Summer Employers Brace for Shortage of Foreign Workers
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Breakfast will not be served this summer at Cape Cod’s Crown & Anchor. The Provincetown resort and entertainment complex usually hires 10 to 12 people from Jamaica and Eastern Europe each summer as cooks, housekeepers and maintenance workers. But new visa restrictions mean the guest workers it used last year aren’t expected back. With fewer workers, the resort’s management realized it wouldn’t have the manpower to serve three meals a day.
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Employers around the country who thrive on seasonal business are preparing to lose thousands of foreign workers they’ve hired in past summers to work in restaurants, hotels, landscaping and other industries. New visa controls are cutting the number of temporary foreign workers eligible to return to the country, so employers are scouring job fairs for replacements, lobbying Congress for help and bracing for staff shortages they say will make business tough.
Tourism and hospitality officials envision various problems if the jobs go unfilled: Restaurants may have fewer tables and longer wait-times. Hotel check-in times could be delayed as fewer housekeepers hustle to clean rooms. Resorts may offer fewer meals to guests.
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The shortage hit winter ski resorts from Colorado to Vermont and is expected to affect summer hot spots like Newport, R.I., and Cape Cod, where businesses count on foreign workers to meet the tourist demand. Many seasonal workers have held the same job for years, and employers say they value their returning workers’ experience and count on them to fill the critical, if unheralded, jobs that high school and college students typically aren’t interested in.
Foreign workers issued the visas, known as H-2B visas, are generally offered the same pay as an American worker would get for the same job, though the actual salary varies depending on the position and the location.
Rick Farrick, who owns five inns in Newport, is looking for replacements for about a half-dozen Jamaican housekeepers, who earned $9 or $10 an hour. He said he was willing to offer more money to find quality local replacements, but said that wouldn’t solve the problem of losing experienced workers who have worked for him for years.
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The shortage provides an opening for local workers, especially with a slumping economy and a national unemployment rate of 5.1 percent in March. But Keith Stokes, executive director of the Newport County Chamber of Commerce, said there’s usually not enough local interest to meet the need.
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Newport County is looking to replace around 500 H-2B employees this summer, Stokes said, while Cape Cod and the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard usually have between 5,000 and 7,000 H-2B employees.
Employers are looking into whether they can hire workers on visas other than the H-2B visas. Some are also bringing in foreign workers who are already in the country on an H-2B visa and are willing to extend their stays.
Steven Filippi, president of Ballard’s Inn, a resort on Block Island—a popular vacation spot off Rhode Island’s coast—said he had found 20 to 30 H-2B workers in Florida and Arizona to replace the Filipino workers he used to hire as bartenders, chefs and servers.
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(Posted on April 29, 2008)
Comments
Perhaps they’ll have to hire (gasp) some white high school students, or maybe a now-unemployable white, American software engineer.
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 6:39 PM on April 29
Isn’t summer vacation the time when students have several months off from school? And didn’t they use to take all these jobs? These employers have very short memories.
Posted by passingthru at 6:43 PM on April 29
I wish that those business addicted to cheap foreign labor would quit their whining. There are plenty of unemployed AMERICAN CITIZENS (ie: college students and those who are less skilled) WHO WOULD DO THESE JOBS.
Posted by at 7:18 PM on April 29
No one admits the truth. The only reason there is a shortage of employees is they refuse to hire blacks.
Posted by at 8:49 PM on April 29
All of the State unemployment offices should require all these businesses needing help to register with them.
Applicants and recipients of unemployment benefits should be made to report for interviews of these jobs or be denied benefits. If they are being paid less than the unemployment benefits then the State could pay the difference and all parties would be better off.
If you reward people for doing nothing, odds are they will continue to do nothing.
Posted by Lucas M at 8:51 PM on April 29
Notice how the reports of worker shortages are always prospective? It’s never there is a shortage, because the shortage never actually happens. In real shortage situation businesses would be closing up for lack or workers or becaue labor is too expensive for them to make a profit.
It ain’t happening.
Posted by Alan at 10:16 PM on April 29
With gas over 4 bucks a gallon in my (northern IL) area, and many people NOT taking vacations due to finance and fuel costs, it should all balance out….
Theres plenty of help to hire when the price is right.
Posted by at 11:35 PM on April 29
No one admits the truth. The only reason there is a shortage of employees is they refuse to hire blacks.
Posted by at 8:49 PM on April 29
Well, yes. But before blacks (or anybody else) can be hired for a job, they first have to APPLY for it. Blacks can’t blame employers for not giving them jobs if they never show up to fill out the application in the first place.
Posted by Right-Wing Rocker at 12:19 PM on April 30
I heard something similar on the BBC news today. More and more Eastern Europeans are returning home, after working in the UK for a couple of years, because the economies back home are improving. Apparently, employers are worried about how they are now going to cope. Well, how did they cope before? They employed local people! Why not try it? You never know, it might work!
Posted by IrishBlood-EnglishHeart at 12:39 PM on April 30
“No one admits the truth. The only reason there is a shortage of employees is they refuse to hire blacks.”
Posted by at 8:49 PM on April 29
> Nonesense! Blacks do not want service jobs. None of them want to be a Step’an Fetchit to white people. Dole and drug dealing is their choice.
Posted by Whiteplight at 2:47 PM on April 30
At least it means that my wallet won’t turn up missing if I leave it in my room!
Posted by Whiteplight at 2:48 PM on April 30