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Labor pains
Squeezed by domestic and immigrant labor issues, superintendents are getting creative in their efforts to keep their maintenance teams fully staffed.
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Bruce Burger, CGCS, (far right) talks with his grounds crew at San Antonio’s Quarry GC. Photo by Gary M. Perkins. |
American labor supports the golf industry in many ways and varying degrees. Unfortunately, golf course maintenance is not so high on the list, for the most part.
The progression of societal and commercial change in the United States, combined with a political climate swirling amid partisan agendas, doesn’t always bode well for the country’s labor sector. Facts and figures from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the domestic workforce is both aging and shrinking, with the prime working age population (25-34) in decline while the economy continues to create substantial numbers of entry-level, low-skilled jobs.
Specifically, seven of 10 jobs today require only on-the-job training, and projections indicate that nearly half of the 17 million jobs that will be created in the U.S. in the next three years will not require a college
degree. Meanwhile, birth rates are declining and college graduates are increasing, which won’t sustain the job growth. By 2010, workers age 46-64 will have the fastest growth rate. Additionally, more than 60 million current workers are expected to retire over the next 30 years.
Domestic downer
The numbers can be downright bleak for the nation’s golf courses, which must compete with many other industries for workers to fill low-skilled jobs. In fact, most in the business believe the golf industry cannot be sustained, let alone grow, without adequate and legal access to a workforce for the game’s signature low-skilled, seasonal maintenance labor — labor in which, frankly, most American workers show little interest.
“Not many aspire to work at a golf course nowadays,” one veteran superintendent says of the domestic labor dilemma. “It’s one thing that the work is unskilled and seasonal, but there’s also an attitude — air-condition the course, three-week vacation, 35-hour work week, benefits, the whole ball of wax, all just to ride on a mower,” he adds in a tone more serious than facetious.
That superintendent and thousands more have come to depend on immigrant labor to survive, a move that in itself is fraught with volatile issues. In late June, political partisanship took its toll when the U.S. Congress failed to pass an immigration reform bill and basically left the subject dead in the water for two years. Meantime, an estimated 12 million illegal workers swarm about the country.
In August, the Bush administration launched a crackdown on illegal immigrants in accordance with current laws that heretofore have been given only token enforcement or have been unfairly enforced in many localized instances. The new initiatives include requiring employers to fire employees who use false Social Security numbers. Federal officials also will begin to more harshly deal with companies who employ large numbers of illegal immigrant workers. Small business leaders say many employers in the low-skill industries will be hard-pressed to handle Social Security number verifications and predict mass layoffs or dismissals.
Immigrant irony
For those employers who exhaust honest attempts to hire American labor for low-skilled temporary work, the leading solution is the 17-year-old guest worker visa program known as H-2B, which escaped the flak from the reform bill defeat. It provides labor for small and seasonal businesses such as golf courses. But the number of immigrants in America legally participating in programs such as H-2B is a mere drop in the bucket compared with those who aren’t.
“It’s craziness. The market ought to rule ... but it doesn’t,” says Bob Wingfield, an immigration labor agent, of the huge discrepancy in the numbers of legal and illegal workers and a government seemingly incapable of dealing with it.
Wingfield is president of Amigos Labor Solutions Inc. in Dallas, a company that annually provides about 4,000 H-2B workers from Mexico to more than 300 clients in the U.S.
“We do the paperwork and coach the employers through the process,” he says. “Approved job lists are sent to Mexico, where workers are found, matched to the jobs and sent to the States.”
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Brad Babek, superintendent at Territory GC near Duncan, Okla., manages a staff of 18, 15 of whom are immigrant workers. Photo by Andrea Mason |
Welcome guests
Established in 1990, the H-2B program is becoming increasingly important to the golf industry by filling temporary, seasonal labor needs that are eschewed more and more by domestic resources. The program’s main hitch is a cap of 66,000 on the number of guest workers who can come to the U.S. for up to 10 months annually — 33,000 in the first half of the federal fiscal year, 33,000 in the second half.
For years, the cap was extremely problematic for many seasonal industries like golf. Many facilities faced the likelihood of the cap reaching its limit before they needed workers in the early spring. Then, a few years ago, Congress passed a bill in which returning guest workers would not count toward the cap, which has increased the available H-2B workforce to around 200,000. The returning-worker exemption was a boon for superintendents, who can now request workers experienced in golf course maintenance and familiar with a specific layout. Those using the program for the first time, however, languish near the end of the line and still face cap issues.
Political games
The returning-worker exemption must be renewed by Congress each year. It expires this year on Sept. 30, and as of early August the legislators had once again not dealt with the matter, a delay that leaves employers all around the country on edge.
“If it’s not extended, then we go back to a free-for-all for 66,000 workers and more than likely the seasonal green industry would not get their workers for the next year,” says Wingfield of the looming consequences.
Don Mooers, a Maryland attorney who specializes in employment-based immigration law, calls Congress’ 11th-hour tactics “brinkmanship.” Indeed, it brings many small business employers to the brink of being out of business, he adds.
Mooers has a pretty good handle on all this. He’s also the chief consultant and driving force of Save Small Business, a grassroots organization out of Bethesda, Md., that surfaced when the exemption was first introduced and passed in 2004 and led the lobbying efforts that were successful in eventually gaining extension passages in 2005 and 2006.
Mooers’ baby this year is the Save Our Small and Seasonal Businesses Act of 2007, which, if passed by the Sept. 30 deadline, features proposals for longer exemptions — five years in the Senate bill and complete exemption in the House version.
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Steve Cook, CGCS, MG at Oakland Hills CC in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., used to hire migrant workers, but turned to the H-2B program in 2001. Photos © Fabrizio Costantini |
Grassroots power
“There’s a lack of understanding about the U.S. labor situation,” says Mooers. “Congress is just hesitant to bring in more immigrants,” and he notes that there are two main alternatives to lagging domestic labor for golf courses: H-2B, which gives employers the opportunity to do it right by hiring a legitimate agent who in turn contacts ethical, trained firms that work with the U.S. Consulate in Mexico to provide legal workers for temporary and/or seasonal work; and the J1 Summer Work Travel Program, which provides university students from overseas to work in the U.S. for up to four months.
It’s H-2B, of course, that consumes avid supporters like Mooers and Save Small Business president Hank Lavery, along with considerable volunteer and contributing help.
“We’re predicated on everybody participating with what they can to make sure we can operate,” Mooers says of the lobbying organization. “The key to our success has been bringing together participants from the different industries in communities that utilize the H-2B program.”
The font of human resources
While people like Bob Wingfield and Don Mooers champion H-2B on a national scale and in turn are lauded as shepherds of the program, it’s somewhat fitting that an ex-superintendent is a key figure in supplying the manpower that fuels the guest worker machine in the U.S.
Jeff West, a member of GCSAA from 1989 to 1999, has for the last eight years run LLS International, which has six offices in Mexico and gathers and processes workers through the U.S. Consulate and provides passage to temporary jobs in America.
West moves several thousand legally documented guest workers north of the border every year. In 2006, his company supplied temporary and seasonal labor in all 48 states of the continental U.S., serving approximately 1,000 employers — including between 40 and 50 golf courses.
West deals mainly in the H-2B program, but does some H-2A, which supplies labor to the U.S. agriculture sector. His clients also use a secure database, MexicanLabor.com, to access photos and profiles of more than 20,000 Mexican laborers. LLS International staff also uses the database to fill job requests with the most qualified workers.
West disdains being called a recruiter, mostly because of the stigma borne by those who employ unethical and illegal practices to round up immigrant labor in Mexico. In an interview in The Washington Post just a few days before the immigration reform bill was defeated, he said, “They find us. We don’t have to go out and recruit.”
“Basically, we represent the worker ... that’s our job,” West told GCM. “We get paid ($160) by the worker. If a worker has a problem, we check into it. We have a toll-free number to Mexico. If there is a problem, we try to get it resolved right away.”
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Cook directs an in-season maintenance staff of 56, which includes 19 H-2B workers, all of whom are returnees to the course. |
Strengthening the system
From his decade in golf course management, the 45-year-old West, who lives in Fredericksburg, Texas, just north of San Antonio, knows well the frustration a great many superintendents in the States feel trying to maintain a legal and trained workforce for low-skilled, seasonal jobs.
“I had labor shortages myself,” he says. “I also found out once that all my workers were illegal and I had to find ways to make sure they were legal, which is how I learned about the H-2B program.”
West’s career-changing experience came while he was construction superintendent at Wyndgate Golf & Country Club in Rochester, Mich., and in need of a workforce.
“There were plenty of domestic workers, but they didn’t like the work. I couldn’t keep American workers on the job. At one time I had up to 90 paychecks for four hours apiece. They’d show up for work, go to lunch and never come back,” recalls West, who then hired migrant workers already in the area who had been working in vegetable fields until a freeze decimated the crops.
“They showed up every day and did the work, then I found out they were here illegally,” he says.
That setback guided West to the guest worker visa program, which then was struggling against mismanagement and corruption, and began his mission to help himself as well as others.
“I realized there was a real weak link in Mexico — once you got to the point of requesting workers, it went into a black hole,” he says. “I created an online system so the employer could see everything that was going on, from when workers checked in, when passports were submitted ... everything was tracked. From there, one thing led to another and I started my own company.”
The pursuit of excellence
One of the more high-profile golf facilities to benefit from the efforts of West’s company, go-between agencies like Amigos Labor Solutions and those who lobby to sustain H-2B, is Oakland Hills Country Club in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where Steve Cook, CGCS, MG, has been superintendent for the last 11 years.
Oakland Hills, led by its 17th-ranked South Course, has been the site of 14 major championships over the years, including six U.S. Opens, and will host its third PGA Championship next summer. Cook requires a large staff to meet the needs of the world-class venue, and says that wouldn’t be possible without immigrant labor.
Cook hired some migrant workers several years ago literally off the streets, then turned to H-2B in 2001 because, in his words, it’s “efficient, safe, legal and employer-friendly,” and he knew the local labor force would not meet his needs.
“We need 30 to 40 seasonal workers each year,” the 25-year GCSAA member says. “We run a lot of advertising ,and a typical response is just 10 to 15 local applicants, even though the Detroit area has been economically stressed and has a large labor pool. Regardless of the wage, the workers just aren’t there for whatever reason. When you see in the media that (golf courses) aren’t paying enough, it’s just simply false. I could pay $20 an hour and the number of applications would not go up. Nobody wants to run weed-eaters, push a mower, hand-rake bunkers or lay sod.”
Embracing H-2B also had some necessity to it.
“We had to upgrade our seasonal crew,” Cook says. “With the U.S. Amateur coming up in 2002 and the Ryder Cup in 2004 (after being postponed by 9/11), I knew we had to come up with a different solution. It was too much of a hassle trying to confirm all the identification and documents and the increased government scrutiny. We knew we were going to be left without a workforce if we didn’t do something.”
Today Oakland Hills has an in-season maintenance staff of 56, which includes 19 from the H-2B program, all of whom are returning workers, a big plus on the heels of a Rees Jones renovation of the South Course for the 2008 PGA. In fact, most of Cook’s H-2B staff worked the Ryder Cup three years ago.
Cook points out that he could request as many as 30 guest workers, but instead keeps the number low and pays them well.
“Our labor force from Mexico is incredibly motivated,” he says. “They’re genuinely nice people who work hard to make a living for their family.”
Cook’s only holdup is just that — being held hostage as Congress waits until the eve of adjournment each year to extend the returning-worker exemption.
“It’s frustrating that it’s a political issue,” he says. “I really believe if they would increase the number of H-2B visas to 500,000 or even a million, the issue of illegals would go away.”
An only recourse
Lee Miller is a client of Amigos who dreads to think of the predicament he’d be in if it weren’t for the guest worker visa program. Miller is the Class A superintendent at Gateway National Golf Links, an 18-hole daily fee layout in Madison, Ill., in the shadow of St. Louis’ famous Gateway Arch. He’s been there 10 years and for a half-dozen of those years he’s had H-2B labor. In fact, on a staff of nine, there are Miller, his assistant and a technician. The rest are immigrants.
“If I didn’t use H-2B, I’d be in a world of hurt,” the 10-year GCSAA member says in a bit of understatement.
Miller, whose experience with immigrant labor includes hiring workers by the van load in Arizona and off the streets in his early years at Gateway, says nearly all of his guest workers these days are returnees, a definite advantage considering the course’s challenging tee-through-green bentgrass makeup is unique to the region and requires savvy management staff-wide.
Unable to hire local labor, Miller is more than pleased with what he has, pointing to what he calls a “good problem.”
“These workers have been awesome. They show up on time. They’ll work from sunup to sundown; they don’t want to leave,” he says. “I’ve got somebody who wants to work instead of somebody who dreads being here. I run about four guys short so I can pay them overtime.”
Sooner solution
Brad Babek, the young superintendent at Territory Golf Club near Duncan, Okla., has learned well the opportunities immigrant labor offers these days. In his second year with the H-2B program, he runs a staff of 18 from mid-March to late October, 15 of whom are immigrant workers and all but two are in the H-2B program. Of the latter, 12 are returning workers. The crew stays in an old ranch home at one end of Territory GC, a single-owner private enterprise built four years ago, and rides utility vehicles to work each morning to the maintenance facility on the other side of the property.
Babek, who was an assistant during the construction of the course, says finding dependable labor in the oilfield-rich Duncan area in the first couple of years was tough. The oil business at that time was topsy-turvy with a lot of turnover.
“It was hard to get anybody interested in working for more than three or four months,” the five-year GCSAA member says of the area’s hybrid form of domestic labor apathy. “We’d hire some local guys and they’d work for a couple of months and then quit and we’d hire some more for a couple of months and so on. During that first year we probably ran through 30 workers to keep up a staff of 10.”
When the country’s latest oil boom hit a couple of years ago, Babek’s pool of local labor, such as it was, became a dry hole as ads in two newspapers produced no applicants at all. He then learned about H-2B at the 2005 Golf Industry Show in Orlando, Fla., and later got a tip on Amigos Labor Solutions in a response to a query on GCSAA’s forum. That convinced Babek to take the H-2B route. He hasn’t regretted it.
“The guys we have now are actually very good,” Babek says. “Some of them had done landscape work in the States before or worked in agriculture in this country or in Mexico. The thing is, their whole purpose is to come up here to work and get paid and be able to go home to their families after nine or 10 months. It works out perfectly for both us and them.”
Persistence, loyalty still exist
Bruce Burger, CGCS, longtime superintendent at San Antonio’s famed Quarry Golf Club, agrees that it takes a special type of person to do golf course work, but in the bustling economy of his niche in south Texas, he has managed to successfully tap into the local labor force even though newspaper ads usually result in few responses for low-skilled, low-paying work.
But Burger has made it work ever since 1993 when he was construction superintendent at the unique, environmentally sensitive Quarry GC site. He’s used plain old word of mouth in San Antonio’s golf-rich climate and also has had help recruiting workers from current crew members. While facilities around him employ guest workers, the 19-year GCSAA member has prevailed doing it his way.
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Kevin Smith (left) CGCS at Bryan Park GC in Browns Summit, N.C., was part of a state green industry contingent that went to Washington in May to push for immigration reform. Photo courtesy of Kevin Smith |
“I’ve never done it,” he says of the H-2B program, despite its many roots in the Longhorn state. “I rely on local labor. I haven’t had a lot of attrition; I usually have to replace one or two people each year. I have a lot of guys who have been with me a number of years. That’s just the way we operate.”
Burger’s most obvious advantage is that he offers his domestic workers full-time jobs. “We open year-round and we overseed, so the work, especially mowing, is the same in February as it is in July,” he says.
He also has modest needs — a relatively small crew of 12 counting himself, an assistant and a technician. The staff includes some immigrant labor, El Salvadorans and Mexicans with green cards. But still, having no guest workers stands out.
“I’ve just never gone down that road. I guess I’m a little old-fashioned, or old-school, but I try to keep good people on and reward them. That’s what works best for us,” says Burger, who notes that some of his staff also has been at The Quarry since construction. “It’s nice to have those guys as leaders and mentors to the younger or newer workers. It’s a good selling point, having employees stick with you.”
With a touch of activism
When Kevin Smith, CGCS, golf course maintenance director at Bryan Park Golf Course in Browns Summit, N.C., went on a state green industry mission to Washington this past May to push for the immigration reform bill, he was the only superintendent involved in the lobbying quest.
Helping represent the Turfgrass Council of North Carolina, of which he is a board member, Smith quickly discovered that the mission was made up mostly of agriculture interests touting the H-2A program. The 28-year GCSAA member, who also is vice president of agronomy for Pinnacle Golf Properties in central North Carolina, nevertheless made the most of the opportunity.
“I made sure I brought up golf to the people we met with,” he says. “There is a very strong level of concern here in an agricultural state like North Carolina that also relies heavily on the golf industry.”
Smith is also quick to express his chagrin at the defeat of immigration reform a little more than a month after the mission to Congress. Being that close to the law-making scene has caused him to join others who have criticized other proponents of reform for being too passive, including taking to task the efforts of the golf industry in supporting immigration legislation (see “GCSAA makes its case,” below).
“I don’t think we’ve done our job effectively enough in communicating to Washington that (immigrant workers) are essential people to our success — not only in turf, but in so many other areas of our society,” he says.
Pinnacle Golf Properties operates five separate golf facilities in North Carolina’s Piedmont region, including Bryan Park. To understand Smith’s disenchantment, you must understand that the Pinnacle properties basically are a microcosm of the Carolinas in labor demographics. Seasonal workforces comprise domestics, retirees, students and immigrants more or less off the streets with documentation valid “to the best of our (superintendents’) knowledge” and a limited number of H-2B workers. He adds that some courses, Bryan Park among them, have used refugees in the Lutheran Family Services program. Overall, the majority of the hodge-podge labor force is Spanish-speaking.
At Bryan Park, a 36-hole facility Pinnacle leased from the city of Greensboro 4½ years ago, Smith has a staff of 25. There are two course superintendents, one assistant, a technician, a part-time student and Smith, and the rest are immigrants. None is H-2B. He also employed a contract labor service recently to help prepare for the 2010 U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship.
“The most interesting thing about our situation here is that as a management company we took over an operation that had been run by the city’s parks and recreation department, which gave the full-time employees the option of continuing on with us or remaining with the city in another capacity,” Smith says. “They all stayed with the city and its attractive benefit package. We were faced with the daunting task of building a crew from scratch in mid-stream at an existing golf course — everybody was new with zero experience at Bryan Park, including myself.”
For starters, Smith found a couple of Hispanic immigrants who had worked at Bryan Park previously and built around them and a few locals. Guest worker visas were a poor option because of the region’s numbers crunch — the North Carolina green industry employs 152,000 people, including nearly 8,400 golf course workers. Smith says the landscapers, sod producers, nurseries, etc., all have sought H-2B assistance more fervently than the golf industry.
“We had to go outside the traditional means to staff our operations,” he says. “Our goal was to break even, and we have actually exceeded that expectation. But there is no way we could have done that and still continue to pay $11 to $12 for the average hourly worker here.”
Smith, who also has faced immigration labor issues at golf facilities in Arizona during his career, says the social and political tug-of-war involving a legal-versus-illegal labor force is frustrating for the turf management profession.
“Inherently we don’t want to break the law; we’re not criminals and we don’t want to be put in the position where we could be accused of criminal activity,” he says. “But the system has created a monster that’s so corrupt, so inefficient and so poorly enforced that many superintendents are forced to make difficult decisions with reguard to the overall health of their operations.”
GCSAA makes its case
GCSAA has been involved in immigration labor issues in recent years, particularly in its support of the guest worker visa program H-2B, which allows immigrants to take temporary or seasonal jobs in the U.S. for up to 10 months each year.
H-2B (see main article) is an ideal solution to labor shortage problems in golf course management caused by a marked decline in the number of American workers attracted to low-skilled, transitory jobs.
GCSAA joined others in persuading Congress to modify the then 15-year-old guest worker visa law so that returning workers would not count toward the program’s annual 66,000-worker limit. The association also supported successful legislative extensions of that exemption the past two years and has been among those urging immigration reform.
“Reform should create an immigration system that functions efficiently for employers, workers and government agencies,” GCSAA maintains in an official position statement, adding that it supports comprehensive immigration reform that includes guest workers and is not limited to border security. “Reform measures should safeguard the seasonal worker H-2B visa program and not place undue economic burdens on employers,” the statement says.
GCSAA staff also is involved in assisting members with labor and immigration information and solutions, especially in providing guidance to appropriate programs and contacts.
“We do hear from members quite often wanting to know how to go about securing H-2B labor,” says Carrie Riordan, GCSAA director of information and public policy. “Most of the time it’s because they’re in an area where there’s just not an available workforce for seasonal jobs. But more and more we’re hearing from people in larger areas, as well, where they can’t find people for that kind of work.”
GCSAA and its membership also is being pressed by some of the leading proponents of sustaining and improving legal immigration labor to play an even larger, more distinct role in communicating to legislative representatives how important that sustainability is to small businesses and seasonal industries such as golf.
By early August, Congress had yet to act on another extension to the H-2B returning-worker exemption, which was to expire at the end of this month. The Save Our Small and Seasonal Businesses Act of 2007 proposes a longer, possibly permanent, exemption.
“People in the golf course industry really need to make sure their representatives know the consequences,” says Don Mooers, an immigration attorney and consultant for Save Small Business (www.savesmallbusiness.org), a grassroots organization that promotes sustainability for the H-2B program and is the source of the exemption extension legislation now before Congress.
“If the extension isn’t passed, many in the golf course business in the northern half of the country needing guest workers probably will be dead in the water,” Mooers adds. “Each and every member of the superintendents association needs to get out there and give it their all and make it happen.”
Bob Wingfield, president of Amigos Labor Solutions of Dallas, an agency that assists employers in the process of securing H-2B labor, notes that an all-out push by many of the three-dozen different industries in the U.S. that use temporary and seasonal workers was to begin early in September after Congress returned from its August recess.
One superintendent who has a big stake in seasonal-worker law continuity and who has a better handle on the issue’s fragility than most is Kevin Smith, CGCS, the golf course maintenance director at Bryan Park Golf Course near Greensboro, N.C., and also the vice president of agronomy for Pinnacle Golf Properties.
Smith joined a delegation of North Carolina agriculture and green industry interests that traveled to Washington in May to talk with congressional representatives about the immigration reform bill and, as a consequence in the wake of the measure’s defeat the following month, he knows the frustrations and unpredictability of political volatility.
“We got so much positive feedback in terms of, ‘Yes, we recognize the problem; yes, we’re sympathetic to your situation; yes, we know we need to do something,’” he recalls during the visit to Capitol Hill. “And then, of course, it just all falls apart. Partisanship and the political process thwarted the bill’s success.”
That experience and his knowledge of the golf course industry’s needs have caused Smith, a member of GCSAA for 28 years, to urge his professional association to do more.
“I really feel like we’re behind the curve,” he says. “I love GCSAA and everything it does, but we need to do a better job of telling this story and making the right people understand the gravity of what this means to us. It’s going to take some strong and sincere efforts within our industry to convince elected officials and those in the appropriate positions to take action.”
— T.O.
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