Tag Archives: Seasonal jobs

Snow jobs: In tight labor market, ski areas up the ante

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It was once {that a} free ski go was sufficient to lure employees to seasonal jobs at mountain resorts. Not.

Within the present tight labor market, ski areas throughout the nation are having a troublesome time filling jobs, so that they’re upping the ante by boosting wages, offering extra housing and providing different perks to fill these jobs earlier than the snow flies.

New Hampshire’s Wildcat is providing a $1,000 bonus for brand spanking new snowmakers to come back on board, and Sunday River in Maine final yr elevated its hourly wage from $13 to $20 for that job. Utah’s Snowbird is increasing its pool van service to get staff to the mountain, and Sugarbush in Vermont, which has among the many lowest unemployment charges within the nation, is hiring extra overseas school college students.

“It is an unlimited problem for us,” Dave Byrd of the Nationwide Ski Areas Affiliation stated of the labor challenge.

As a result of ski resorts are by their nature in mountainous areas, they’re usually removed from cities from which to attract employees. And with the nationwide unemployment fee lately hitting the bottom stage in 50 years, potential employees would slightly have full-time jobs with advantages, stated Byrd, director of threat and regulatory affairs for the Colorado-based affiliation.

“We do not have a whole lot of ski areas which can be in shut proximity to main metropolitan areas. And even once we do, just like the ski areas in Salt Lake … they’re nonetheless struggling to seek out folks,” he stated.

The nation’s roughly 460 ski resorts rent about 100,000 seasonal employees every fall, he stated. Many depend on overseas visitor employees for five% to 10% of their labor, he stated.

“We’re not in a position to fill 100% of the roles we have now out there,” he stated, including that the J-1 visa program is crucial for the ski business.

This system is meant to present overseas employees who might be students, lecturers, camp counselors and au pairs coaching and expertise in these fields in america. The ski business makes use of about 8,000 J-1 visas, Byrd stated.

This yr, Vermont’s Sugarbush is bringing on greater than 100 overseas school college students by means of this system due to the problem in filling jobs. A number of years in the past, it had nobody on J-1 visas, spokesman John Bleh stated by electronic mail. Sugarbush has additionally been growing its worker housing over the previous a number of years, in response to Bleh.

Housing might be scarce, costly or each within the distant mountainous areas or resort cities, and on-line trip rental companies have added stress to the market by gobbling up a piece of the out there property, Byrd stated.

The housing crunch makes it troublesome to be ski bum these days.

“In case you wished to be ski bum and also you need to take a spot yr after you graduate school earlier than you go on to getting an actual job, that notion of the ski bum within the 1980s and 1990s, these are laborious to seek out, these folks, as a result of housing is so enormously difficult for us within the business,” Bryd stated.

And the free mountain go that comes with the job is now not sufficient of an incentive within the period of aggressive go applications that permit skiers and snowboarders to get a discount with out working on the resort, he stated.

On high of that, potential employees can now be picky and go for a year-round job with advantages.

“When House Depot and Goal are paying $13 an hour, and the ski space 20 minutes out of city — they have to match that,” Byrd stated. “They have to compete for that labor pool.”

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UPS plans to hold holiday hiring steady at about 100,000

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UPS said Monday it expects to hire about 100,000 seasonal workers and pay them more to handle the avalanche of packages shipped between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

That’s about the same number of people that UPS hired for last year’s holiday season. UPS is also counting on automation to keep up with the constant growth in online shopping.

Delivery rival FedEx and major retailers are expected to lay out their plans in the next few weeks.

The official unemployment rate is just 3.7%, and the tight job market will make it harder — and more expensive — for those companies to fill seasonal jobs.

Danelle McCusker, the head of U.S. human resources, said UPS paid an average of $10.10 per hour for seasonal workers last year. This year, under a new labor contract, pay rates will range from $14 an hour up to, for truck drivers, $30 an hour, she said.

“Some markets are a bit more competitive, and we will adjust” wages higher and even offer bonuses of $100 to $250, McCusker said, citing San Diego as an example.

Other employers are likely to boost pay, too.

“Last year, there was a flirtation with $15 an hour,” said Tony Lee, a vice president at the Society for Human Resource Management. “This year, $15 an hour seems pretty solid” among nationwide employers, “which puts real pressure on the mom-and-pops, who may not be able to afford $15 an hour.”

Lee said those smaller, local employers will try to counter by offering more flexible schedules — something that often is not possible at the big retail and delivery firms.

Last year, UPS held job fairs at 170 locations around the country on a single day in October to recruit for seasonal workers including package handlers and drivers. McCusker said the company is considering similar events this fall.

The volume of packages running through the UPS network roughly doubles during the holidays, compared with the rest of the year, and forecasting the right number of seasonal workers — and when to bring them on the job — can be critical.

Two years ago, UPS underestimated a surge in early shopping right around Thanksgiving, and many shipments were delayed. UPS wound up spending an extra $125 million to catch up and reduce delays.

UPS says that in recent years, about one-third of people hired for seasonal jobs land full-time jobs with the company when the holidays are over.

Atlanta-based United Parcel Service Co. is also relying on more automation to increase package-sorting capacity. The company is opening or upgrading about 20 facilities — after a similar number of new or retrofitted centers last year — and estimates that the new buildings are 35% more efficient. The company is also raising the percentage of packages that can be sorted with automation, reducing the number that require handling by workers.

FedEx hired about 50,000 seasonal workers last year. Big retailers including Amazon, Target and Walmart also looked for tens of thousands of extra workers during the holidays. Kohl’s department stores and the Michaels arts-and-crafts chain have already launched their seasonal-hiring blitzes, another sign of the tight labor market.

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