general

By JOHN LOFTUS Gannett News Service

There are plenty of jobs in Bulgaria. But Ana Ivanova says the money isn't good. So for the second summer in a row, she has come to Ocean City to work for the kind of pay college kids earn in an American resort town.

That would be about four times, maybe more, she said, than she could get back in her hometown, Sofia, the Bulgarian capital.

Trouble is, as of late June, she had not found a job.

She is not alone in that, or in being an Eastern European college student at the shore.

This summer, Ocean City is thick with Russians, Poles, Serbs, Slovakians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Macedonians and Bulgarians, lots of Bulgarians.

"Too many," said Assya Doncheva, another Bulgarian student.

And that has meant that students from former Eastern Bloc countries who got to the shore after the first few weeks of June are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to find work. Like anyone else looking for work in a resort town after the middle of June, they have found all the jobs are taken.

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."