Eager-eyed and curious, Tatiana Luhova, an international finance major at the University of Bratislava in Slovakia, cheerfully strides into the motel room.
She glances left and right, seemingly taking everything into account in the well-furnished, thickly carpeted room at the Holiday Inn AquaDome and Resort Hotel, which boasts two indoor and three outdoor pools, a poolside grill and a heavily used indoor water park with water slides.
Then the 20-year-old, wearing a Holiday Inn employee T-shirt, spins around and bounds toward the cart in the doorway, reaching for fresh sheets. It’s her first day on the job, having arrived only the night before after a long, tiring trip from Slovakia. She wants to make a good impression.
Last year, she worked at resorts in Maine and Virginia, and she was anxious to return to the U.S. for the money and the experience.
Her work history is a plus, but Luhova’s bosses at the hotel were pleased from the minute she showed up–because she showed up.
Like other employers in this bustling central Wisconsin resort community, a veritable buttermilk and cheddar cheese Disney World, they are truly desperate for help.
So desperate, in fact, they snapped up the chance, offered by an enterprising local personnel agency, to hire 600 college students from Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Poland and South Korea. They have hired foreign college students before, but never in such numbers.
With the nation’s jobless rate skimming along at levels not seen in nearly three decades–it was 4.2 percent in May–the solution taken by the Dells’ businesses for their worker drought is hardly unique. Indeed, resorts across the U.S. are increasingly turning to foreign students to maintain order at the long, winding lines for their roller coaster rides and to spend endless hours spinning cotton candy for ravenous 10-year-olds.
At least 350 foreign students, for example, will be working this summer at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, and they will make up more than 10 percent of the workforce. “We started taking them as a novelty about a decade ago, and now they have grown into a great resource,” says Jim Franz, human resources manager at the suburban amusement park.
Employers in the Dells and elsewhere say they have faced only scattered criticism about the foreign workers from customers or workers. The major gripe is that the foreign students are taking away American workers’ jobs or overtime hours.
But Tim Johnson, head of the Chamber of Commerce for the Wisconsin Dells and Lake Delton, says he hasn’t heard a word of criticism. Rather, he says, “they (foreign workers) are usually a very welcome addition.”
About 300 foreign students will be working for the private concession at Yellowstone National Park, more than twice as many as last year. Patty Bishoff, an official with the Yellowstone National Park Lodges, a subsidiary of Amfac Parks and Resorts Inc. of Aurora, Colo., offers no apologies for reaching so far for workers.
“We send out 95,000 applications. We get 9,000 back. We make 6,000 offers. We see 3,500 people. There aren’t any other Americans to fill the bill,”she says.
James Knight, who is a waiter at two restaurants in the Wisconsin Dells, taking on the extra work because he can make more money in peak season, has only praise for the foreign workers.
“You know what you never hear from them? Complaints. They never complain,” he says. “And they are always there, always working.”
Hard workers are exactly what employers in the Dells say they want, especially on weekends when as many as 50,000 people pack the local hotels and motels.
But they say there are no workers, good, bad or indifferent, to be found for the summer jobs in the nearby rural communities. With Wisconsin’s unemployment rate at 3.1 percent in April, one of the lowest in the nation, it doesn’t help to reach out for workers in Milwaukee or other big communities in the state, they add.
The booming economy has put the jinx on workers from outside of Wisconsin, who used to seek summer jobs in the Dells. They can find summer jobs at home.
This is not a new dilemma for the Dells.
Year by year, as the economy has boomed and the Dells have grown, the quest for workers has become more difficult.
Last year, some businesses had to close early on nights when they did not have enough staff. But this year, the situation looks like it might be worse: There has been a steady expansion in businesses, but not in workers.
As the Dells vacation season gets under way, it is estimated that the businesses are about 2,000 workers short of the 10,000 needed to staff the water slides, T-shirt stores, fudge shops, miniature golf ranges, restaurants and motels that sprawl for miles.
The tiny, one-person Wisconsin Job Service office in the library in the Upper Dells operates as a sort of nerve center for this job crunch, steadily fielding calls from employers.
Thea Jesse, who runs the office, says she could easily cover it, top to bottom, with job posters.
How bad is the jobs drought?
The local Taco Bell, Jesse says, is starting its workers at $8 an hour plus a bonus. One of the bigger motels is starting its housekeeping staff at $7.50 an hour, nearly $1.50 more than what most other motels pay. And on and on.
She has just spoken with a store owner who had to shut his shop while he goes to buy his goods. He has not been able to hire a single worker, and he called to see if she had any suggestions.
It’s become a dream market for workers looking to pick up some summer money at the many resort-related businesses, she says. A few years ago, most were getting slightly more than the minimum wage, $4.25 an hour. But today, with the minimum wage at $5.15 an hour, she says, many are getting $7.50 an hour plus a bonus. And those who don’t like their wages, she adds, hop from job to job.
Seeing this situation develop and hearing businesses’ pleas for help, Les Pennington, a partner in Career Staffing, a small personnel agency in nearby Baraboo, had an inspiration last year.
Why not look overseas?
Foreign students have been working in the Dells for years, but there was no system to bring them in. Sometimes they were abused by middlemen who charged high fees or by businesses that stuck them in overcrowded facilities, according to Pennington.
He had heard about resorts that recruit overseas and learned that current students or recent college graduates can come into the U.S. on short-term visas to work from June until October.
And so, his partner, Brad Hintze, went on a recruiting tour this year in Eastern Europe, set up by an agency that specializes in student exchange programs.
Signing up the students was no problem. Finding a place for them to live soon became one, however.
After searching for rental housing, and not locating enough, Pennington and Hintze decided to take a costly plunge: They bought four older motels and a former shelter for abused spouses. The students, who make between $6.50 and $8 an hour, pay $60 a week for their housing.
Enthused by businesses’ response for the summertime workers, Hintze has begun talking to factories and non-amusement related businesses about bringing over foreign students year-round for internships.
Verne Shea, general manager of the Holiday Inn and head of a local business effort to find workers, is glad to have the foreign students. “They are excellent workers. They are very friendly and they are serious,” he says.
For Luhova, the job means money she can use for graduate school, and it is not so easy, she says, to earn such money in Slovakia. But she has another dream. “I would like to visit the West Coast and Mexico,” she says.
She had hoped to work as a waitress, not as a housekeeper, and Shea says its likely she will get the jobs she wants. But Luhova gives the impression that a job is a job and she will do what’s available.
Hiring eager workers is important to Shandra Smith, who helps manage the housekeeping staff at the Holiday Inn. “A lot of workers just don’t show up the next day,” she says, standing in a hallway near where Luhova is working. “This is hard, repetitive work,” she says, adding that often workers quit in search of better pay.
That’s one solution to the lack of workers, says Bill Van Wie, an insurance agent in town. Give the workers better pay, he says.
“In the past, these here businesses didn’t give these kids real wages, and they worked them real hard. And now they (the workers) got them over the barrel,” he says, sitting at the counter at Grandma Jakes, a restaurant in a gas station complex. The lunchtime crowd is starting to grow, and the topic of too few workers came up only seconds ago.
It seems the restaurant can’t find more help, so everyone’s hustling harder, and some people are putting in double shifts.
But that’s not unique these days in the Dells.
