Outsourcing the American Summer
It’s so commonplace now that it’s easy to forget that it was not always so: Romanian students ringing up seasonal sales for Nantucket shopkeepers; Russian girls hawking souvenirs on Virginia Beach’s boardwalk; Lithuanian youths bagging groceries at gourmet markets on the coast of Maine; and at my community swimming pool, all eight (except one) of the lifeguard positions outsourced to Bulgarians.
I had never thought twice about it until my teenaged son attempted to get a summer job. Most of his peers, children of Boomer parents like me, weren’t even attempting to find summer jobs. Instead, they were doing “internships” (paid for by their parents), going to summer camp or vacationing with their families. On the other side of the class divide, the kids who really needed the summer jobs seemed not to be potential employers’ ideal candidates.
Fifty years ago, I worked as a lifeguard at a community swimming pool in the Northern Virginia suburbs of the Nation’s Capital. The job was considered “way cool” by my fellow high school students, who typically did part-time manual labor. But summer jobs we all had.
Summer jobs were a Boomer rite of passage — a formative, possibly even character-building, experience that included valuable real-world lessons such as the meaning of “after taxes” paychecks. By summer’s end at the pool, I managed to save enough to purchase a ratty, used sports car, and I had something “real-world” to put on college applications. More important was the sense of self transcending adolescent anguish when you discovered that others valued your time enough to pay you.
So with my encouragement — indeed, direction — son Tom began a job search for a lifeguard position last summer, also in Northern Virginia. It became as entangled as the college admission process; finally he found a place with a local pool management company. But he was only one of two American kids on the payroll; and he was never allowed to pull more than 10–20 hours a week, hardly enough to recover his costs for lifeguard training, while the kids from Bulgaria all got full 40-hour shifts.
The Eastern Europeans working at America’s swimming pools and summer resorts are not undocumented workers. Rather, they’re here at the explicit invitation of clever small businesses and enterprising middlemen exploiting the State Department’s “J-1 Summer Work and Travel Program,” created under the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961.
The program was meant to foster cultural understanding — and in this regard can be said to be a perfect example of Boomer idealism. But it is also possibly symptomatic of Boomers’ greedy selfishness:
Even after being fine-tuned last year to prevent flagrant abuses, the program has become, in the words of the Associated Press, “a booming, multimillion-dollar international business.” The $10 million management company contracted to run my community swimming pool, for instance, employs its very own recruiter in Bulgaria.
Recruitment is easy, since in Bulgaria the typical wage for this kind of summer work is less than the equivalent of $2 per hour. Even after the foreign youth pay their exchange fee plus transportation and other expenses, they net easily twice what they would have made in their home countries.
On the other side of the ledger, U.S. employers’ seasonal labor costs are a fraction of what they would have been employing their own citizens. Although the minimum wage is the same, employers do not have to contribute to Social Security and Medicare withholding. Moreover, the most “creative” employers charge their foreign employees for goods and services (like rent) in the manner of the legendary coal-miners’ owe-my-soul-to-the-company-store.
Still, as long as the foreigners are netting more money than they would back home, it’s a classic “win-win.” The only losers are unemployed American youth wasting away their valuable summers. It’s easy to impugn State Department “job-killing regulations,” but the sponsoring U.S. businesses are the real job killers, gaming the system for short-term bottom-lines at the nation’s long-term expense.
And so America’s own youth are robbed of summertime opportunities for growth — not to mention future nostalgia, such as what we Boomer parents are now enjoying.
My son Tom and the Bulgarians became great friends. In that sense — increasing international understanding — the State Department’s program can be judged a success. But the image that these foreign guests inevitably form of the United States is of individual greed and institutional corruption:
“We don’t even pay our share for the upkeep of your infrastructure that we use!” one of the Bulgarian lifeguards, amazed and amused, told me. Now in his second summer at the same pool, he explained that as non-resident, temporary workers, the foreigners can get all their withholding taxes refunded. To help them through this puzzling process, the U.S. employers or affiliated entrepreneurs have set up consulting services that (for a fee, of course) will file and collect the foreigners’ tax refunds for them.
“Is this a great country, or what?” I joked with Nickolaiski. In his impeccable English, he joined the joke and shook his head at the absurdity of it all: “And people wonder why America is in decline.”
