Leaf Blower Issue a Clash of Expectations, Realities

When Don Waldie was growing up in Lakewood in the 1950s, he and his brother and father all had their appointed yard tasks.

Waldie, the youngest, pushed the broom. His brother edged the lawn and his father mowed the grass. That was the neighborhood norm.

No longer. It is still possible to find fathers cutting the grass in that classic patch of postwar suburbia. But the more common sight is that of a hired garden crew sweeping through yards with power mowers, weed whackers and leaf blowers.

That the comfortable--but hardly rich--citizens of Lakewood can now routinely afford to hire someone else to perform their yard drudgery says reams about the degree to which cheap immigrant labor has transformed daily routines and expectations in Southern California.

Gardeners, nannies, maids and car detailers have become standard fixtures of the middle class to a degree unknown a few decades ago--and still unknown in many other parts of the country.

Yet one need only look at the surprisingly fierce and emotional fight over Los Angeles’ pending ban on gasoline-powered leaf blowers to see how complex and contorted the relationship between the served and the servers has become.

Ever more dependent on hired help from Latin America, Californians are frequently ill at ease with the consequences of that labor pool--whether it’s a noisy yard tool that helps keep gardening rates low, day workers crowding street corners, or proliferating bilingual classes in public schools.

At the same time, it can be argued that through their sheer numbers and eagerness for work, the laborers inevitably perpetuate their low wages and devalue their jobs. The Latino gardeners fasting on the steps of City Hall last week were demanding not better pay, but the right to continue using a tool that has helped turn their jobs into little more than outdoor factory work, an alfresco assembly line.

“There are too many of us,” lamented Ramon Reyes, a 26-year-old San Fernando Valley gardener who stood in support of the fasters Friday morning, a few hours before the hunger strike was called off in exchange for promises of city help in searching for alternatives to the gas blowers. “There’s too much competition now.

“It’s a shame because gardening should be an art, pruning and taking your time,” Reyes mused. “It’s come to people making a lot of noise and dust and you’re gone. It’s not a job to be proud of anymore.”

But gardening is all he knows, what his five brothers do and what his father did when he came across the border from Mexico in the 1960s.

They didn’t have leaf blowers then. But the rates were comparatively better, says Reyes, who charges $50 to $80 a month for a weekly yard cleanup and says he has not raised his prices in years. “There’s always going to be someone out there who charges less for the same amount of work. Unfortunately we’re not united.”

As Reyes spoke to a reporter on the grounds of City Hall, a man stopped. He looked thirtysomething, professional and angry. “Why don’t you ask why he doesn’t use a rake and a broom?” the man snapped. “Is he too lazy? I use a rake and a broom.”

Lazy? Reyes and his helper service 10 to 20 yards a day, spending an average of 15 to 30 minutes on the typical garden. He works six days a week, anywhere from eight to 12 hours a day, depending on the season. He takes one week off a year. He and his co-worker each clear about $100 a day.

Transformation of Middle Class Life

To follow a Los Angeles gardening crew through the day is to watch a grueling marathon of motion, noise, fumes and dust. If the light is waning, the gardeners push the mower at a trot, looking like they are engaged in some frantic contest--whoever cuts the grass the fastest wins.

And yes, many of them do blow dirt all over the place: into the street, the air, the next-door neighbor’s yard. They rearrange it rather than remove it.

Reyes concedes the blowers are often misused. “You don’t have to blow everything to hell,” he says.

Indeed, he is not that fond of the machines. “It does bother me. I have a thing with dust and fumes.” But like everyone else protesting the blower ban, he says that without them, he couldn’t clean up nearly as many yards a day. He would have to charge more. And he doesn’t believe most of his clients would pay more.

In his 1991 book, “Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World,” David Rieff examines the reinvention of middle class domestic life in L.A., the extent to which the city “had taken to cheap labor in much the way American consumers had taken to cut-rate appliance stores. . . .

“Even an activity as recreational as gardening has been transformed, in L.A., into one that requires the services of a gardener,” Rieff observes. “But that was no problem. Los Angeles is now a place where a middle-class person can live in a First World way for Third World prices, at least for domestic help.”

Rieff writes of how “on the Westside, they need staffs to perform activities that only a generation before, their parents had taught them to perform themselves,” of how maids have become “part of the basic ‘kit’ of middle-class life.”

A good part of this dependency, of course, is the natural result of two-career families in which there is never enough time to do anything the way the previous generation did--when the stay-at-home mom filled the roles of maid, nanny and cook.

In these two-income households, where both parents often work long hours at demanding jobs, life would be unimaginable without a nanny to take care of the kids and do the laundry, without a gardener to keep the yard looking unnaturally neat--as Southern Californians prefer it.

But beyond the pressures of hectic lives, Rieff suggests other influences at work, at least for the boomer generation.

“There was no way, as long as they could afford it, that a generation that had grown up thinking of life as essentially fun, was going to be reconciled to mopping their own floors or cleaning their own toilets.”

Jack Allen, a retired attorney and blower opponent who lives in Pacific Palisades, remembers how “it used to be you’d hire the kid around the block” to mow the lawn. But in the late ‘70s, he says “the boys next door became unavailable. They didn’t want to do it. The desire for doing jobs like that disappeared.”

The middle class boomers’ children seem even less acquainted with the concept of weekend chores and neighborhood jobs. On Saturdays, they are far more likely to be in their rooms tinkering with their computers than in the driveway sudsing up the family cars.

After all, for less than $10, you can go to the carwash and get a near battalion of men to vacuum the dog hair out of that sport utility vehicle and wipe it to a gleam after it rolls off the washer track.

Waldie, who lives in his childhood home and two years ago wrote a well-received memoir of Lakewood life, still works in his yard. But now he happily turns over care of his lawn to a garden service.

“It didn’t make me a better person,” he says of his childhood yard chores. “It’s work. And it’s work that many men would gladly shift to some other provider.”

And so they have, even in modest neighborhoods of what Waldie, Lakewood’s public information officer, calls the “not-quite middle class.”

‘Some Element of Hypocrisy Here’

In the ‘80s, he remembers reading books and articles about Los Angeles in which writers from England “would drop their jaws that nearly everybody they ran into had a gardener, maybe a maid and a nanny. It’s remarkable the amount of service work done in not-quite middle-class communities.”

With a wink and a nod, Californians have until recently left the door ajar to illegal immigration because it served their purposes, greasing the skids of commerce and daily life with a ready pool of cheap labor.

Yet as reliance on that immigrant service class has grown, so has resentment at the societal transformations wrought by it. There was Proposition 187, designed to deny most government services to illegal immigrants. Now there is an initiative to virtually eliminate bilingual education.

“We in Los Angeles have become pretty comfortable expecting these goodies,” said Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, a USC sociology professor who has studied Mexican immigration and paid domestic work. “And there are choices that need to be put on the table.

“Resident homeowners have every right to object to polluting, noisy leaf blowers,” she continued. “But at the same time, we can’t expect to have our beautiful, manicured lawns for the same price if we’re going to object to the tools of the trade.

“There seems to be some element of hypocrisy here,” she remarked. “It’s sort of an unfair placing of blame on the gardeners. The gardeners are here working because there’s a demand for their services. And we like our beautiful lawns but we don’t want to pay for them.”

Allen, a former city attorney in Beverly Hills, concedes that the blower ban will force some adjustments. And he believes homeowners will make them. They will pay their gardeners more, as he has, or stop demanding every leaf and twig be cleaned up. Or perhaps do what he saw various Beverly Hills residents do--maintain a spotless front yard and forget about the back.