Posted on 08/27/2018 4:24:23 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Brian Friend sat at his kitchen table nursing a Friday-night beer this spring when he realized he would need to cancel $80,000 in landscaping contracts because he couldn’t hire enough workers.
“It was a low point,” said the 42-year-old Mr. Friend, who runs Sylvan Gardens Landscape LLC in Pittsburgh.
Like landscapers across the country, Mr. Friend has faced a severe labor shortage this year, spurred by low levels of unemployment and high demand for visas under the foreign seasonal-worker program known as H-2B. Higher wages and added bonuses haven’t attracted more workers, some landscapers say.
Richard Cafaro, owner of family-run Lawn Maintenance Services Co. outside Pittsburgh, said he was forced to shut down the 48-year-old company because it didn’t receive any of the seasonal foreign-worker visas it requested. For 17 years, the company had relied on those for the majority of its field crew.
“I just had no path forward,” said Mr. Cafaro, 47. “It’s so frustrating.”
Customers weren’t happy. Theresa Dozzi used Mr. Cafaro as her landscaper for 20 years. Ms. Dozzi, 64, watched this spring as the grass grew so high it became “unsightly” around her 10,000 square-foot brick home set on 3 acres in Fox Chapel outside Pittsburgh.
“It was a nightmare,” she said.
The tight labor market and visa shortage are hurting all kinds of industries that rely on seasonal workers, from Maryland’s crab-picking industry to New England restaurants to Michigan fudge shops. But the $82 billion-a-year landscaping industry is the largest user of the visa program that allows employers to bring workers from abroad for temporary positions, accounting for 50% of all such visas certified by the government this year.
The visa program, which has a cap, was oversubscribed quickly this year, leaving landscapers across the country unusually short-handed.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
This is a Joseph Gobbles article don’t you think?
BS. More propaganda for the open border crowd. Did the Koch Bros write this stupid crapola?
This is pure globalist propaganda. Don’t even buy off on the premise of labor shortages.
Anyone believing this story is too stupid to be alive.
You are a stupid dickhead. You know that?
Exactly. Get rid of welfare for able-bodied people, and they’ll be turning away applicants.
This is obvious globalist Cheap Labor Express propaganda. Nakedly so. Embarrassing so.
I’m sure they have those robot lawn mowers that work like the robot vacuum cleaners.
BS. Pay more. There is a price point. $22/hr is $44,000/yr. That is what college grads start. So you story is probably totally made up.
And that probably saved you at least HALF of what you made. Spending money on booze and women can be extremely expensive especially for a virile young college lad, can't it?
Trashing Americans. It’s what we do here on Free Republic. /sarc
But, for the right price, you can get a Wilkinsburg kid with a mower to come to Fox Chapel.
Teenagers are more than capable of doing these jobs. You are correct.
One thing is that these days, doing manual labor is associated with being an illegal, or lower-class person, so doing those kinds of jobs have been stigmatized by white people as being beneath them.
Sad isn’t it!?
All labor shortages are local. We have 2.7 unemployment here in NH. Our lawns are still getting mowed. There were plenty of people working at Chic Filet across the street.
However, physical labor jobs like landscaping are hard. I did them for all of my teenage years and throughout college. I mow my own lawn, trim shrubs, cut down trees on my own 12 acre property. I need to get a bigger tractor now that I am 55 because I do not have the energy I did when I was in my forties.
It is difficult to get young people to do the jobs we did when we were in our younger years. This is the same problem in the restaurant industry. Who in their right mind wants to wash dishes? Construction industry is the same. Who wants to do roofing in the middle of the summer? The WORST job I have ever seen was spraying gunite for forming an in ground pool. You could not pay me enough to do that job. These are SH&TY jobs. That is why the illegals end up doing them. The young American kids start as the busboy, then become a waiter and eventually bartender(real money).
Some places have local labor shortages because of their physical location. The Mount Washington Hotel & Bretton Woods ski area have this problem here in NH. They are located in the White Mountains. It is very difficult for them to staff their resort from the local populace because of its rural location and seasonal business. Therefore, they bring in young folks from Brazil, etc. that live in a dormitory onsite at the hotel resort. You will see the same kid working at the ski area during the day and the hotel at night.
The whole ski area industry has this problem because of their typical remote locations. The last time I was at Okemo in Ludlow, VT the pretty blonde girl waiting on us in the bar for lunch was from South Africa.
Interfor’s sawmill in Gilchrist, OR is having a real hard time getting labor to run its sawmill/planer mill. Some of it has to do with its location. It is about an hour south of Bend, OR. The able bodied people in the area do not want to work in a sawmill. The ones left are the meth heads you do not want to hire. They couldn’t pass a drug test anyway.
I’m an employer whereas you were never more than an employee
The problem is that immigrants already here won’t work. Why should they? They get all kinds of welfare and live better than where they came from.
It is not just stigmatized. Most of these jobs S#CK. I was a landscaper.
We have all done or witnessed these Sh&ty jobs:
landscaping
asphalt paving
painting houses
drywall installer
roofing
concrete
gunite pool sprayer(the worst I have ever seen)
poultry workers
anything on Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs show
There is a reason why illegal aliens end up doing these jobs. Any of us that have done them KNOW that they S&CK.
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