Tourism chief considering in-state jobs strategy
Overseas workers nab much of the summer employment
By SCOTT WILLIAMS
[email protected]
Posted: July 17, 2004
Wisconsin’s top tourism official is considering stepped-up efforts to
promote summer job opportunities in the tourism industry as many
attractions recruit workers from overseas despite unemployment here.
Tourism Secretary Jim Holperin said he has no indication that theme
parks and other popular destinations are intentionally passing over
Wisconsin workers. But he said the state lacks a comprehensive
strategy for matching Wisconsin’s jobless to tourism jobs, which often
go to workers from Poland, Finland or other foreign countries.
A state job center in Wisconsin Dells, for example, has stopped
sending representatives to job fairs in Milwaukee, relying instead on
the Internet to reach job seekers in the state’s largest metropolitan
area.
“There might be a programmatic gap,” Holperin said, meaning not
everyone who needs a job is being reached by existing programs.
Destinations in the Dells, Door County and other popular tourist spots
began wide-scale recruiting of foreign workers, typically college
students, when low unemployment in the late 1990s created a labor
shortage. Although the economy has since gone flat and Wisconsin
joblessness is up, many attractions continue hiring from out of the
country for their summer seasonal help, citing other forces in the
marketplace.
Some say residents who live in Milwaukee and those who live in other
areas of high unemployment cannot be coaxed into relocating for the
summer, and that young people in Wisconsin generally must return to
school before the tourist season ends.
At Landmark Resort in Door County, Personnel Director Joanne Stanzel
has hired several college-aged students from Armenia and Romania,
primarily for housekeeping jobs.
Stanzel said some Wisconsin residents seem uninterested in the
drudgery of scrubbing bathrooms and arranging bedsheets.
“Even in desperate times they don’t want to do housekeeping,” she
said.
“It’s sad to say.”
One housekeeper, Lilit Vasilyan of Romania, said she worked as a
waitress in her home country but wanted to visit the United States
this summer to improve her English.
Vasilyan, 20, said she is enjoying her job at Landmark and is most
impressed by Door County’s natural scenery.
“I imagined how it would be,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
Dells uses foreign labor In the tourism mecca of Wisconsin Dells, just
about every tourist-related business seems to employ at least one
foreign employee, said Tom Diehl, president of Tommy Bartlett Inc.
Bartlett hired about 70 young people from Finland this summer to work
on the company’s famous water shows and other attractions.
With so many businesses experiencing peak demand during the summer
months, Diehl said, nobody in or around the Dells should complain
about not being able to find work.
“Anybody who says they can’t find a job here isn’t looking very hard,”
he said.
The state job center manager at the Wisconsin Dells said the summer
tourist season in the Dells creates as many as 8,500 jobs.
Many destinations have built relationships with international exchange
organizations or other groups that can arrange for large numbers of
young people to clear immigration channels and come to the U.S. to
work.
Tim Gantz, president of Noah’s Ark Family Park in the Dells, said he
has hired 140 students this summer from Hungary, Poland, Finland and
elsewhere to fill a variety of jobs in his water theme park. That
number actually is down from 200 not long ago, Gantz said, because the
rise in unemployment has made hiring locally easier. Park employment
is about 550 during the summer.
“We have a lot of people who want to work for us. We can probably pick
the cream of the crop,” Gantz said. “I can’t say we turn any American
away – you know, good ones.”
Lifeguards from afar Noah’s Ark lifeguard Tito Suero of the Dominican
Republic is spending his third summer in the Dells, earning about
$1,000 a month compared with the $50 a month he would earn doing
similar work in his homeland.
“I feel pretty lucky,” the 23-year-old medical student said.
Like other tourist destinations, Noah’s Ark says it pays international
employees the same salaries as American workers. Many businesses, such
as Noah’s Ark, also have built dormitories to provide housing for
seasonal employees.
The practice of recruiting from overseas has drawn criticism from
organized labor and elsewhere.
In the late ’90s, unemployment in Wisconsin was below 3%, and
employers in tourism and other industries complained about being
unable to find enough workers. Today, unemployment is 5%, which means
about 150,000 people are out of work, according to federal
figures. Some 70,000 more Wisconsin residents are out of work than
there were five years ago.
Enough in-state recruiting? Jim Cavanaugh, president of the
Madison-based South Central Federation of Labor, questioned whether
the tourism industry has recruited heavily enough for Wisconsin
workers, including adults.
Plenty of laid-off factory workers and other adults would gladly
accept a tourist job for the summer just to get a regular paycheck,
Cavanaugh said.
“They would be as interested in those jobs as (in) any other jobs,” he
said.
Tourist destinations say they recruit heavily from high schools and
colleges throughout Wisconsin, as well as participate in job fairs and
take other steps to find local seasonal workers.
Holperin, the state tourism chief, said the idea of launching an
intensified effort to promote those job openings statewide is still
just a concept in early stages of discussion.
Uncertain on the extent to which foreign employees are filling the
industry’s needs, Holperin said he only knows there have been no
recent complaints about worker shortages. He suspects that businesses
fearful of a tight labor market returning are hesitant to cut off
sources of international manpower.
“They are going to keep those connections,” he said. “They are
reluctant to give those up.”
To check job listings or other resources of the state Department of
Workforce Development, go to