Summer work has long been a rite of passage for high school and college students who need to earn money to put toward tuition and other expenses.
Young people, however, are bearing a disproportionate share of the nation’s unemployment burden.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, in July 2011 only 31 percent of young people in the United States aged 16 to 19 and only 64 percent of those aged 20 to 24 who were seeking employment were employed — the lowest rate on record for July since 1947, the year reporting began.The month of July is typically the summertime peak of youth employment.
Meanwhile, through a special visa program, foreign students are having an easier time finding work in the U.S. hotel and entertainment industry.
Vermont youth unemployment
The general Vermont unemployment rate runs about half the national rate — 4.6 percent for April 2012 compared to 8.1 percent nationally — and is significantly lower than the other New England states. These statistics don’t include self-employment in Vermont.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does not release data broken down by age bracket at the state level, explains Mathew J. Barewicz, Economic & Labor Market information chief at the Vermont Department of Labor, because “the data can be quite volatile and therefore the data is unreliable.”
However, the ballpark figures Barewicz was able to estimate have the same daunting effect as a downpour on the Fourth of July: For a 12-month average from May 2011 to April 2012, unemployment for 16- to 19-year-old females was 18.8 percent and for males 20.4 percent. For 20- to 24-year-olds, 9.6 percent of women were unemployed and 13.6 percent of males.
Statistics from the Vermont State Data Center at UVM’s Center for Rural Studies indicate that there are about 92,000 Vermonters in these age brackets.The unemployment figures include those young men and women actively looking for work who are unable to find it. They do not include the underemployed, those with a job at a mall clothing store, fast-food chain or supermarket who get a handful of hours a week.
Howie Le, art director and volunteer coordinator of the Boys and Girls Club of Burlington, sees the impact of teen unemployment in his organization’s halls. “I see a lot of teens volunteering for us because they can’t find jobs,” he said. Ironically, the club used to have a program to hire several teens as summer counselors, but in the economic downturn they lost the funding.
Le notes that lack of job skills and preparation is hampering young job seekers as much as the economic pinch. “A lot of the teens here don’t know what to do with their resumes or how to fill out job applications,” Le said. “I’ve been doing mock interviews with them. Even the high school graduates. You would think they would teach you this in high school.”
The J-1 program
Foreign J-1 visa students don’t have to go through the same application process. Because of economic and logistical advantages, employers go looking for J-1 students to hire for summer and even leaf-season and ski-season work.
According to U.S. State Department data, 2,365 J1 visa students worked in Vermont in 2011. Of these, the majority — 1,386 — worked in the general unskilled labor Summer Work Travel Program. Another 299 worked as camp counselors and 28 were au pairs, also usually summer positions but classified separately from the Summer Work Travel Program.
About 400 are here for study programs, internships or other work.
Nationally, 80 percent of J-1 visa student employees come during the summer, primarily to work in unskilled jobs. The Summer Work Travel program allows post-secondary school students to come for up to four months. They can arrive up to 30 days before and stay for up to 30 days after their employment.
According to an official from the State Department, American employers like the J-1 visa program because of payroll savings of nearly 15 percent over the cost of hiring Americans.
The Summer Work Travel Program was launched in 1968 allow “persons who were otherwise financially unable to visit the United States.” The theory is that participants will “enjoy cultural exchange experiences while offsetting at least a portion of their travel costs through temporary employment in the United States.”
Recently the program has come under scrutiny. A 2010 Associated Press investigation showed that J-1 visa workers were being compelled to work in strip clubs, housed in horrible conditions with dozens of students sleeping on blankets on the floor and being charged in some cases more than they were making. Foreign students pay $140 for the visa fee and can pay hundreds of dollars to the sponsoring organizations, topped by charges for rent, food and utilities.
Criticisms of the program spawned regulatory changes in 2011 and a new set of revisions have been proposed this year.
Why employers like the J-1 program
According to Mario Janssen, program director of State Department-designated sponsor trainee and intern programs for the J-1 visa, American employers like the program because of payroll savings of nearly 15 percent over the cost of hiring Americans. Employers of J-1 workers need not pay into Social Security or Medicaid or provide unemployment insurance.
Other advantages include a fast application process that doesn’t require U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) pre-approval and the fact that married J-1 workers can bring a spouse or other dependents on a J-2 visa who is also authorized to work.
When asked why we should continue the J-1 visa program when youth unemployment is so high, Janssen declined to answer, and suggested contacting an online list of sponsor organizations. These include Walt Disney World, American Pool Enterprises (which brings in J-1 workers for lifeguard duty and pool maintenance), the American Hospitality Academy (a for-profit sole-proprietor LLC based in South Carolina that places employee trainees in hotel chains like Marriott, Ritz-Carlton and Hilton) and the Council on International Educational Exchange, a Maine nonprofit that places American students in study-abroad programs in addition to helping facilitate bringing foreign students for work and study to the U.S.
In addition to the payroll pluses, advantages to employers are that J-1 employees are “quicker and easier to get than H-1B or H-2Bs,” according to Leigh Cole, an attorney at Dinse Knapp McAndrew in Burlington.
“The industry of J-1 sponsors will help you place someone,” Cole explained. “There’s no limit on the number of J-1 visas issued, and when you go for J-1 employees you don’t need an attorney.”
Unlike the H-2B nonimmigrant work visas for foreign non-student temporary non-agricultural workers, employers do not need to certify that they cannot find local employees to fill the slots. Nor do they have to certify that they will pay industry-standard wages. Submitting and supporting these certifications and obtaining governmental permission to hire H-2B workers can be costly and time consuming for employers. In the absence of H-2B employees available, when you see seasonal workers at ski areas or resorts in Vermont where they need a lot of temporary workers, you are probably seeing J-1 visa workers.
Cole says that significantly more Vermont employers ought to be taking advantage of J-1 visa workers, especially in categories other than the Summer Work Travel Program.
“We certainly do not have high unemployment in highly skilled professional positions,” she said. “Employers have difficulty recruiting health care professionals and computer tech people, for example. Employees for these positions could be sponsored under H-1B status, but with the cap for H-1B visas exhausted, J-1 visa workers for these positions is an option.” Special J-1 categories for teachers, health professionals, and skilled interns are rarely taken advantage of in Vermont or nationwide.
Local inns say J-1 workers are reliable
Nancy and Mike Boyle, owners of the Maple Leaf Inn in Barnard, are among Vermont’s hospitality industry employers who have relied on seasonal foreign labor. When they bought the seven-room inn five years ago, they “inherited” an annual returning H-2B employee who hailed from India.
“He had worked for the previous owners and had come back every year for 10 years,” Nancy Boyle said. “He could do everything, he knew the place top to bottom, could fix anything. And he was a friend.”
But a change in the H-2B visa regulations left India off the list of the State Department’s desired source nations for foreign workers and the Boyle’s trusted foreign employee was without a job. Unable to find a local employee “who didn’t want $25 an hour, which we can’t afford to pay,” the Boyles “thought it would be fun to have a foreign student.” Their sponsor organization connected them with a young woman from Russia for two years and then last year with a girl from Romania, Nancy said. “Typically they have to leave in September, but she got an exception to come later and stay later,” giving them help through the busiest October leaf-peeping season.
The Boyles planned on hiring another J-1 visa student this summer, from Turkey but the placement didn’t materialized. A local woman took on the work.
“This is the first time in five years that we’ve found a local employee,” Nancy Boyle said. “It worked out well for her, and it worked out well for us.”
Bert Hügle, proprietor of the Arcady at the Sunderland Bed and Breakfast Motel in Manchester, has given up altogether on finding local employees. For the last seven years, Hügle has employed J-1 visa students for summer help with housekeeping, general maintenance and office work. Hügle, who arrived from Germany in 1965, was fed up with the quality of the labor he could find locally the first five years that he operated the Arcady.
“I’d place an ad in the paper for housekeepers for the summer and I’d get a few phone calls, then maybe one or two would show up for interviews and the ones who showed up looked like they’d crawled out of a sewer pipe,” Hügle said. “They smelled, they were dirty, they smoked. If I hired one, they might or might not show up for work. They would damage things, they stole from me.”
While Hügle’s assessment sounds harsh, it was echoed by at least a dozen other employers interviewed, ranging from landscapers to law offices. In addition to a lack of basic job skills, Hügle blames social welfare programs. “I realized it’s the liberal way the state hands out money, so they really don’t want to get hired,” he says. “They make their phone calls so they can report back that they are looking for work, but they don’t want the job.”
After a summer housekeeping employee demanded $15 an hour and paid vacation time, Hügle asked around about alternatives. His business neighbor, BattenKill Canoe, told him about hiring J-1 visa student workers for the summer.
“It worked out wonderfully,” Hügle said. “They do twice as much work as anyone else here. This is the kind of people you get — they are educated, because of course they are college students, they are motivated and they still have a work ethic because they come from somewhere else.”
Hügle provides the student workers with room and board and pays them above the Vermont minimum wage, and gives them an increase in pay if they return for subsequent summers because they can take on added duties like answering the phones. Because the J-1 visa employees return to their home countries to go back to school, there is no unemployment exposure.
Although the downturn in economy has now led locals to knock on Hügle’s door looking for work, he tells them he’s not hiring.
Correction: A section of this story on H-1B and H-2B visas was edited to clarify the information provided by attorney Leigh Cole.
