Posted on 08/17/2003 6:36:19 PM PDT by fight_truth_decay
I got the idea for this story following a visit to Monhegan Island a couple months ago. After a hike around the island, my friend and I stopped into the one major hotel/restaurant in the area, the Island Inn. To make a long story short, our waitress, who could barely understand us, (#$%%$!!) up our order. It really wasn’t a big deal, but the annoyance level was punctuated by the fact that the part of the order that was wrong was the part we had asked questions about in the first place. She didn’t have an answer because she couldn’t understand our questions. I asked her where she was from and she told us that it was a country ending with an -ia (I can’t remember the exact country, but I do know that it is Eastern European and one of the relatively new ones on the map).
She dutifully corrected the problem with our meal after some very slow explaining on our part. In the end, the experience wasn’t a disaster. In fact, the waitress was very nice and I’m sure we both benefited in some way from the exchange.
Not all American patrons are as easygoing, however. Last summer, I moonlighted as bartender at an upscale restaurant in Ogunquit, where the entire waitstaff was from far away and their collective understanding of the English language was, well, quite poor. I witnessed patrons take off in the middle of meals, yell at the frustrated and bewildered men and women, and even walk right into the kitchen to find someone with whom they could communicate.
Both situations suggest that employers really ought to weigh the pros and cons of shipping in summer help and evaluating where the imports might best fit into an organization, but we’ll get to that. My question, particularly in what are touted as dismal economic times, when unemployment is ostensibly a problem, is why on earth are restaurants, hotels, amusement parks, and convenience stores populated with workers from places other than Maine?
Not that I’m complaining. In fact, I’m psyched whenever I get the chance to communicate with someone from a foreign country. But, in the last two years, there seem to be more of these workers on hand than ever before. What I expected to hear was that this labor force was cheaper than what employers can afford here, but that’s not the case at all.
In fact, said some Maine business owners, there aren’t enough people on hand to fill jobs even if they pay a good wage; the people who are tacitly willing to take the jobs have shitty attitudes; and finding obedient help from places like Bulgaria, Lithuania, Russia, and Poland is nearly as easy as turning on your computer — like everything else, the Internet has made the entire process lightning-quick and fool-proof.
When Jen Amara and Lucas St. Clair began to think about staffing the restaurant they opened earlier this summer, one of the first things they discussed — and vehemently disagreed upon — was the prospect of tapping an international workforce. Both were aware that the candidate pool would be deep and that most, if not all, of the process could be done right over the Internet, but they disagreed that finding quality help near Mama’s Boy Bistro in Winter Harbor might be difficult. St. Clair assumed finding reliable workers would be tough, while Amara was optimistic that a shaky economy would drive people to their door.
To be sure, thousands of young people from foreign countries, particularly Eastern European countries, seek employment in the US through one of dozens of placement services that make the process seamless. For a fee of somewhere in the $2000 range, these international temp agencies pluck kids right out of universities, set them up with a visa, find them a job and housing, and then fly them over for a summer in God’s Country. St. Clair, who has traveled the world and taken in just about every imaginable culture, knew that hiring international students would also be an excellent opportunity for him to help them get a taste of our culture.
Amara, on the other hand, says that the prospect left a bad taste in her mouth. "At the time, I thought that I would much rather hire people locally because the job market is so poor, especially in this area," Amara explains of the Downeast region that Mama’s Boy Bistro calls home.
If you visited her tiny restaurant or kept track of the pricey cars flooding the area at this time of the year, of course, you’d never know times are tough in the Acadia region. Amara, however, sees the grittier side of the tourist traps and, besides, with vacationers come vacationers’ kids, many of whom are looking for summer work.
As a fledgling chef and caterer in Portland, she knew how difficult it was for her to find a good position when she started out a few years ago, so, as a fledgling business owner, she assumed that little had changed. If anything, unemployment rates are higher than they have been in a decade, so finding dependable help shouldn’t be particularly difficult, right?
"I really wanted to wait until I came up here to meet with people and see what we could get before jumping the gun and looking to another country," says Amara. "That was my only major problem, it really would have had nothing to do with where they would be coming from and I really wasn’t all that concerned with their experience."
Amara concedes that there may have been one other little hesitation — culture shock — on both sides. As a restaurateur and someone with an appreciation for fine food, Amara had found herself in a situation from time to time over the past few years when an otherwise fine-dining experience was somewhat smudged by a lack of communication between her and a waitperson.
"Okay, it was a consideration," she points out, recalling situations where restaurant employees weren’t up to speed on menu items, didn’t know ingredients or cooking methods, or just weren’t aware of restaurant protocol. "I don’t think that restaurant owners always think about their staffing needs wisely when they take on a lot of international help."
Eventually agreeing with St. Clair that workers may be hard to come by, Amara eventually turned to the ’net for some of her staffing needs — it was an experiment, she says. "It was very easy on our end and I think that’s why we ended up going with this process. We basically put an ad on summerjobs.com and within 24 hours we had 400 applicants."
The first one to come in was from Irina Sibajeva, a student from Lithuania, and the only international help hired by Mama’s Boy. "Hers was the first one to come in and we liked what she had to say so we figured we’d look into it. We started corresponding with her and she was really excited."
Things didn’t work out well at first. Amara initially wanted Sibajeva to handle the host position but, as she initially feared, the young woman wasn’t up to the task. "She really had no restaurant experience and it came to a point where her English just wasn’t up to speed and she was shy and not confident and we felt that we needed to find other things for her to do to determine where she fits in," says Amara.
"Now, she cleans the restaurant and does dishes and she is in her glory. Her English is getting better and she’s more confident because she is doing her own things and she is very proud of her job because she knows that she’s needed."
A happy story indeed. And Amara gushes that Sibajeva is one of her most reliable, hardest working, and, above all, ethical employees. She refers to her hardscrabble Eastern European upbringing for that, and that’s why she would hire Sibajeva or someone like her again.
Hal Feldberg, the owner of the Club, a gay nightspot in Ogunquit, says that it’s that ethic that has kept him looking across the seas for years now. In fact, he says that if Amara had come to him, he would have been happy to give her some advice on the young work force of Maine and the US in general. He says you’d think that unemployment rates would be driving young guys his way — he pays an above-average wage and his employees are treated well, but those are no longer hot commodities among job-seeking youth.
"It’s really unusual. Even when unemployment is high here, we’re forced to look someplace else for good workers. American kids? Why aren’t they looking for jobs? Don’t ask me — ask the government. My sense is that the government is doling out huge amounts of unemployment and the kids are getting money and everything else that they need from their parents," says Feldberg who, this summer, has taken on a 22-year-old Polish native, Marc Krasiewicz. Actually, this is Krasiewicz’s third summer at the Club — he loves it there, even though he’s straight and living in the gay resort town with his girlfriend, Kate. He says that he can make as much as $4000 a month here, whereas he might only eek out $1000 a month in Poland, where unemployment hovers in the 20 percent range.
Feldberg likes Krasiewicz a lot. In fact, he says that patrons are charmed by the young adult’s thick foreign accent (if not his youthful good looks) and, he says, Krasiewicz is superior to many of his former staff members and not only just because he shows up for work. "The bottom line is that Marc is a good kid and all these kids like him are bright kids and they are nothing like some of the coked-up kids who come in here who are looking to do some partying, get their tricks, and then just go away when it suits them. They are completely undependable and that’s something that I won’t miss at all," says Feldberg, who recently sold the Club after more than 20 years.
"You know, when I was a kid, everyone was working and I don’t know what the problem is now. In other countries, people are taught responsibility and they have a work ethic, whereas American kids are just spoiled."
Both Amara and Feldberg suggest that work ethic may run on the low side among the young people that come to them for jobs, if people come to them at all, but officials suggest that not much has really changed as of late. In fact, says Adam Fisher, the assistant to the commissioner of the Maine Department of Labor, it’s a surplus of jobs in the hospitality industry in Maine and a smaller-than-necessary workforce, particularly in Southern Maine, that forces some employers to look outside of the US for help. What’s more, he claims that overall unemployment rates can’t really be taken into account when evaluating a lack of submitted resumes.
"There really is a legitimate lack of workers, particularly in the hospitality industry," says Fisher. "We get some calls from employers who just can’t find anybody. Plus, there is a tendency for people who are out of work, people who, say, might have worked in a bank, to seek employment that is similar to what they were doing in the first place. If they do end up taking a summer job and something better comes along, they are gonna take it and you can’t really blame them for that. People are always looking for something a little better."
That doesn’t make things easier for people who rely on summer help and employers like Amara agree with Fisher to a point, but they still say that quality workers are hard to find.
"I have kids around the same age as Irina who don’t want to work, they have their heads in the clouds and they want a paycheck. They’re lazy and whiney and they complain while she doesn’t complain, ever," says Amara. "I think it starts in the home. For a lot of kids, they aren’t expected to work at a young age like I was, and things are just handed to them. I mean, they are given brand-new cars and stuff like that. Granted they have to work, but it’s not like when I was younger and certainly not like when our parents were younger. This new generation is just incredibly lazy."
Peter Gore, a lobbyist at Maine Chamber of Commerce, just shakes his head at the allegations made by Feldberg and Amara, and his comments lead one to believe that, if employers in Maine think they have it bad, they ought to try running a business in some other state.
"I don’t know if I’d say that Maine people can’t compete when it comes to work ethic," he says. "In fact I think that I would put Maine workers up against anyone else in the world, and what I have seen is that the pool of workers needed to fill the positions just isn’t there. Whether it be in the service industry, if it’s restaurants or hotels or amusement parks. The people just aren’t there because they have a different job, or they don’t want that type of job. Regardless of the reason, those positions need to be filled and there’s a workforce out there, namely foreign workers, who can fill them."
"Let’s face it — the economy of the state is based on tourism, whether it be skiing during the winter and especially leaf peepers in the fall and the tourists of the summer. Does it add to the diversity of Maine? Sure. And I don’t think that people are all that surprised when they get here and see that there is a foreign workforce. In my opinion, it really just gives everyone the opportunities that they need. The workers have a great opportunity to come here and experience Maine and make money; employers have the opportunity to serve their patrons well; and the tourism industry certainly benefits from the help."
For business owners looking for employees, the Internet has indeed become a boon. Lots of agencies are out there, but getting in touch with an actual person through any of the Web sites is about as easy as finding an actual customer-service phone number on eBay — that, by the way, doesn’t exist. I couldn’t even find some of the agencies mentioned by people I interviewed for this story — one person told me off the record that the individual he went through to hire foreign help is currently being investigated. I had heard anecdotally that this was often the case and that some agencies don’t just skim but rather hack right off the top of the wages earned by the kids they sponsor.
I was told no horror stories, however, and one of the agencies mentioned, Travel & Work USA, actually has an extensive Web site full of information for potential participants, even tips for those who might get the blues during their stay in the US. From getting a work visa, to finding employment, to shopping for a flight across the big pond, it was all there.
You might wonder, with the air of hysteria surrounding immigrants, fostered by John Ashcroft and his ilk, why it’s so easy for these kids to get into the country. Well, it has gotten more difficult. Just recently, new rules went into effect to better track these kids who come over on what’s called a SEVIS visa, which is tailored specifically to exchange students. Their four-month limitation, however, and the fact that these kids have no interest in being banned from the US for overstaying their welcome, make the applying-and-granting process fairly easy.
The truth is, the students with whom I spoke are so damn happy to simply be making money that they’re downright hysterical. Take Atanas Nedelchev, a 22-year-old from Bulgaria, where he will soon finish his law degree. Despite his white-collar aspirations, Nedelchev isn’t in the US clerking for a judge or pouring over legal documents at the Muskie Center — he’s washing dishes at the Oceanside Grill at the Brunswick in Old Orchard Beach.
That’s why I think many students from Europe choose to come here. And, doing the same work in Bulgaria, I wouldn’t make near the same amount of money," he says. "But, of course, that depends on what part of Europe you come from. If you’re from Western Europe you might make the same amount of money, but if you’re from Eastern Europe, the standard of living is much lower than here. Particularly in Bulgaria — there are rich people and all the other people are poor. It doesn’t matter if they are doctors, teachers. If you’re not rich, then you are poor."
I asked him what he thought of the American people that he works with and he laughed. "You want me to be polite or honest?" After a pause, he dodged the question, obviously considering how his comments might be interpreted. "Most European people have a strong work ethic because of the money involved. They have to do everything correctly and do their jobs perfectly. The American boys and girls don’t face the same types of problems that we face so they really don’t need to be such hard workers."
As for the Club’s Krasiewicz, whose father is a doctor in Poland and who doesn’t face many of the same challenges as Nedelchev, coming to the US has been a mixture of recreation and money-making — he’ll finish his masters in business management in the next couple years.
"I came here because I can make much more money and I can travel around the United States. Well, I can make more money — that’s the biggest reason," he says. "I mean, the positions in restaurants, even if you can get them, aren’t good because people are poor and they don’t leave tips."
Even though the US is where the money is, these folks still exude a love of country and, although they are enjoying their stay in the US and the wages they earn here, they, too, will bolt the hospitality biz and the jobs that no one here seems to want.
"Why would I want to be a dishwasher in the United States forever?" asks Nedelchev when I asked him if he’ll be back next year. "I mean, as much as I love it here, I think I’d rather be a lawyer in Bulgaria than a dishwasher here."
Tony Giampetruzzi can be reached at amg207@earthlink.net
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.