A specter is haunting the mountain
resorts of the West, not the specter of a working-class revolt
against the owning class, but the specter of no working class at
all.
In western Colorado in recent years, some
restaurants and shops have had to cut business hours due to a lack
of workers to fill their shifts. And many employers complain about
the quality of the worker pool available. The problem has been
exacerbated by the booming second-home construction industry, where
grunt laborers get wages much higher than restaurants, shops and
hotels can afford. Large resort employers now import planeloads of
seasonal workers from Mexico, Africa and Europe to fill the gap,
but small businesses lack that option.
A more subtle part
of the problem seems to be attitudinal: Employers complain that the
locals who will work don’t have a good “work ethic.” Locals
call in sick on powder days. There are “attitude” problems, mostly
concerning surliness toward customers, and then there’s the
matter of dress, tattoos, body piercings.
“Job applicants
don’t ask about wages and benefits,” one shop owner said;
“they start by telling me what hours they are willing to work, and
when they need a long weekend for a kayak trip or whatever.”
But, while this is a real problem for business owners in
the mountain valleys, I think blaming the “working class” for
losing the “work ethic” — or at least expecting that reform
should come from the workers — is a narrow and nostalgic
approach that achieves nothing. That “work ethic” needs a little
analysis.
The epitome of the pure work ethic in the Upper
Gunnison Valley has always been attributed to the coal miners and
the cowboys — “pure” because, unlike the ranchers who work hard,
and the shop owners and restaurateurs who work hard, the miners and
the cowboys had no ownership in what they did; it was straight work
for wages, the dirtiest, most dangerous work imaginable, for the
meanest wages employers could get away with.
Most of the
miners had traveled across an ocean for the opportunity to earn a
few dollars a day working for companies that viewed them as less
valuable than the mine mules (harder to replace). But what of their
work ethic? Did they love their work? They were proud of their
ability to survive the work, and to stand up to its brutal
nastiness. But I don’t believe most toiled for any love of
the work.
Once they began to organize themselves in
unions to get better working conditions and wages, the owners
raised the same cry we hear today about the loss of the work ethic.
The Industrial Workers of the World (“the Wobblies”) got slammed as
the “I Won’t Work” union for arguing that workers should have
reasonably safe working environments, an eight-hour day, and some
tangible share in the ownership of the businesses that succeeded on
their backs.
Joe Saya in Crested Butte said it for a lot
of the miners when he told me, “If I had it all to do over again,
I’d rather sell pencils in the street.” But coal mining was
at least an industry where great gains in productivity were
possible through mechanization; the unions were able to make sure
that those gains got spread around rather than all going to the
owners. Those kinds of productivity gains are not possible in most
jobs in the resort industry.
So if a community’s
workers aren’t enthusiastic about jobs that don’t
support such reasonable middle-class ambitions as desire for
advancement, opportunity to purchase a home, the stability to start
and raise a family, it’s not just a “work ethic” problem to
blame on the workers. But on the other hand, it’s too easy to
just blame it all on the “capitalist” owners of the restaurants and
shops and hotels and say they just need to start paying higher
wages. Not many of them are getting stinking rich exploiting labor.
Many of them are having to pull their own shifts just to stay open.
It’s really a problem for the whole community of
the New West to puzzle out. Just bringing in a globalized workforce
from those abundant places where people are still desperate enough
to be grateful for any work at all is a 19th-century solution that
doesn’t address the larger problem at all.
Except
that this labor force gets sent back home at the end of the season:
No fear of them settling down, getting organized and rebuilding
that vanishing middle class that was supposedly one of
America’s greatest achievements.
George
Sibley is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He teaches and writes
in Gunnison, Colorado.
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