A landscaper shortage is hitting Ohio particularly hard this year due to cuts to the seasonal worker visa program and the nation’s low unemployment rate.
Sandy Mulney, executive director of the Ohio Landscape Association, said the main challenge is to find workers who can fill the positions and actually show up to work.
“Unemployment is the lowest it has been in many, many years, and we have a shrinking population, so there is just not the people out there to hire,” Mulney said.
Roughly 125 Northeast Ohio landscape contractors rely on the H-2B visa program to hire workers and fill their staff each year, Mulney said. This year, because of changes to the program, about two-thirds of those companies were not approved for visas, leaving them scrambling.
The H-2B visa, which can be obtained by a seasonal immigrant worker, is capped at 66,000 workers per year. In years past, it has allowed for a “returning worker exemption,” so that immigrant workers who are returning to jobs are not counted against the cap. This year and last, Congress took away that exemption, meaning fewer visas are available.
For George Hohman, who owns the Twinsburg-based landscaping company Turfscape, the changes have hit hard. Hohman has used the H-2B visa program to hire roughly 50 of his 150 employees each year. This year, he was approved for zero visas.
“It’s the worst year I’ve ever had in business,” Hohman said. “The most devastating, the most challenging.”
He has been using the visa program for about 18 years. Now he has hired local workers to fill out his staff and said he sees about an 18 percent daily call out rate. It makes it tough to keep up with demand and to keep clients and customers.
On the Saturday after Memorial Day, Hohman said 15 workers either called off or just didn’t show up. Since the season started, roughly 50 workers have quit or stopped showing up at his Twinsburg location.
“I’ve had the no-calls, no-shows for 30 years, you know? There’s a reason we use the visa program, because these guys want to work and they want to work hard,” Hohman said. “And I would not be a bit surprised if we end up losing anywhere from a $1 million to $2 million in work this year, because we can’t service our properties in a timely fashion.”
One misconception about the H-2B visa program, Mulney said, is that people believe using immigrant workers means cheaper labor. In fact, the U.S. government sets the wages for H-2B workers at roughly $13 per hour — well above the federal minimum wage.
