Ah dun voted fer th' anti-immigrant guy, now ah can't hire no immigrants! It ain't fair!

[Underseer]

http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-eblen/article210676214.html

'Tricked by the devil.' They backed Trump. Now, his foreign labor cuts may ruin them.

Eddie Devine, owner of Harrodsburg-based Devine Creations Landscaping, said the Trump administration's clampdown on H-2B guest worker visas threatens to put him out of business. He says it has been years since he could find enough legal local workers to mow and tend landscapes for his customers.

They stood at rallies and cheered when he promised to get rid of the immigrants and shut down H-2B visas as much as possible, and now their businesses are in trouble because they rely on the cheaper labor of workers on H-2B visas. It's almost as if Trump voters are uninformed and bad at thinking about the consequences of their own actions, kind of like stupid people would be if stupid people were allowed to vote.

Oh wait, stupid people are allowed to vote. Not that I'm calling Trump supporters stupid. I'm sure this is all the fault of the Deep State, or maybe the Uranium One deal, or Hillary's emails, or the Mooslems or some shit.

Can we blame this on Obama somehow?

Suddenly, I remember that joke about Trump's election "I voted for the Tigers Eating Faces party, but I didn't expect tigers to eat my face!"

 

[Opoponax]

Nobody knew labor and employment matters could be so complicated.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Well, if his business model relies on underpaying people, doesn't that just mean he has a bad business model? He doesn't have any trouble finding legal local workers, he has trouble finding legal local workers at the salaries he's offering. It seems that landscaping is simply a more expensive service than he's asking his customers to pay for it. If he raises salaries and raises prices to account for those higher salaries, he'll either be fine or he'll go out of business because people don't want to pay what landscaping actually costs.

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

He’s not having trouble finding American workers; he’s having trouble finding “dependable, drug-free” American workers. LOL.

I hope he bought himself dinner before he fucked himself.

 

[James Brown]

True, Tom. Immigrants don't take the jobs we don't want. They take the wages we don't want.

Landscaping seems to be an industry with low barriers of entry. It only takes the cost of a few lawn mowers and a trailer, and you're in business. That means that lots of people can compete, which pushes the rates that anyone can charge way down. And like real estate agents and hairdressers, most competitors in these kinds of industries earn low revenues. Thus, they are very sensitive to the price of inputs--in the case of landscaping, labor costs.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

True, Tom. Immigrants don't take the jobs we don't want. They take the wages we don't want.

Landscaping seems to be an industry with low barriers of entry. It only takes the cost of a few lawn mowers and a trailer, and you're in business. That means that lots of people can compete, which pushes the rates that anyone can charge way down. And like real estate agents and hairdressers, most competitors in these kinds of industries earn low revenues. Thus, they are very sensitive to the price of inputs--in the case of landscaping, labor costs.

Ya, he says he's paying people $17/hour and can't find people to take the jobs. That's fine. Just trying paying people $20/hour or $25/hour. If it's hot and dirty work that people don't want to do without getting a premium for doing it, add that premium to the salaries and pass that cost onto the customers.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

True, Tom. Immigrants don't take the jobs we don't want. They take the wages we don't want.

Landscaping seems to be an industry with low barriers of entry. It only takes the cost of a few lawn mowers and a trailer, and you're in business. That means that lots of people can compete, which pushes the rates that anyone can charge way down. And like real estate agents and hairdressers, most competitors in these kinds of industries earn low revenues. Thus, they are very sensitive to the price of inputs--in the case of landscaping, labor costs.

Ya, he says he's paying people $17/hour and can't find people to take the jobs. That's fine. Just trying paying people $20/hour or $25/hour. If it's hot and dirty work that people don't want to do without getting a premium for doing it, add that premium to the salaries and pass that cost onto the customers.

I have a very hard time believing he is paying people $17 an hour for that!

 

[Underseer]

Well, if his business model relies on underpaying people, doesn't that just mean he has a bad business model? He doesn't have any trouble finding legal local workers, he has trouble finding legal local workers at the salaries he's offering. It seems that landscaping is simply a more expensive service than he's asking his customers to pay for it. If he raises salaries and raises prices to account for those higher salaries, he'll either be fine or he'll go out of business because people don't want to pay what landscaping actually costs.

Those stupid white people expect too much money! You can't expect me to pay that! Didn't anyone tell you that communism failed? Why do you hate our freedom? [/conservolibertarian]

 

[Underseer]

True, Tom. Immigrants don't take the jobs we don't want. They take the wages we don't want.

Landscaping seems to be an industry with low barriers of entry. It only takes the cost of a few lawn mowers and a trailer, and you're in business. That means that lots of people can compete, which pushes the rates that anyone can charge way down. And like real estate agents and hairdressers, most competitors in these kinds of industries earn low revenues. Thus, they are very sensitive to the price of inputs--in the case of landscaping, labor costs.

Ya, he says he's paying people $17/hour and can't find people to take the jobs. That's fine. Just trying paying people $20/hour or $25/hour. If it's hot and dirty work that people don't want to do without getting a premium for doing it, add that premium to the salaries and pass that cost onto the customers.

Huh.

Other industrialized Western nation seem to be able to have a functioning capitalist system while paying people a decent wage.

But if you say that it is impossible to have a functioning capitalist system without underpaying people, then I guess we just have to admit that capitalism is a failure. Funny how all the other Western nations are able to make capitalism work, but I guess capitalism is just impossible in America.

 

[Jobar]

I run a small lawn care business, and have for many years. But I've never hired illegals.

The real problem is finding people who are able to do hard physical labor in extreme heat, and willing to do that for low wages. People just are not willing to pay the sort of money it would take to pay wages commensurate with the difficulty of the job. I know.

I keep at it because I grew up on a dairy farm, where the work was even harder and less profitable. One of the benefits is that it keeps me in hard physical condition, despite being 62; and I actually like working outside, and being my own boss.

Maybe one day we will have lawn-care robots, and the only work I'd have to do is maintaining them. But I keep up with that sort of thing, and we're still a long way from that. The best thing available right now are remote-control mowers; and even those require you to be out there in the heat with them. And given their expense, I still use zero-turn riding mowers.

Note that none of the above is in any way meant as support for Rump, or his idiot policies!

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Goddamned robots taking jobs away from hardworking illegal aliens.

 

[Politesse]

Well, if his business model relies on underpaying people, doesn't that just mean he has a bad business model? He doesn't have any trouble finding legal local workers, he has trouble finding legal local workers at the salaries he's offering. It seems that landscaping is simply a more expensive service than he's asking his customers to pay for it. If he raises salaries and raises prices to account for those higher salaries, he'll either be fine or he'll go out of business because people don't want to pay what landscaping actually costs.

Indeed. Smith-worshippers often seem to fall suddenly silent when it is their own job or business that the invisible hand of the market has chosen to smite.

Or worse than silent, whiny. I have never owned a business, but with or without the influence of 45, I honestly can't imagine taking up an entire newspaper article whining about how the "system" killed my business if it failed. Isn't risk part of the overall concept of entrepreneurship? All the more irritating since most people who try are not exactly going to go hungry if their business fails. It might be rough to lose a business, practically and emotionally, but unlike their workers, few business-owners have a Tyson line-worker's uniform in their future if their project goes belly up. I mean, even as an independent contract worker, I always knew I had a lot more options than most of my students; I could have left the academy at any time and gotten a decent job in the corporate world, a flexibility that most of my kids are gambling their lives and those of their families trying to get to. I have my issues with the way adjunct labor is compensated, like everyone who becomes aware of it, but I never complained about it in front of my students, it would have been ten kinds of poor taste.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

True, Tom. Immigrants don't take the jobs we don't want. They take the wages we don't want.

Landscaping seems to be an industry with low barriers of entry. It only takes the cost of a few lawn mowers and a trailer, and you're in business. That means that lots of people can compete, which pushes the rates that anyone can charge way down. And like real estate agents and hairdressers, most competitors in these kinds of industries earn low revenues. Thus, they are very sensitive to the price of inputs--in the case of landscaping, labor costs.

Ya, he says he's paying people $17/hour and can't find people to take the jobs. That's fine. Just trying paying people $20/hour or $25/hour. If it's hot and dirty work that people don't want to do without getting a premium for doing it, add that premium to the salaries and pass that cost onto the customers.

I have a very hard time believing he is paying people $17 an hour for that!

Ah... article says $12 an hour.

 

[Toni]

Along the same vein, I listened to this piece on NPR:

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/05/608802924/trump-policy-leads-to-worker-shortage-in-crab-industry

Note that the guy they are interviewing just cannot wrap his head around the notion of paying workers more for the difficult, unpleasant, labor intensive work he needs to have done. Because he already pays over minimum wage and then workers are paid by amount they pick.

PHILLIPS: We're paying over minimum wage now. And once these girls - they got two weeks to train and after two weeks, they surpass the minimum wage price of the United States and start getting paid by piecework. They get paid by the pound - $3.25 a pound. Some of these girls pick 40, 50 pounds of crab meat a day. That's pretty good money.

and there's this:

PHILLIPS: Well, I don't mind telling you who voted for because it's not a secret. I voted for Trump because I thought he could do a decent job, and I wasn't alone. 89 percent of the people in this district voted for Donald Trump. So how do you think all these people are feeling about President Trump after we supported him, counted on him, and for the last 25 years, whether it be one party or the other, we've gotten our workers? I do not understand. President Trump uses H-2B workers in his resorts, and I'm sure he got his. But here we are, empty handed, out of work, and there are many, many unhappy people with the party right now

One of the issues is that as a nation, we are accustomed to and insist upon a policy of cheap food--meaning that labor costs must be kept extremely low. This is not just in agriculture but also in poultry plants, milking operations, and of course restaurants, to name a few.

We are also accustomed, at least in recent history, of performing our own lawn work or hiring a neighbor kid to do the job if we didn't have kids to do it for us. We think this must be cheap to do--and we're only willing to pay accordingly.

The other side to this is the dramatic uncertainties that all agriculture and food industries face. Much of the production is limited to a short season during which the operation must produce as much as possible and gain as much profit as possible in order to sustain the operation and its workers throughout the year.

This applies to all sorts of mostly seasonal work.

 

[scombrid]

Well, if his business model relies on underpaying people, doesn't that just mean he has a bad business model? He doesn't have any trouble finding legal local workers, he has trouble finding legal local workers at the salaries he's offering. It seems that landscaping is simply a more expensive service than he's asking his customers to pay for it. If he raises salaries and raises prices to account for those higher salaries, he'll either be fine or he'll go out of business because people don't want to pay what landscaping actually costs.

I worked in ornamental horticulture as a high school and college job. I worked on the farm that grew the trees. Started out mowing then worked into planting, digging, and transplanting trees. We hand dug, burlapped, and roped everything out of the hard clay. My hands bled every day for a month or so until they got good and hardened up. I liked being able to work 40-60 hours a week during the summer when I was 14 (until HR found out that I was working that many hours and said something about it being a labor violation for a minor to work over 40). Anyway, the farm crew and the landscape crews were mostly a never ending cast of drunks and losers and high school kids that thought they'd like to work outside rather than at McDonalds or stocking shelves at the supermarket. You'd get a couple that stuck around and they'd become crew leaders. The turn-over was ridiculous. I quit that gig after my sophomore year of college when I started getting work as a biotech during school breaks. My brother stayed on and took over the farm until he finished his horticulture degree. That was just about the time that the whole industry was going full immigrant. I took a plant propagation class for fun one semester and we went to one of the big wholesale nurseries to see how they did things. 1000 acres of greenhouses and container stock in one of the whitest counties in 'murica and the only English speakers at the place were the managers. Back home my brother was taking Spanish because that was required in order to remain in the business.

The immigrants work for the same pay that was attracting only drunks and drop-outs and they do a better job with less turnover. Those unreliable rednecks turned out at the poles in 2016. Went and got rid of the immigrants and the rednecks still aren't worth a shit to pick fruit or dig trees.

 

[Elixir]

Went and got rid of the immigrants and the rednecks still aren't worth a shit to pick fruit or dig trees.

Yabut 'Murrika is Great again because they don't have to rub shoulders with any grimy immugrunts.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Well, if his business model relies on underpaying people, doesn't that just mean he has a bad business model? He doesn't have any trouble finding legal local workers, he has trouble finding legal local workers at the salaries he's offering. It seems that landscaping is simply a more expensive service than he's asking his customers to pay for it. If he raises salaries and raises prices to account for those higher salaries, he'll either be fine or he'll go out of business because people don't want to pay what landscaping actually costs.

I worked in ornamental horticulture as a high school and college job. I worked on the farm that grew the trees. Started out mowing then worked into planting, digging, and transplanting trees. We hand dug, burlapped, and roped everything out of the hard clay. My hands bled every day for a month or so until they got good and hardened up. I liked being able to work 40-60 hours a week during the summer when I was 14 (until HR found out that I was working that many hours and said something about it being a labor violation for a minor to work over 40). Anyway, the farm crew and the landscape crews were mostly a never ending cast of drunks and losers and high school kids that thought they'd like to work outside rather than at McDonalds or stocking shelves at the supermarket. You'd get a couple that stuck around and they'd become crew leaders. The turn-over was ridiculous. I quit that gig after my sophomore year of college when I started getting work as a biotech during school breaks. My brother stayed on and took over the farm until he finished his horticulture degree. That was just about the time that the whole industry was going full immigrant. I took a plant propagation class for fun one semester and we went to one of the big wholesale nurseries to see how they did things. 1000 acres of greenhouses and container stock in one of the whitest counties in 'murica and the only English speakers at the place were the managers. Back home my brother was taking Spanish because that was required in order to remain in the business.

The immigrants work for the same pay that was attracting only drunks and drop-outs and they do a better job with less turnover. Those unreliable rednecks turned out at the poles in 2016. Went and got rid of the immigrants and the rednecks still aren't worth a shit to pick fruit or dig trees.

Well, you don't need to hire those unreliable and drunk rednecks. You can hire the reliable and sober rednecks. You just have to pay more for them. If the actual economy of landscaping means that you need to pay a decent landscaper $50/hour because that's what it takes to get someone who'll do the job, it just means that far more people will be doing their own landscaping work or letting the grounds grow wild while only a couple of landscaping companies exist for the high end clients who can afford this type of premium service. There's nothing wrong with that.

What there is something wrong with is people complaining about how the artificially low prices they're currently able to change customers are the fault of anything other than their business model. If it turns out that they need higher labour costs in order to run their business, then they charge their customers more to do the jobs. That will result in less customers and fewer landscaping companies serving that smaller customer base because that's the reality of the market they're in.

 

[Derec]

I run a small lawn care business, and have for many years. But I've never hired illegals.
The real problem is finding people who are able to do hard physical labor in extreme heat, and willing to do that for low wages. People just are not willing to pay the sort of money it would take to pay wages commensurate with the difficulty of the job. I know.

Yes, not everybody can do it, but I am sure there are plenty of people who could do the work who think living off government benefits is just fine with them. When in a grocery store I often see young, able-bodied people pay with food stamps. They could work at your lawn-care business instead. Although it would require moving to Bumfuck, Ga.

Maybe one day we will have lawn-care robots, and the only work I'd have to do is maintaining them. But I keep up with that sort of thing, and we're still a long way from that.

Roombas have been around for years. What's the problem adopting that technology to the outdoors? Even if it could only replace the big mower and you still have to do edge and shrubbery trimming by hand, it would still mean significant savings, no?

 

[scombrid]

What there is something wrong with is people complaining about how the artificially low prices they're currently able to change customers are the fault of anything other than their business model. If it turns out that they need higher labour costs in order to run their business, then they charge their customers more to do the jobs. That will result in less customers and fewer landscaping companies serving that smaller customer base because that's the reality of the market they're in.

I totally agree.

I saw the writing on the wall regarding labor practices in the industry and decided that growing plant for a living was a bad idea.

There are a few mow-n-go companies around here that pay well but it is mostly their spray techs that have to have commercial driver license and chemical applicator licenses that get the top wage. The cutting crews are majority non-citizen. I wouldn't mind seeing that whole suburban turf industry go poof. They are destroying our water quality at the bidding of their customers. The lawns that they put in require year round water and fertilizer when we have a dry season that might last 6 or more months. It takes an obscene amount of water to keep St. Augustine grass happy on our sandy soil during our dry season. The shallow aquifer is getting over pumped for lawn sprinkling. Then they'll fertilize right through the wet season when thunderstorms that dump >3-4 cm of water in one hour are common. That fertilizer goes straight into our lagoon. Chlorophyll is >300 micrograms per litre out there right now. Should be about 10. Fish kill is coming. They are resisting any and all regulations on that front. Their entire business model is built on artificially low labor costs and dumping negative externalities on the commons.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Lawns should be illegal in Arizona and Florida.