$34/hr jobs, no takers

Via Kevin Drum, this article in the LA Times adds an interesting element to the immigration debate. I don't know whether this is just an atypical experience or whether its the general rule. If the latter, it certainly suggests the immigrants are not stealing Americans' jobs.

Cyndi Smallwood is looking for a few strong men for her landscaping company. Guys with no fear of a hot sun, who can shovel dirt all day long. She'll pay as much as $34 an hour.

She can't find them.

… Smallwood is ambivalent on immigration reform, saying demands for immediate citizenship by those who entered the country illegally are offensive. But without a guest worker program, she says, her company probably will not survive.

"To get workers, you have to steal them from other companies," the 54-year-old entrepreneur says.

Even that has been unproductive recently. She'd ideally like to add eight employees by the end of the year to her current staff of 12.

The lawn and landscape business in California is heavily Latino, with an abundance of illegal immigrants. In a study of Los Angeles County's "off-the-books" labor force, the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research organization, estimated that a quarter of the landscape workers were undocumented. That leaves the companies vulnerable to crackdowns, which has them agitating for guest workers.

…"Last July I ran an ad in the Riverside Press-Enterprise," she says. "I got only two responses." She hired one of them, who left after a few months for a job closer to his home.

Other landscapers also report a labor shortage.

…"Every time someone says illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans or do jobs Americans don't want, I want to scream," UCLA economist Christopher Thornberg says.

This argument makes Smallwood want to scream herself. On a recent job that went into overtime, a Diversified Landscape foreman, Vincente Sanchez, was making $52.34 an hour.

"How high can you go?" she says.

Outside her office one recent afternoon she encounters Bennie Gray, who says he earns about $60,000 a year detailing cars — a different kind of work, but also done in the hot sun. Gray, a thickly muscled African American, acknowledges that on an hourly basis, he might make more working for Smallwood, but can't imagine it.

"I'm not going to lie," says Gray, 48. "I don't want to work that hard. My ancestors had to work in the fields. My mom still talks about the splinters and sores."

…Will she be making another contribution to the Republicans anytime soon?

"Not hardly."

That's due in large measure to her anger at her congressman, Rep. Gary G. Miller (R-Diamond Bar), who does not favor a guest worker program.

In January, Smallwood had a contentious meeting with Miller at his district office in Brea. She said Miller twice challenged her assertion that she couldn't find workers for $34 an hour, saying his son would work for that wage and offering to send him over.

Smallwood said she took the deal, but that his son never showed up. Miller declined to be interviewed.

Last week Smallwood wrote a flier that says she would pay $34 with experience and $14 without. The notice cautions that no application would be accepted "without verification of proper identification that allows you, by law, to work in the USA."

The flier is up in more than a dozen landscaping supply stores. So far, Smallwood says, there have been no calls.