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Lawn-Care Entrepreneur Faces A Changing Racial Landscape
Nikita Floyd, left, owner of Green Forever, explains a client's sidewalk preferences to foreman Santos Medrano, center, so he can translate the instructions for Juan Salvador.
(By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)
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"There was a lot of resentment on the part of many African Americans because they lost their jobs," Hutchinson said. "African Americans don't even look at that [sector] anymore because it is not open to them, or they believe it is closed to them."
It distresses Floyd to be placed in that camp.
When he started Green Forever in 1989, he recruited and hired black workers but was frustrated when they often left after a few months. That kind of turnover is typical of the low-skilled labor pool, and in those first few years Floyd paid his workers slightly more than minimum wage and did not yet offer health benefits.
Some of the guys would come in late, and Floyd hates to waste even a minute of daylight. He fired a man who nearly chopped off his arm on a log splitter after coming to work drunk. Others left for better-paying jobs. High school and college students hired in summer saw no future in landscaping.
"I got tired of the way things were going," Floyd said.
Green Forever's start coincided with a wave of migration. Between 1990 and 2000, the region's foreign-born population increased by 71 percent. Many recent immigrants can earn more than 10 times as much for low-skilled labor in the United States than in their home countries, and Floyd saw in them a thirst for survival.
He wanted workers who were hungry for the jobs he offered, as he was after dropping out of college and starting the business with a loan from his mother to buy a walk-behind lawnmower, a tiller and a weed whacker.
As owner, Floyd had a vision for Green Forever that his U.S.-born employees -- with no stake in the company -- did not share. "When I was mowing lawns, I saw myself in a truck checking on the men. When I was in the truck, I saw myself in the office," Floyd said. "Now that I'm in the office, I see the company running itself."
Floyd's first jobs were to clean property strewn with used needles and dirty diapers. "It was nasty, nasty work," he recalled, the kind President Bush has said U.S.-born workers won't do as he pushes Congress to allow more immigrants in as temporary workers.
Immigrants present Floyd with Social Security numbers, but even corporations that use a government-hiring program employ illegal immigrants. Floyd acknowledges that he may have unknowingly done the same.
Not all of the immigrants were stellar. One stole Floyd's truck radio, he said. Others were always looking for a job that paid even 25 cents more per hour.
But Floyd instituted raises and bonuses for the best workers and asked the guys to teach him a few words of Spanish.
