I have heard that in New England there was a changeover in some people that were administrating the H2B program and they seem to be totally incompetent. The result being exactly what you said - estabished workers did not get their papers and could not come.

The nursery where I work part time is having the same issue. Their foreman rode 30 hours on a bus only to be sent home at the border.

Same here. One of the companies that I design for lost one of their foremen in the same way. Not so easy to replace a good, trusted foreman, so it did put them behind in their business.

What an industry we work in .. hire an american and raise your price a buck. Nuts.

Good Day ...

I don't know how it is where you are, but up here you could pay any amount and only the same people (if any at all)came for the job .... ones who don't show up every day, are not on time when they show up, have "substance issues", can't or won't follow directions, and don't care about anything but how to do less and want to get paid more. That is not 100% of everyone, but it is the vast majority.

Anyone with minimal competence decides they can make money doing it on his own .... and he's right.

It stands to reason that if you lay out more money you get better help, but come on up here and try it out. Imigrant workers are not getting paid less up here. Seventeen dollars an hour is a fairly common wage. You can give it to a Brazilian who shows up every day in a good condition to work and wants to stay late, or you can give it to a guy who complains all day and causes problems with everyone he works with.

I know a lot of owners who vowed they would never hire imigrants, some were racists, that have found that they can not work without them.

I don't like the situation, but it is what it is.

I've yet to understand why individuals are more than willing to pay in excess of $65.00 an hour for an auto mechanic (formerly known as a grease monkey) but then are totally unwilling to spend half that wage for landscape services but yet expect to receive the utmost in professional service/quality. It is plain and simple...You get what you pay for.

In 21 years, I Never employed a single non-citizen. My designers were Engineering or Landscape Architecture grads, Foremen were college grads, and most laborers were tenured employees with 7 or more years. Hourly wages paid ranged from a starting $17 to $35.00 plus the additional overhead of benefits such as insurance, training, certification, and licensing. Our proposals and estimates were based on hourly labor rate tables of between 32.50 and 75.00 depending on the types of resources required for a given project.

Of course, my turnover rate was less than 2% and all project installations were performed per a committment schedule to start within two weeks of the agreement to proceed. NEVER missed a single start date...we did miss a few completion dates, but except for weather conditions, never failed to start on the agreed-upon time.

By the way, it is important to note that these rates were circa 1993. Fourteen years ago!!!

Yes, you do get what you pay for...Similar advice to the Landscape business owners...you are getting what you pay for. That is why you are experiencing a predicament of declining capacity when the demand is continuously increasing. There are fairly large niche markets of sophisticated consumers who are willing to pay for truely professional services and that demand will not be adequately satisfied by continuing to use low-wage migrant workers.

For those consumers that want to only pay Wino wages, you can just stop by any Wal-Mart and recruit a couple of the department managers or if you need someone more trustworthy or intelligent, just visit the county lock-up for some work-release trustees...

I am a professional gardener. I have 25+years experience a class"e" drivers lic. a mo. pesticide lic.and I have been unemployed for months. the only job offers I got all winter were for $8.65, the dept of labor min for h2b, and at the only interviews I got they were disappointed I was American ( they have to pay unemployment etc)I don't know what is going to happen to me. I can't believe that with un-employment where it is we haven't ended this.

since were on this topic. i started landscaping fulltime at 17 and am now 23. i make 13$ hr and say 3000$ a year in cash. i can accomplish pretty much every task without help. besides landscape design , choosing right plants, but if i had to do it all, i would. I am caucasian and work from 8am until the day is done, during season. Dont drink or complain or abuse substances. Am i being paid fairly? I believe if i had a few good people to work with me we could accomplish a whole lot, and bring in alot of $$. It almost as if the boss wants me to get paid a certain amount and do all the dirty work. A glass ceiling? No, i dont have any degrees. what is your opinions. I know there is money to be made in landscaping but its like if you dont do it on your own , forget about making a decent living.

Almost as if?

The truth of the matter is that the nursery and landscape industries are heavily dependent on undocumented immigrant labor to fill the demand. Firms that do not hire undocumented labor must charge a much higher hourly labor rate to cover their business expenses I don't know how it is in the rest of the country, but here in northern California in urban areas the going rate for casual day laborers is $10 an hour, which is better than the minimum wage. One rarely sees any anglos/documented laborers looking for daily work at the pick up points, which are readily known by anyone seeking workers or seeking work here in California. Having used underemployed American workers and undocumented workers in the past, I would have to concur that there is no comparison in general, the generally Mexican or Guatemalan undocumented workers just work harder with less grief, (consistently show up every day, on time, are willing to work overtime, and are respectful to clients as well as employers).

For anyone who does speak English fluently and does not have document issues, and wants to work in the landscape/nursery industry; my advice would be that you can't compete at the lower wage levels within the industry. You simply have no excuse if you don't avail yourself of getting more training/education to make yourself more valuable to employers in the industry. At the very least, you should be thinking in terms of knowing how to schedule workers and supplies, knowing your plants and how to use them in your conditions, be bilingual in spanish/english, work on your people skills to be able to get new clients and sell the design/installation, etc, etc. You also need to be able to sell yourself to future employers, by having a good resume, portfolio of completed work, and good client recommendations. None of this is specifically taught in high schools these days, but are minimum requirements to advancing in the field. Also, it wouldn't hurt to have better written english skills, because even if you have the most talent within a batch of potential employee hires, you will still be judged on your written and oral english skills.

As to the dearth of landscape workers in other parts of the country, it does seem strange to me that there is not a local pool of underemployed Americans who might be willing to fill the void. I can only assume that the wages on offer and job conditions are simply not attractive enough to compete with unemployment/welfare benefits in your area, or people just aren't hungry enough for work. The only similar complaints here in California revolve around agricultural work, which pays vastly less than landscape/nursery work and is also much harder and more seasonal. Even these California agricultural jobs would get filled if the pay were to rise enough to make it more attractive, but food prices would also need to rise as well.

Go out and look at who is doing the gardening/nursery/agricultural/landscaping work in your part of the country and tell me that your area is also not greatly dependent on immigrant labor to get the job done. It is what it is, and there is no going back, and we the public have spoken that we don't value these industries sufficiently to be willing to pay more, and at least here in urban California, these industries would collapse without immigrant labor. You could also make the same case for hotel/restaurant/construction/convalescent home workers, which are also all low paying, and often unskilled at entry level positions. This same trend is world wide, also occuring in Europe, Japan and Australia, and even in the better off countries within South America and Africa. Labor migrates to meet local demand...

The answer is that employers want all those qualifications - the list you gave is what a person might use to run their own show instead of working for someone else, hence the myriad small hort. businesses - but won't pay for them.

When I started in the local industry the mowing etc. business I worked for lost the trusted foreman because the owner wouldn't give him a raise to $5 per hour. This was before the influx of hispanic and east Asian hort. workers that is claimed to have brought pay rates down.

When I ended working for other businesses in the local industry it was at a huge plant production facility. One day INS came through and took away 50 other workers. All that labor lost in an instant because they were all undocumented. How is this better than recruiting and retaining legal help?

There also seemed to be quite of bit of extra time and effort being spent trying to instruct and direct people who didn't speak English. Doesn't this start to eat up any supposed advantages to the lower pay rates after awhile?

One time I overheard a local community college instructor talking to a contractor/nurseryman during an intermission in a conference/presentation. What got my attention was the businessman complaining to the instructor that he couldn't get graduates coming out of the program with all the training he wanted to use in his business. When the instructor suggested that he contribute to the program that pretty much shut him up - instead of prompting an offer to help.

I understand that in places like California there has long been a problem with illegal immigrants.the h20 program was started,supposedly,to entice employers to only hire legal immigrants, though I don't see what would have been wrong with simply enforcing the law,and arresting employers of illegals. That situation simply did not exist here in st.louis.It is not a matter of me being lazy or greedy,contractors cannot pay me the same rate as h2b workers because of the huge tax incentive they get with h2b.As far as the myth that it is necessary or that anyone's business would fail without h2b,I dare anyone to tell me when the year that no one landscaped because there were no workers. and don't dare blame the consumers either.I can well believe that, for instance grapes might have to go up a dime to pay a decent wage, but everyone who paid $30.00 to get there grass cut before h2b paid the same after h2b.This program has benefited no one but the contractors.It was paid for with money that came out of my check.perhaps CONtractors who can't afford to pay Americans should go back to college and start a business that is more "internationally competitive"

I beg to differ about the costs to hire legal versus undocumented labor, and my opinion is that it is the consumer who is unwilling to pay the additional costs and willing to overlook the fact that the majority of the service labor in many fields here in California and the southwest in particular is primarily latino and/or undocumented labor. There are very few people who don't benefit in some way from the cheaper labor costs, from the price of hotel rooms to restaurant meals, to housecleaning. To deny this fact of life is willful ignorance in my view, as some of the people screaming the loudest about the problem no doubt tangentially do benefit from cheaper undocumented labor during their daily routine.

I personally do not feel threatened by vast hordes of undocumented workers stealing work from me, or reducing my pay check by virtue of being here. From what I can see locally, there are some additional expenses to the general public of providing emergency health services as well as public schooling, but this is balanced out by all the social security money collected as well as income taxes on paychecks that are not later used by those undocumented workers. The economy seems to be working rather well with the system as it is, even though it is not fair for all those involved. Fairness as an issue seems to be going out of fashion these days, in any case, to judge by the bonuses being given to AIG executives...

Then again, I know that it is important to have skill sets, including being multi lingual in 3 languages, that insure I can work easily in any circumstances, depending on what the client is willing to pay for. As I primarily do landscape design, I am not really caught in the middle of this dilemma, but do resent the denial I see coming from people like Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, and who use the issue to hate monger and drive up their ratings, as opposed to walking the walk...

bahia, a couple of observations on your post.

...legal versus undocumented ...

I thought the opposite of legal was illegal? Who's in denial?

The economy seems to be working rather well ...

8% unemployment rising steadily is good for you???

True, its not the illegal immigrants who caused this current mess we are in, but I do believe they have contributed to the lowering of standards and class divide we are in. There will not be a middle class for long at this rate. This has been a long and steady economic problem unrelated to current financial crisis.

Back to landscaping, I used a firm once who did not have the staff with language skills to communicate with me and I fired them. Fortunately, they were the anomaly around here and there are plenty of capable landscapers to choose from. Interestingly, the prices were the same from non-English speaking as English speaking. The American boss obviously was keeping the difference in his own pocket. That made it extra easy to fire them. There was no incentive for me to keep them on. Quality of work was comparable.

>The American boss obviously was keeping the difference in his own pocketDing!