Would you hire an illegal?
I once owned a small company that made pre-cast concrete basement panels that I marketed to residential builders in four states. Before the business failed, largely in part to the 1987 stock market crash and the resultant sudden rise in mortgage interest rates, followed by a crashing halt in new home starts, I had as many as 13 employees. That’s history, but I had an experience from that period that I want to pass on.
We were located in an industrial park just off the Philadelphia airport that had once been a shinning and massive Westinghouse turbine plant. We occupied one small corridor in the giant building and I had seen the huge lathes and milling machines just before they were shipped abroad along with the American jobs this surrounding community had banked on for generations.
As I said, at our height we had 13 employees and it was the quality of the employee pool I drew on, that was the second reason my business failed. I was paying well for that time and area, yet I had real difficulty in finding employees who had a work ethic, were dependable, were mature, were able to manage small tasks or small groups of workers.
Looking back, Perhaps one out of 10 employees were someone I would ever wish to hire again. I would have loved to be able to hire the low paid, hard working, dependable, flexible, Hispanics I see working on construction sites across the country. And I would not have hesitated a moment in hiring them – if hiring illegal aliens carried as little serious consequences to an employer as it does today. Hell, I would have sold my first born to save that company, which was to be the domino, that falling, would in turn strip me of everything I had worked for and built my whole life.
Had I the chance, I would have been compelled to hire illegal aliens. And it is unenlightened thinking today that would suggest that small competitive independent businesses or contractors would not make the decision to hire illegals when the difference in labor costs may be the difference between the business surviving another year and bankruptcy. I’ve had my baptism in this industry – when a subdivision is begun and the contracts are let, there is the expectation that some number of contractors, especially the newer and smaller, will fall by the way side during the project. It’s raw supply and demand - in an industry where timing in a business cycle can be critical, one mistake can be critical, one code violation, one customer who doesn’t pay.
Now if cheating on income tax were so flagrant, so wide spread, so without risk or prosecution, then one would feel increasingly pressured to put his and his family’s interest ahead of strict law abidance. The minute that risk approaches my risk tolerance, then I am much more law abiding.
Low interest rates alone didn’t propel the recent real estate boom. It was accompanied by and dependent on available hard working, dependable, low wage illegals.
I have a solution that I will post next. And if I, a lowly layman, can in minutes craft a broad, and I’m sure naïve in some ways, solution – then why has our country’s best effort allowed this crisis to continue growing in plain sight?
We were located in an industrial park just off the Philadelphia airport that had once been a shinning and massive Westinghouse turbine plant. We occupied one small corridor in the giant building and I had seen the huge lathes and milling machines just before they were shipped abroad along with the American jobs this surrounding community had banked on for generations.
As I said, at our height we had 13 employees and it was the quality of the employee pool I drew on, that was the second reason my business failed. I was paying well for that time and area, yet I had real difficulty in finding employees who had a work ethic, were dependable, were mature, were able to manage small tasks or small groups of workers.
Looking back, Perhaps one out of 10 employees were someone I would ever wish to hire again. I would have loved to be able to hire the low paid, hard working, dependable, flexible, Hispanics I see working on construction sites across the country. And I would not have hesitated a moment in hiring them – if hiring illegal aliens carried as little serious consequences to an employer as it does today. Hell, I would have sold my first born to save that company, which was to be the domino, that falling, would in turn strip me of everything I had worked for and built my whole life.
Had I the chance, I would have been compelled to hire illegal aliens. And it is unenlightened thinking today that would suggest that small competitive independent businesses or contractors would not make the decision to hire illegals when the difference in labor costs may be the difference between the business surviving another year and bankruptcy. I’ve had my baptism in this industry – when a subdivision is begun and the contracts are let, there is the expectation that some number of contractors, especially the newer and smaller, will fall by the way side during the project. It’s raw supply and demand - in an industry where timing in a business cycle can be critical, one mistake can be critical, one code violation, one customer who doesn’t pay.
Now if cheating on income tax were so flagrant, so wide spread, so without risk or prosecution, then one would feel increasingly pressured to put his and his family’s interest ahead of strict law abidance. The minute that risk approaches my risk tolerance, then I am much more law abiding.
Low interest rates alone didn’t propel the recent real estate boom. It was accompanied by and dependent on available hard working, dependable, low wage illegals.
I have a solution that I will post next. And if I, a lowly layman, can in minutes craft a broad, and I’m sure naïve in some ways, solution – then why has our country’s best effort allowed this crisis to continue growing in plain sight?
posted by Bill Garnett | 3:40 PM
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