Mowing Alone? Technology Works On Grass As Well As Snow
By James
Fulford
Alien
Nation
has several references to lawn mowing, this
notoriously being one of the jobs Americans let
immigrants do.
The
landscaping industry knows this too, and has
written a thing called
“Lawn & Landscape White Paper:
Managing Immigrant Labor”, with sections on ”Managing the Hispanic Workforce.”
It
seems there are problems if no
one on the crew speaks English:
“The
most obvious challenge related to hiring
immigrant employees is the language barrier and
maintaining effective communication among crews
and with customers.....”
“A
crew that doesn’t speak English turns our
customers off,” according to Ron Kujawa,
president, Kujawa Enterprises, Cudahy, Wis.
“We make sure there is always at least one
person on each job that speaks English. That was
a big learning curve for us because we never
realized how much onsite communication goes on
with the customer.
“Customer
communication was second
nature [Emphasis added by VDARE] for the
English-speaking employees, so they weren’t
necessarily reporting it all back to us,”
Kujawa continued. “Now, our employees that
don’t speak English carry a card that explains
this so they can present it to any customers who
approach them.”
A
couple of more recent tidbits from the Green
Industry:
*
Scott Jamieson, who is spending his
own money to teach his workforce English,
doesn’t seem to believe in bilingual
education. Could someone tell the
California Association for Bilingual
Education, or
would they care?
From:
Lawn & Landscape Magazine
How
We Do It: March 2000, Teaching
English As A Second
Language
By
Scott Jamieson
“The
trend toward a diversified workforce shows no
signs of slowing. That means proportionately
fewer workers in the green industry speak
English. So we at The Care of Trees offer our
employees training in English as a Second
Language (ESL).“
“Safety was the No. 1 reason we began our ESL
classes. We invest a lot time and effort into
safety training for our crews, but if they
can’t understand the information, the training
is pointless.“
“Relying
heavily on input from our bilingual Latino
staff, we learned that the most effective ESL
program uses instructors who speak only English
in classes that are held at workplace locations.
Our Hispanic employees also helped pick their
ESL provider.”
* Terry
Foley is happy about the H2-B Program
How
We Do It: Sept. 1999, Managing The H2-B Program
“The
H2-B program allows us to recruit individuals
from Mexico to work for what we can establish as
our peak season. In the past, we found that we
needed additional laborers from March through
the middle of December. Most of our laborers
want to return to Mexico for the Christmas
holidays and are not ready to return until early
spring. As a landscape contractor, that works
great for us. From the Christmas season through
February we are able to perform our contracted
work with our full-time laborers and do not feel
the financial strain of excess employees. Not
only does this program allow us to employ legal
laborers, it does not require that we employ
them longer than 10 months of the year. The H2-B
program is perfect for our business.”
And
finally there was an industry roundtable, Obstacles
and Opportunities of A Hispanic Workforce,
where a lot of problems surfaced.
“I’m concerned
that the general public doesn’t see the need
for immigrant labor because it’s tired of
immigration stories. If we have to start calling
in social security numbers we’re in
trouble.”
- Bill Gordon,
Signature Landscape
“Not being able to
understand what the laborers are saying is
dangerous because you can have a bad apple and
not know it.”
- Gordon
“We’ll see
companies go the Wal-Mart route of being low
cost operators with cheap labor before they’ll
invest in the new equipment. Cheap labor is the
core commodity for too many companies.”
- Rorie
“It’s very
important to the other Hispanics that their crew
leader be Hispanic, but there has to be someone
who can communicate with the client as well.”
- Hasbrouck
But
there is a solution! I read in the December
issue of WIRED Magazine that someone has
invented a robot
lawnmower.
The
RL500 automatic lawnmower from
Friendlymachines.com can mow a 3000 square foot
lawn without recharging.
It
comes with instruction
manuals
in English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch,
Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, so language is no
longer a problem.
Nor
are catastrophic health care, crime, and
education costs.
March 10, 2001
