Labor Solutions: Jan. 2001, Stabilizing Your Labor Force: Raid Recovery

His description of this turning point resuscitates a surreal scene, unraveling a series of plot twists that fit the formula for a Hollywood action movie: confrontation, commotion and consequence.

At 7:15 a.m., about 25 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents raided R.A.R. Landscaping, Baltimore, Md., and detained 54 Hispanic employees, leaving the 20-year-old, full-service commercial lawn and landscape maintenance business in a state of labor emergency.

“They closed our gates and interrogated about 99 percent of the people that were working at our company - Hispanic, white, purple, blue, green - interrogated them to whet their whistle,” noted Kowitz, human resources manager.

“It was chaos. The agents came out, they had their hands on their guns, they announced themselves and there was chaos,” he remarked. “People running, agents running after the guys that were running, people jumping over fences - but the majority of our guys stayed calm.”

INS agents handcuffed R.A.R.’s foreign national employees, largely from Mexico, Honduras and Ecuador, ages ranging from 16 to 35, and requested the company’s I-9 forms - mandatory employment documents that verify an applicant’s nationality.

After assessing the forms, INS agents issued the company a list of employees who could not return to work , and R.A.R.’s employee roster belly-flopped from 85 workers to 31, splintering company operations.

“We were pretty much devastated by the entire process,” Kowitz confessed. “We didn’t know how we were going to maintain our commercial properties, we didn’t know what step to take next.”

What Kowitz needed was labor. In a booming economy with a tight labor market, R.A.R. knew that this employment loss would be challenging, if not impossible, to replace, Kowitz noted. R.A.R. needed a resolution to this unexpected circumstance.

FILLING THE GAP. R.A.R. started the season with a sparse staff and a full schedule. Workdays often started and ended in the dark and employee turnover circulated 100 workers through the company - 20 people lasted. It was two months before the company stabilized its work force. Still, R.A.R. finished the season without losing a single account, Kowitz noted.

“We developed a reputation for helping the community, helping people solve problems and helping people overcome problems, and that has made our company extremely successful,” he said.

Through working extra hours, recruiting, training, advertising and informing customers, R.A.R.’s company vision and positive attitude led the company through the labor crisis, Kowitz said.

“I think that with the raid, the guys really had something to prove to themselves, to the company and to the INS,” Kowitz said. “We, as a group and a family, said to ourselves, ‘We’re not going to let these guys close our doors.’”

R.A.R. canvassed the community for employees, advertising with newspapers, churches, job corps and local labor companies. Foremen shouldered a bulk of the recruiting efforts, Kowitz said. “We combed the area for employees,” he said. “After the raid, we decided to really make sure that we built a work force that would never succumb to this type of incident again.”

Honduran churches proved to be successful recruiting locations, and R.A.R. agreed to assist Honduran immigrants with the paperwork necessary to gain legal status if they joined the company.

An emotional angle often remains buried beneath business logistics and red tape. This dimension surfaces with images of the INS raid, and expressions frozen on many of the Hispanic workers’ faces remind Kowitz of the importance of employee relations - sensitivity and understanding. R.A.R. also researched and applied for seasonal workers through the federal H2B program, which supplies visas for foreign national employees for 10 months at a time in the U.S.

“We still to this day don’t know why we were targeted,” Kowitz admitted. But, R.A.R. turned its labor trauma into a turning point.