Jewel Ouradnik has 300 toilets to clean.
And that’s only the beginning. She also has to build a fire for the fish boil, rent out the kayaks and wash several hundred dishes. And who, she worries, will flip the Swedish pancakes?
In all likelihood, it will be someone who possesses a name like Agnieszka, Lukas, Valeria, Ruslan or Esra–all of them current employees–and a passport from Eastern Europe.
Ouradnik owns the Wagon Trail, a sprawling, piney-woods resort that happens to be in a county where most of the population is too old or too wealthy to be interested in the seasonal, entry-level jobs that keep the place running.
She’s hardly alone. Each year, she and other innkeepers and restaurateurs who are at the center of Door County’s tourist economy scramble to find staff, and increasingly, they’re resorting to some very long-distance recruiting to provide services to the vacationers who triple the mostly rural county’s 28,000 population each summer.
“It works out very well,” says Ouradnik, who over the course of a summer will employ about 50 foreign students. “I’ve really come to depend on them.” Most of her “internationals,” as she calls them, are from Ukraine or Poland, though local businesses have drawn summer help from throughout Europe.
“I didn’t expect there would be so many Polish people here,” said Darek Ponski, a student of international relations from Lodz, Poland, who is spending the summer making fresh-squeezed orange juice and otherwise attending to the well-heeled customers at the Hillside Inn bed-and-breakfast in nearby Ephraim.
“They’re everywhere,” says Ponski. “I probably have met 20 of them” since arriving early in July.
Nobody knows how many young Europeans prop up the resort economies in such Chicago vacation magnets as Door County and the Wisconsin Dells, though the agencies that recruit the workers say the demand, nationwide, is intense.
“Off the top of my head, I’d say there are about 70,000 of them around the country,” estimates Kathleen Baader, president of Spirit Cultural Exchange, a Chicago employment agency that specializes in recruiting the Europeans (plus some Asians and South Americans) for seasonal work at resorts and amusement parks.
Federal officials say the numbers are elusive because many of the workers are here on so-called J-1 visas, a broad “cultural exchange” status that includes high school exchange students, au pairs, camp counselors, some professors and various other categories of internationals in the U.S. for temporary, non-immigrant purposes.
“It’s a moving target,” agrees Karen Raymore, who heads Door County’s Chamber of Commerce. She estimates “at least a couple hundred” Europeans hold summer jobs locally, a situation that has become more complicated by the expansion of the European Union and federal ceilings on other types of foreign-worker visas.
The J-1 workers must be students in post-secondary schools who can come here for up to four months. Typically, they work for three months, which are winding down now, and then travel the country for as long as four more weeks.
Though some find jobs here on their own, many come through businesses structured in various ways: Some charge the employers a fee, others charge the students. The companies recruit and interview the students, help facilitate the visa paperwork, arrange travel and usually offer orientation.
The J-1s, or “12-weekers,” as some Door County employers call them, have been a reliable stream of workers, though they have become fewer as the European Union has grown.
“There’s definitely been a reduction of interest from some countries,” explains Baader, who says that EU’s relaxed borders have made it simpler for Eastern Europeans to find work in nearby countries instead of enrolling in American programs such as her company’s, which charges the students a fee.
“Now, for students from Central and Eastern Europe who want to work without paying for any type of program fee or paying airfare, they can just go to Germany,” she says.
Interest in the American resort jobs has waned among Western Europeans, Baader says.
“A lot of these jobs are housekeeping and maintenance, lower-level positions that pay anywhere from $6 an hour and up. They’re not that attractive” to residents of more affluent countries, she says.
Nor to many locals, who weigh the short-term wages against the costs of living in pricey resort areas and look elsewhere.
“Housing continues to be one of the greatest challenges for any of our employees,” says the Chamber of Commerce’s Raymore. Simple cottages–in high demand from vacationers–rent for $500 a week and up.
The J-1 visa requires employers to offer a source of affordable housing. Some house them. One resort has built a dormitory, and a local entrepreneur has converted a farm’s machine shed into apartments that he rents to workers.
Ouradnik, who grew up at the resort when her parents owned it, turned the sizable old house where she was raised into a 15-bedroom dorm, typically housing 25 students. She says the expense of making the property meet local building codes, plus providing three meals a day to her staff, is worth it.
“In our area, the price of living here and everything that’s involved with Door County, makes [employees] hard to find,” she said. “The people who buy homes here are people who don’t want to work. They’re retired or this is their second home.”
On a recent day, Ruslan Legenzov was found sweeping the residence’s living room–furnished with cast-off couches and chairs that would fit right into any American college-student apartment.
The Ukrainian linguistics student works in the resort’s marina and washes dishes. He says the experience had been what he expected, though upon his arrival in New York, he learned that his agency had diverted him from a job in Kentucky to Door County.
“When you go to a foreign country, you know you will come across some problems,” he says, acknowledging that some of his housemates were less laid-back than he, particularly those beset with homesickness or boredom with the area’s rusticity. “I grew up in a city,” explains Esra Tanirgan, 22, a German citizen of Turkish ancestry who sells pastries at the resort’s bakery and who says that speaking English full-time has been a strain. The business administration student says she longs for a nightclub. She struggles to be diplomatic.
“We try to go out,” she says of what she and her roommates do in their free time. “Bigger places are far away–it’s an hour to anywhere,” which would be Sturgeon Bay, population 10,000.
But things are looking up, she says. She and another young woman recently bought a car, and they’re planning four days in Chicago, then maybe New York after they finish their 12 weeks.
“This is a nice for a vacation for a few weeks, but …” Her voice trails off. She smiles politely and returns to the cinnamon rolls.
———-
mumberger@tribune.com
