Arizona company eyes future with no guest workers

Vicente and Mario Moran climbed step ladders in unison and held a heavy board over their heads. The cousins, who work for the company Paul Johnson Drywall, were in Goodyear, toiling on what will eventually be a senior living center.

“One board will wear you out,” Vicente said. “So you’ve got to be special kind of crazy to do this job.”

Hanging vertical drywall is hard work. Fastening it to the ceiling is even tougher. From the top of their step ladders, the men lifted the drywall into place. Then they held it up with one hand, reached for their tool belts with the other, and started drilling in screws.

A family of Mexican immigrants, relatives showed Vicente and Mario this business. The entry level wage is around $27,000 a year. Top workers earn more than $100,000.

“Like, so as a matter of fact, our uncle is across the hall right now,” Vicente said. “He’s kind of the one who taught us.”

At first, the cousins struggled with the job’s physical and mental demands. But they didn’t quit. Now they both have the title, foreman. Vicente isn’t sure why more people don’t tough it out.

“Hey, if I had an answer to that, we wouldn’t have a labor issue right now,” Vicente said.

Paul Johnson Drywall’s labor shortage got more challenging this year.

“We didn’t get H-2B workers and that’s almost a universal story across the United States for construction for craft workers,” said Cole Johnson, own-

er and president of the company.

Oct. 1 marked the start of a new fiscal year for the federal government, and immigration officials have already started processing requests from business owners who want to hire foreign guest workers through the H-2B visa program.

“It is an extremely difficult and expensive process,” Johnson said.

The government’s process changed this year, he said. It was less transparent, and officials kept asking for more information.

No H-2B workers has had an effect on the drywall company.

“There’s projects on a daily basis that we decline to bid based on not having an ability to quickly enough train the workforce that we need,” Johnson said.

Johnson thinks the problem was convincing the government his need for guest workers was temporary and seasonal. He argues it is, because the slow and busy seasons haven’t changed in 50 years. By hiring U.S. citizens, he said he cut the company’s need for H-2B workers.

“It’s a very tiny program,” said Cindy Hahamovitch, who has studied the H-2B visa, and works as the B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor of Southern History at the University of Georgia.

H-2B visas are capped at 66,000 annually. For businesses that could prove they faced serious financial harm without foreign guest workers, the government made 15,000 more available this year through a lottery.

When the H-2B program emerged in the 1980s, the idea was to help fill a need for seasonal jobs like a cook at a resort, said Hahamovitch.

“But we’ve seen the program encroaching into industries that are simply recasting themselves as hirers of temp workers only,” Hahamovitch said.

H-2B workers are bound to their employer in way that U.S. citizens aren’t, she said.

“This is not just about labor scarcity,” Hahamovitch said. “It’s about control of workers.”

On the job site in Goodyear, Vicente Moran said guest workers are easier to train than U.S citizens because guest workers’ minds are set on making it in drywall — no matter what.

“You don’t just have to be tough,” he said. “You have to be smart, too.”

Paul Johnson Drywall had planned to apply for H-2B guest workers again in the upcoming fiscal year. But the company recently changed course, and is investing in a relocation program to build its labor force with U.S. workers. The hope is to attract a mix of workers who are skilled and unskilled.

“The relocation assistance program that we’re utilizing, the genesis of that was Puerto Rico,” Johnson said.

Johnson looked to the island after his company was denied foreign guest workers this year, but ran into snags when prospects couldn’t make it to Arizona, and lacked experience in drywall.

“And that really is what prompted us to broaden our outreach to the entire continental U.S.,” Johnson said.

The company prefers candidates with three years of experience. They’ll be guaranteed 40 hours a week, money to help move and pay rent, health care and “higher than average wages.” Paul Johnson Drywall will also take unskilled workers, depending on its ability to train them.

“The range, on the low end, would be in that $12-$13 an hour range for an entry level labor position,” Johnson said.

It adds up to a maximum of $27,000 a year.

“These are jobs that Americans have been moving out of quickly because, as I said, the wage is not very high,” said Giovanni Peri, professor and chair of the economics department at the University of California Davis.

Construction, agricultural and service-based companies relied for years on undocumented people for unskilled labor, Peri said. After 9/11, the national dialogue shifted away from the economics of immigration.

“The debate is mostly about how undocumented are costly, are a danger,” he said.

Lost in there, Peri said, is the reality of a domino effect from companies not having enough low-skilled workers.

“If you have a construction company that hires fewer of these people, you will have them also hiring fewer engineers, supervisors, electricians, accountant,” he said.

Paul Johnson Drywall hopes its relocation program will eventually bring in about 100 workers a month. It’s taken a little while to iron out the details of the plan. The company says it has been getting calls from prospects, and a handful of people have agreed to come work in the Southwest.