Also

He also could have failed to publicize the jobs adequately. The article says he went to the state labor board and posted the jobs. That doesn't seem adequate, given my experience with the state labor board in Maryland. What you have to do is go to an area where the underemployed people are, and spread the word. Post a flyer at the supermarkets in poor neihborhoods. Post it at the welfare board. Post it at the GED location. Post it at the parole office. I thought of this several days ago, but didn't have time to post it.

Ignorance and Poor Fact Checking at the New York Times

The New York Times of July 6 has an article "Employers Fight Tough Measures on Immigration."  The article begins, "Under pressure from the toughest crackdown on illegal immigration in two decades, employers across the country are fighting back ..."  

Here is what the article says at one point, "Mike Gilsdorf, the owner of a 37-year-old landscaping nursery in Littleton, Colo., saw the need for action by businesses last winter when he advertised with the Labor Department, as he does every year, for 40 seasonal workers at market-rate wages to plant, prune and carry his shrubs in the summer heat. Only one local worker responded to the notice, he said, and then did not show up for the job."

By definition, if no workers were willing to take the job, then the employer did not offer market-rate wages.  The definition of the market-rate wage is that it is the $ wage that will elicit a supply of labor to match the quantity of labor demanded.  If no workers showed up for the job, then the wage offered was not the market rate wage and obviously needs to be raised.  Remember those supply and demand curves from your economics class?  Where the supply curve intersects the demand curve- that is the market-rate wage.    

The only way out of this economic analysis is if there is some kind of population shortage so that there are simply no workers to take the job.  But we all know that is simply not the current situation in this tenuous economy.

So,

(1) Mike Gilsdorf did not offer the market-rate wage

(2) Mike Gilsdorf offered a wage so low that no workers wanted the job.  What Mike Gilsdorf wants is really cheap labor!  That's why Mike Gilsdorf wants to fight against measures to control illegal immigration.  It is all about cheap labor.   But this was for summer jobs.  Is Gilsdorf saying that no high school or college students wanted the job?  Well, not at the wage he wanted to pay!   
(2) If Mike Gilsdorf asserted to the New York Times reporter that he offered the market-rate wage, he is wrong or lying.
(3) The New York Times reporter (Julia Preston) knows so little economics that she could not detect the falsity of the statement uttered by Gilsdorf, or she just got it wrong
(4) The New York Times fact checkers did not detect the clear falsity of the assertion.

Mike Gilsdorf, CEO of Arapahoe Acres Nursery in Littleton, is chairman of Colorado Employers for Immigration Reform (COEIR)