Teens face competition for summer resort jobs

May 2, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — This summer, the guy running the Tilt-A-Whirl at the beach might be a laid-off, middle-aged accountant instead of the usual bored teenager. And the towel boy at the pool might be from East Providence instead of Eastern Europe.

All over the country, resorts and other summer businesses are getting swamped with applications from out-of-work Americans, many of them professionals. They are competing for jobs usually filled by young people and foreigners — making beds, serving brunch, mowing lawns, running concession stands and operating carnival games and rides.

Six months ago, Ramon Villanueva was earning $50,000 a year at a Philadelphia company that rents out sound systems and video projectors. But he got laid off in the fall, and now he is making $8 an hour operating the Frog Bog game on the Seaside Heights boardwalk at the Jersey shore.

“I never really thought I’d be working here,” Villanueva, a 22-year-old with a wife and two children, said Thursday. “I thought I’d be a customer here.”

All over the country, as unemployment rises, U.S. workers such as Villanueva are lowering their expectations.

“The demographics of this year’s summer work force is going to change into more well-educated, semiretired, people in crunches, people happy to be employed,” said Patty Ceglio Bishoff, director of operations for CoolWorks.com, an online board based in Gardiner, Mont., that helps people find summer jobs in scenic areas.

About 8,000 people turned out for a job fair run by the Myrtle Beach Area Hospitality Association in South Carolina last month — double the number from the previous year. Some of the 60 employers ran out of applications within hours.

Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, N.J., also got twice as many job applications this year. And members of the California Attractions and Parks Association won’t have to hire as many foreign workers this year, said the group’s president, John Robinson.

Red Jacket Resorts, which runs five hotels on Cape Cod and two in New Hampshire, had to turn people away and cancel its usual pre-summer job fair because managers were already swamped by local job-seekers. The number of foreign workers the chain uses has fallen 10 percent this year.