Authorities in Mount Rainier National Park, in the northwest of the United States, advise arriving early in the morning to avoid traffic jams. America is back in the middle of a boom, with activity that has caught up to its level at the start of 2020. The economy created 943,000 jobs in July alone, bringing the unemployment rate down from 5.9% to 5.9%. 4%, revealed Friday, August 6 the Ministry of Labor.
When you arrive at the Paradise Inn, a superb rustic building built in 1916 at the foot of the glaciers that tumble down from the volcano and the bucolic meadows, the reality is a little different: first, the order arrived from Washington in the morning, you have to put the masks back on the premises, a variant of the Covid-19 delta requires. Above all, we discover this Wednesday July 28 that the restaurant is closed in the evening. Explanation, there is not enough staff to run the hotel.
Melinda Simpson, general manager of the hotel dealership, confirms this: “Our numbers are normally at 260, we are at 130.” There is of course the absence of international workers – young people usually recruited thanks to the State Department to promote the United States -: J1 exchange visas collapsed from 350,000 to 108,000 between 2019 and 2020 and should not have gone up much. And then the impossibility of recruiting Americans. “People don’t want to go out these days”, explains Melinda Simpson.
Picnic
Therefore, there is no breakfast; at noon, it’s picnic, and dinner is only offered five evenings a week – Tuesday and Wednesday, the teams rest. During dinners, only a few tables are occupied instead of the hundreds of diners who usually relive their day hike noisily in this huge dining room and its logs. For Melinda Simpson, it’s not a question of compensation: “We offer one of the highest minimum wages in the United States”, she estimates (about 14 dollars an hour and benefits in kind).
In any case, the labor shortage is slowing the revival of the American economy, which has yet to recreate 5.4 million of the 22 million jobs destroyed at the start of the crisis. If 380,000 people returned to work in leisure-hotel-catering in July, this sector still lags behind by 1.7 million jobs (10% of the total). Today, the number of unfilled jobs in the United States is slightly higher than the number of registered unemployed (8.7 million).
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