Lawn & Landscape White Paper: Managing Immigrant Labor - Welcome & Introduction

Charles Dickens once wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Although I’m sure the professional landscape industry of the late 1990s wasn’t what Dickens had in mind when he penned that phrase, it certainly applies to our industry today in some ways.

By and large, the industry has never been stronger or healthier as contractors continue to report annual sales growth in excess of 20 percent, more homeowners are buying professional lawn care and landscape services, and the industry as a whole continues to professionalize itself and the way it conducts its business.

At the same time, identifying and hiring qualified labor has never been so difficult, and contractors find themselves continually frustrated as they are forced to turn away work that they don’t have the personnel to handle.

This problem has been alleviated to some degree in recent years through the commitment of equipment manufacturers such as Husqvarna Forest & Garden to produce equipment that delivers increased productivity to contractors and their employees who use these tools. But improved equipment alone cannot solve this problem, so contractors have been forced to seek out additional solutions.

One such solution, and it has become increasingly popular in the last 10 years, is the use of immigrant labor. While this has proved a very popular and effective answer to many companies’ hiring problems, employing immigrants also presents its own series of challenges for the contractor.

At Husqvarna, we believe that through nurturing our customers we will be their number one choice. We nurture our customers in many ways, including helping to bring to light important issues that affect their businesses. For that reason, we have worked with Lawn & Landscape magazine to produce industry roundtables each of the last three years that have given us the opportunity to spend 2½ days exploring issues of critical importance with contractors from around the country. This year, that discussion focused on the challenges of immigrant labor - an issue so critical to contractors’ success that we’ve used the information shared during this roundtable to produce this document.

While we don’t believe all of the answers to the questions you may have about employing immigrants will be answered here, we do hope this document will answer many of those questions and help you to become more productive and more profitable businesses.

Best regards,

Dave Zerfoss, President
Husqvarna Forest & Garden

WELCOME

It’s no secret what challenges lawn care and landscape businesses today more than anything else - the lack of labor. The national unemployment level has fallen as low as 4.2 percent, meaning there are fewer available employees today than there have been in years. (By contrast, the national unemployment level in 1993 averaged 6.9 percent.) A 1998 survey conducted for Lawn & Landscape magazine found that 33.7 percent of its readers listed the lack of qualified labor as the number one limitation on their businesses’ growth.

Of course, it’s not a coincidence that this labor shortage is occurring at a time when contractors are most in need of employees as the thriving economy of the last few years gobbled up the unemployed while simultaneous creating increased demand for contractors’ services. But being forced to turn away work frustrates any contractor, and there seem to be few long-term solutions available that will free up contractors’ businesses up to grow as rapidly as the market will allow them to.

One solution that has yielded positive results to contractors has been the employment of immigrant labor, primarily Hispanic in descent. A 1998 Lawn & Landscape survey found that 55.4 percent of its readers employ some Hispanic employees and, in fact, 60.6 percent of these companies said Hispanic employees comprise more than half of their workforce.

While employing Hispanic individuals has provided tremendous results for many contractors and has become a more popular option in more parts of the country as the Hispanic population grows in different cities, additional management challenges go along with employing a multi-cultural workforce. For example, how important is it that all employees speak English? If a contractor hires an employee that doesn’t speak English, who will communicate with him or her from the company? How much responsibility does the contractor assume for finding housing and/or transportation for immigrant employees?

These issues rarely confronted contractors outside of immigrant-heavy areas such as Florida, Texas, Arizona and Southern California, but contractors in Cleveland, Chicago, Boston and Portland are finding new, Hispanic populations in their areas and are looking to capitalize on these individuals’ capabilities.

A hindrance to the industry’s ability to develop solutions to the labor shortage has been the lack of a unifying presence within the industry that collectively represents landscape and lawn care contractors nationwide to analyze the problem, examine potential solutions and move forward with ideas to provide quality labor. However, in March of this year, representatives from 17 leading landscape companies across the country came together at the North American headquarters of Husqvarna Forest & Garden Company in Charlotte, N.C., to discuss the labor challenges facing the industry. This industry roundtable, the third of its kind sponsored by Husqvarna, gave contractors the opportunity to share problems and solutions with each other while also talking with the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Services’ operations in North Carolina.

"There are two issues here to deal with: the issue of finding an adequate supply of labor and the issue of hiring illegal aliens," observed Joe Janssen, president, Stiles Landscape Service Co., Pompano Beach, Fla. "This problem is going to require the involvement of all of the large companies and organizations in this industry. Together, we can do something, but the government has to be made more sensitive to our needs, and that’s a major problem right now."

As a by-product of the roundtable, Lawn & Landscape and various industry associations surveyed contractors nationwide in order to acquire data that would provide a more comprehensive statistical picture of the industry’s labor situation. (Summary results of this survey are presented on pages 4-6.) This information will be used to help industry groups convince key legislative personnel - on both the state and federal levels - that this industry is a valuable part of the American economy and that without necessary changes to current legislation the growth pace of contractors’ businesses is significantly slowed.

At the same time, information from the roundtable is presented here to assist those contractors employing Hispanic employees or considering this move.