Another Labor Day posting…
Three years ago I wrote about how the tourist industry in Bar Harbor, Maine seems to depend on Eastern Europeans who come over for the summer (August 2013 posting). I was back on MDI this summer and the situation doesn’t seem to have changed. In my quest for restaurant meals, ice cream, etc., I encountered eager young workers from Moldova, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, etc. I’m still kind of surprised that Americans don’t want to take these jobs, though I guess the author of the Redistribution Recession wouldn’t be (falling labor force participation rate). Even if you’re comfortably collecting welfare in the South or Texas, why not escape the heat for a few months in Maine?
[The majority of the Eastern European summer workers seemed to be young women. As the typical visitor to Bar Harbor is fairly prosperous, why weren’t they having sex with visitors and then returning home to harvest 18 years of child support at a minimum of $24,024 per year (see the Maine child support guidelines; if one were to have sex with a visitor from Boston and sue under Massachusetts family law the profit potential would be 23 years times $40,000)? The average monthly wage in Moldova is about $262 (source then converted with Google) or $3,144 per year. A pregnancy established in Maine with a high-income visitor would thus be 7.6X more lucrative than a full-time job in Moldova. I asked a few of the workers and they all expressed surprise that it was possible to collect child support at the Maine rates while back in Eastern Europe (see “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage” for more on the mechanics). They estimated the practical revenue available from a U.S. pregnancy at $0. Based on a hypothetical of a sexual encounter with a rich Wall Street visitor, their estimate of the maximum revenue obtainable by an American from an out-of-wedlock pregnancy was roughly $5,000/year (not too different from the actual German maximum).]
Aside from the fact that they took jobs that Americans, if motivated by a lack of available Welfare benefits, might have wanted, these immigrants seemed to be having a purely positive impact on the economy. They were showing up for 3-4 months, working hard, spending some of their wages on the local economy, and looking forward to returning home at the end of the season (between mid-September and October 1, depending on the worker). “I like it here but I miss my family,” said a Lithuanian. Maybe the secret to a successful guest worker program is to have it in a place where the customers disappear on a predictable date and the temperature drops well below zero.
Considering that eastern european women go to Germany to be sex workers for as little as €20 per act, the idea that sex could be profitable may defy their common sense. It may actually pay better to just hold a nice job in the U.S.
The eastern europeans serving tea and popovers at Jordan Pond House earn a pretty good income, but it and mdi in general seem to cater to a multigenerational crowd that seems to include a lot of toddlers and grannies. They might find randier prospects in Nantucket. Or has that become a geriatric crowd as well?
http://bangordailynews.com/2009/10/01/news/mount-desert-island-harbors-5-of-forbes-400/
I used to work for a company with that hired about 1,500 seasonal employees every year to staff its hotels in Alaska. We mostly hired Americans, Dominicans and Bulgarians. Most of the seasonal employees from the US were either retirees or the sort of person you’d only feel confident hiring because you knew they’d be gone in a few months. Most of the seasonal employees from elsewhere were college students who were happy to work 60 hours a week without complaining (our housekeeping staff was the waitstaff at the hotel next door). I can’t imagine many from either group would’ve enjoyed Alaska during the winter. Even our full-time employees usually quit after a winter or two.
(The local area only had a few thousand residents and they were all either unemployable or earning far more than we could offer. There was really no way to make it work without bringing in people from outside the area.)
Your quest, Phil, to educate female East-European season workers in the intricacies of the American legal schemes for little-sweat up-to-23-year payout for, essentially, one night stands is… remarkable for a variety of reasons.
I’ll only deal with one of them: when you write of a woman “having sex with a visitor and then returning home to harvest 18 years of child support,” you make it sound so… automatic. As if her landing in Moldova to bear the child would automagically be followed by a guaranteed 18-year-long bee-line of monthly fat checks. Whereas we all, the woman included, know that that road from conception to enrichment(?) would be long and crooked, full of crooks, and nowhere near as assured as you envision it.
You like to put a mercantile angle on everything; so perhaps for once you could apply some of that muscle to a debit projection of upfront/ above the line/ necessary advance outlay costs that that expecting mother would have to bear in order to even come near an “award” of that size. Such a case would require representation by lawyers, hired translators, multiple court appearances etc. (if not else than to prevent seepage of the principal-agent problem); more money that she’d ever be able to save during multiple seasons’ work. But of course all that is of no consequence in the theoretical balance sheet of yours, where she’d be the winner, if only she had the guts to be that winner [MODERATOR: delete that as I am sarcastically projecting what Phil might have been thinking, which is a big NO-NO in this blog.]