summer job...
The good old American summer job has gone global. Beach towns, lake resorts and mountain ranches are increasingly filling seasonal jobs with foreign students on temporary work visas. And much as I like seeing sleepy beach towns become more cosmopolitan, I think American students are losing a valuable tradition -- one that affects how they view employment for the rest of their lives.
Yes, crummy, low-paying summer jobs had meaning for me. They taught me compassion for hourly wage workers. I learned how taxes ravage small paychecks and how my co-workers needed to put in long hours to support their families. As a result, I'm always in favor of any increase in the minimum wage. I support worker safety inspections. And I'm a great tipper.
Skipping the summer job is one more opportunity lost for class mixing in America. As one girlfriend, who toiled folding bras and nightgowns at a long-defunct department store, related: "It was the first time I saw how low-paid elderly women lived. Talk about incentive to study in college! It was a character-building summer that I never forgot."
Waitressing taught me never to be too proud to serve others, and gave me insight into how physically exhausting work can be. It was a strong incentive to educate myself so I wouldn't be carrying trays at age 62, as my co-workers were doing.
In Rehoboth Beach, Del., I began to ask foreign students why they had come. Many said they want something many American students seem to have enough of: cash.
"I have a great time over here and make four times what I could at home," said Mark Dabrowski, 23, of Szczecin, Poland, who is spending his third summer at Grotto Pizza on the boardwalk, under the auspices of the New York-based Council of International Educational Exchange. The marketing management student earns $10 an hour making pizza and lives in the Sun View Motel, subsidized by his employer to keep his rent to a bargain $75 a week.
I know it's not that American kids are simply too well-off, lazy or spoiled to want such work. They are responding to different pressures, and thus have different priorities. Plenty of American students are working seasonal jobs, but many reject waitressing for experiences that enhance their resumes. They "seem more committed to extracurricular things now, like lacrosse camp," says Debbie Candy, comptroller of Best Hotels, which runs four large properties in Ocean City, Md., and has seen a surge in foreign applicants.
What is it with baby-boomer parents that every experience in their child's life must be endlessly educational? My kids, ages 12 and 15, complain bitterly when we make them do menial jobs such as cleaning the bathrooms at the local ballpark, hauling 50 cases of programs to the concessions stands and picking up trash.
Boomers' attitudes toward manual labor are vastly different from the generation before us. We still think it's virtuous -- we just hire everything out from window cleaning to lawn mowing. It's rare for our kids to see us work up a sweat. The Rule of Saint Benedict, that you live by the labor of your hands, is foreign to my family.
Even American students who want hourly work sometimes find it hard. Employers who need workers to show up for 10 consecutive weeks often discover that American students can't fit that sort of commitment into their overloaded schedules.
"I've got summer school at 11 a.m., so right off the bat I've got weird hours and employers aren't interested," said Ted Nelson, a junior at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
And, far from pushing kids to take low-paying jobs, today's economy actually discourages them from "wasting" the summer working service jobs at the beach. Instead, they talk about landing internships, often unpaid, to buff their skills for post-college opportunities. My friends and I see our kids becoming so career focused that they believe -- at the tender age of 16 or 17 -- they can't take a few months to step off the fast track.
What's more, college is now so expensive that most summer jobs wouldn't help much anyway. Kids who really need the money might look for jobs that pay more. But "I don't know too many kids who are dependent on summer work to get back to school in the fall," Nelson said. "Tuition, room and board is covered by Mom and Dad. We're working for spending money."
By contrast, many foreign students are working two and three $7-an-hour jobs at the beach to allow them to continue college when they get home.
"They work one job to pay for summer housing and meals and bank the rest," said Bob Apy, who manages the Ocean City International Student Services office. "As the season progresses, the bags under their eyes appear. They work themselves to the bone. There's no comparison with the work ethic of American students. They've had things handed (to them) on a platter."
Apy estimates 2,500 foreign students are among the 11,000 seasonal workers in Ocean City this summer, most of them J-1 visa holders. The State Department says it issues 60,000 to 70,000 of those temporary work visas each year.
Jennifer Spillane, 20, of Cork, Ireland, fits the pattern. The medical student took out a $1,000 loan for airfare, a visa and insurance to come to Rehoboth. She works two jobs, selling kites and waiting tables, and shares a one-room "bed-sit" with four girls, which will cost her $950 from June through September. A used bike set her back $50. Nevertheless, Spillane says, she'll earn twice what she could in Ireland.
"I miss my family loads, but the people here are lovely and it's a good laugh," she says.
Some employers say foreign students are willing to work harder to land specialized summer jobs. Bob Wipfler, who runs the Kingswood Camp for Boys in Piermont, N.H., depends on European lifeguards because so few American kids have Red Cross certification.
"Our kids won't give up three or four consecutive weekends in May or June" for the certification, which lasts only three years, Bob Wipfler said. "Most (American) lifeguards know their stuff cold and are not willing to go back every three years for the re-up." Placement agencies such as London-based Camp America actively recruit foreign students to obtain the equivalent European certification and place them in camps nationwide.
So the beach has begun to feel quite different in recent years. The foreign invasion has brought European accents and habits to some tourist destinations. Bicycles have always been a preferred mode of transport at the beach, but the large number of penny-pinching foreign students in Ocean City and Rehoboth has flooded the streets.
If this sounds foreign to car-dependent American kids, it's even stranger to think how quickly our summer job economy has changed. Working a summer minimum-wage job used to be a time-tested rite of passage, one that equipped my friends and me with some of the basic skills of earning a living and developing a reliable routine. It was behind the ice cream counter or sweeping sand out of the hotel foyer that generations of Americans learned how to be part of a team, where many found out they wanted to be the boss, not the bossed. But today's frenzy for big careers doesn't allow for such nostalgic distractions. For many young Americans, the summer service job is like wearing a coat and tie to work -- hopelessly outdated. And I suspect we may all come to regret that.
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