Have you seen all the news about cities passing laws raising minimum wage to $15 an hour?

My question is . . . When did working the french fries at McDonald's or digging the irrigation pipe trench by hand become a career? When I was a kid, I worked at McDonald's, Jack in the Box, Dunkin' Donuts and several other no name restaurants, all at minimum wage. I worked landscape; I worked as a furniture mover; I worked on an assembly line . . . I worked at whatever I could . . . The jobs weren't great and certainly not a career, but as a teenager I got to earn money, develop a work ethic and hang with a bunch of other kids my age who were all doing what I was doing . . . We were all off the couch, learning what it meant to earn our freedom and independence, and earning the opportunity to buy our first car, get a Walkman, go on dates and have fun spending our hard earned money.

Today, you hardly ever see kids working those jobs. In the inner city it just isn't cool to put on the uniform of a fast food restaurant, let alone do the back breaking work of landscape . . . Today, while an entire generation of teenagers sits on their hands, we see middle aged adults, mostly immigrants from nations where $8-9 dollars a day is more normal than $8-9 an hour, working those jobs.

At $15 an hour, the 16-year-old sweeping the back of McDonald's, or the kid on your crew who hoses off the lawn mowers or drops off the load at the dump is now supposed to be pulling in $31k a year!?! So what do you do . . . Well first off you don't hire a kid anymore, because at that rate you can no longer afford to train someone as flakey as a teenager . . .

Somehow today, with real unemployment in the tens of millions, we have immigrants crashing our borders looking for and taking jobs that were traditionally meant for the up and coming youth of our nation.

When I was a kid, we did the residential landscape maintenance in our neighborhood. Almost every kid I knew at one point or another got his dad's lawn mower and went around the neighborhood mowing, blowing and edging. That's how we got experience to become entrepreneurs and businessmen. But now, especially in landscape, where a large number of the companies are made of immigrants who traditionally hire brothers, cousins and extended family members and more often than not pay those members in cash (and in my estimation not $15/hour), the businessman, regardless of age, who tries to compete in these cities by following the law is at a real disadvantage.

Also, we are now seeing workers who are getting the higher minimum wage asking for less hours so they can still meet welfare and subsidy levels. What these policies say and do, and especially with an administration advocating anarchy at every level is: Obey the law, hire young Americans, provide a platform for skill building and you lose. Disobey the law, keep our kids on the couch, pay under the table and you gain.

Call me whatever you like, but with my northern European heritage, I believe that hard, honest work should be the norm, not the exception. And I believe that getting a job as a kid is one of the most important things that one can do and teach others to do. I don't care where you came from or what you look like, if you don't agree with that, you will not get my respect.

So what's my point? My point is that from my experience the vast majority of LC/DBM readers got into landscape at the lowest level, working at minimum wage and doing the hard work of a minimum wager earner. But at $15/hour this door will shut.

I think the state landscape associations and the National Association of Landscape Professionals (formerly PLANET) should protest these cities, stand against raising the minimum wage, stand for the youth of America and begin to promote the landscape industry as a profession where one can start at minimum wage and work themselves up the ladder into the possibility of entrepreneurship.

Our minimum wage laws and immigration policies should be about protecting and encouraging our youth to work, not replacing them. I think the landscape industry can lead this charge . . .

God Bless,

George Schmok, Publisher