Help wanted on Cape Cod
Cape Cod businesses gearing up for a potentially “record-breaking” summer season say help is definitely wanted as they struggle to find workers to fill hundreds of seasonal positions.
“We’re really looking down the barrel of what’s going to be the strongest summer that I’ve ever seen,” Mac Hay, co-founder of Mac’s Seafood, said.
“But I feel like that the amount of volume coming at us, coupled with our challenges of hiring staff … there’s a sense that we simply won’t be able to meet the demand without an increased labor force,” Hay said.
After a better-than-expected summer season last year, Cape officials and business leaders are preparing to roll out the welcome mat for what’s already shaping up to be a “very strong summer” in 2021, Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce CEO Wendy Northcross said.
“There appears to be unprecedented demand for leisure travel to the Cape,” Northcross told reporters on a call Thursday. “The trends we saw last year are only stronger this year: People are not taking international trips, they’re staying closer to home. They’re not going to metropolitan areas, they’re going to more rural areas with great outdoor recreation.”
But even as hotels report high demand and rentals get snapped up, help-wanted signs continue to hang in windows — a situation Hay finds “a bit ironic” given Barnstable County’s 10.1% unemployment rate as of February.
Cape Cod adds about 20,000 jobs in the summer — a quarter of which are filled by foreigners on work or student visas.
President Biden let the Trump-era order that halted many of those programs amid the pandemic expire on Wednesday. But not all U.S. embassies are fully operational, leading to lingering uncertainty in the business community.
Students “are eager and ready to come into the country to work,” Northcross said. “But if we don’t grab them soon they will just make other decisions and not follow through in coming to the United States.”
Gary Thulander, managing director at the Chatham Bars Inn, said his resort brings in about 80 H-2B visa workers and about 150 people on J-1 visas as its employee ranks swell to 675 from about 250 year-round jobs.
“Obviously we try to hire local residents or people from the Northeast for our hotel first,” Thulander said, but with a “hotel of our size it’s very difficult to manage and provide the experience if we don’t get the additional support from these seasonal workers.”
Matt Pitta of The Davenport Companies — the Cape’s largest private employer — said there’s a “tremendous demand” for employees as businesses ramp up for “an extremely busy, if not record-breaking, summer.”
“We have hundreds and hundreds of really great job opportunities available right now,” Pitta said, “from frontline all the way up to top management.”