JACKSON WYO. - Of the 74 Four Seasons luxury hotels in 31 countries, only the Four Seasons here at the base of Jackson’s renowned ski runs has opened up its kitchens to local culinary students in hopes of helping a local community increase a sparse supply of foodservice workers.
The Grand Targhee Resort in Alta, Wyo., is reacting to its own shortage by purchasing condominiums to house some employees, particularly foreigners coming to Wyoming on temporary work visas.
In Park City, Utah, chef-restaurateur Bill White is taking his kitchen staff on a recruiting visit to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., this month. And in the Colorado ski towns of Vail and Aspen, restaurants are staying open year-round through nonpeak seasons in order to retain good employees.
The Rocky Mountain region continues to lead the country in low unemployment rates—3.5 percent in September, compared with a national average of 4.7 percent, according to federal statistics—and the resulting difficulty in recruiting labor is particularly acute in resort towns whose populations can swell to hundreds of thousands in winter and summer tourist seasons.
In addition to pushing some pay scales to nearly double what they were a few years ago, the region’s shallow labor pools have forced operators to be more creative in their hunt to keep and retain staff, trying everything from buying housing, supporting schools, recruiting overseas and changing the way they do business.
“It’s a big challenge, just the time you spend on the phone with attorneys arranging visas, picking people up from the airport, getting them acclimated to the area—all of it has nothing to do with running restaurants,” said White, who owns five restaurants and a bakery in Park City in the Wasatch Mountains overlooking Salt Lake City.
His company now has a full-time human resources staff, and he sends teams on recruiting missions to culinary schools around the nation. To compete, his restaurants and others also have had to raise their wages, White said.
“Five years ago, a dishwasher was making $5.50 or $6 an hour,” he said. “Now it’s $9.50 to $10 an hour, and everything goes up from there.”
Restaurants in ski towns traditionally have closed for a few weeks or a month in the spring and fall between seasons, but that is changing as operators stay open year-round to keep workers.
“We’re trying to eradicate the terms off-season or mud season when the mountain closes,” said Rick Colomitz, who with his wife, chef Kelly Liken, runs her namesake restaurant in Vail. “We’re calling it the ‘harvest season’ for the bounty of produce and protein available in Colorado,” he said of the couple’s new marketing tack for the extended season.
Employing workers throughout the year keeps them in the community, so when the busy winter or summer season begins, the difficulties of finding and hiring employees are not as severe, Colomitz said.
In Aspen, restaurateur Craig Cordts-Pearce also keeps his two restaurants, Wild Fig and LuLu Wilson’s, open throughout the year despite the challenge of making a payroll when guest traffic is down.
In addition, limited amounts of land for development and rising real estate costs in resort towns like Aspen are squeezing out housing that hourly wage earners can afford.
When Cordts-Pearce came to Aspen 15 years ago he found there were plenty of inexpensive places to live. Newcomers today, who can’t afford high rents or million-dollar homes, are more likely to move into the valley towns of Basal or Carbondale, some 30 minutes or more from Aspen.
“If I came here today, I don’t think I could find a place to live, unless I wanted to pay $10,000 a month,” he said. “These poor kids. When I was 21, there was an abundance of old shacks and studios and old ski houses.”
Identifiying employee housing is one of the first hurdles for an employer in key parts of the labor-sparse Rocky Mountain region, particularly for resorts that recruit international workers using student and temporary-worker visas. Their employers are required to provide living quarters for such workers.
The Grand Targhee decided to make the investment in condos not just for foreign workers, but also as a recruitment incentive for domestic employees, explained Karen Cameron, human resource director for the ski resort.
“Usually people who work in ski resorts have horrible living conditions—in a trailer with five other people,” Cameron said. “We want to make housing a positive part of their experience.”
The Four Seasons, located in Jackson’s Teton Village resort area in Grand Teton National Park, temporarily houses some employees in rooms in its basement until they can find other long-term housing.
Executive chef Simon Purvis said the Four Seasons has an advantage in that it can recruit employees from the chain’s other resorts and hotels, and its culinary reputation helps attract interns from culinary schools such as New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vt.
Purvis also spends a couple of hours every week teaching a class of students that come to his hotel from the year-old culinary arts program at Central Wyoming College in Jackson.
“It benefits the community, more than anything,” Purvis said. “As the program grows and we get more people that are focused on a career like this, we’ll end up getting one or two from that program.”
