Summing It Up
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Clubs and resorts pride themselves on catering to the every whim of their members and guests. And with the ever-mounting pressure to keep these properties’ courses and grounds in top shape, superintendents are extending the efforts they make to provide needed services for another type of guest—the temporary guest worker—that has become increasingly critical to their operations’ success.
The scramble to fill seasonal positions with foreign workers obtained through the federal H-2B visa certification program (see box, pg. 44), or other sources, continues to have its challenges. Many superintendents are finding that providing extra training and other “consulate”-like services, to help foreign workers assimilate once on U.S. soil, can be the key to getting better performance from these part-time crew members.
Plus, stepping up efforts to provide native language-based assistance can make “temporary” course workers feel more at home and help to prime the “extended family” pipeline, which is still the best source (see chart, pg. 45) for bringing new seasonal workers to a property.
Common Language
Like most club and resort properties throughout the country, Peter Furey, Director of Golf Enterprises for the Fairfax County (Va.) Park Authority, says the ranks of temporary foreign workers have continued to increase in his operation during this decade.
Island Country Club provides extra training and benefits for seasonal workers like Arturo Rosales, above. |
Fairfax County now employs 20 to 50 seasonal employees at each of its seven golf venues in northern Virginia, Furey says, and 15 to 20 percent of them are Hispanic.
“It began with entry-level seasonal positions, and we’ve seen quite a few move up to specialty, full-time positions,” he notes.
Proper training, he confirms, is essential to maximizing the potential of these seasonal employees. “It helps keep them, and it gives them opportunities to move up,” he says.
Some of the park authority’s equipment training manuals have been translated into Spanish, Furey reports, and its safety classes are now taught in both English and Spanish.
The international employees have to go through the manuals, he adds, and then demonstrate that they can operate equipment safely.
Breaking down the language barrier for all members of the park authority’s C&G staffs has also become an integral part of training, Furey notes. Superintendents at Fairfax County golf courses now take classes in workplace Spanish, he reports, while Spanish employees attend “English as a Second Language” classes.
“We have good employees who speak both languages, and they are tapped to help train new workers,” he adds. The park system now has at least one full-time staff member at each course who can speak some Spanish.
Training Grounds
At the Island Country Club in Baton Rouge, La., Superintendent David McCallum relies on bilingual videos to help train his seasonal workers on how to operate the various pieces of golf course equipment. “All of the videos that come with the manuals for the equipment were done in Spanish as well as English,” he notes.
The course also buys training videos in both Spanish and English from the Golf Course Superintendents Associa-tion of America (GCSAA).
The “buddy system” is another effective training method, McCallum says. He trains Hispanic workers for various jobs by putting them under the wing of someone who speaks Spanish.
All of this has helped the club’s efforts to find reliable seasonal help. In addition to McCallum and four full-time employees, Island CC has 16 seasonal laborers from Mexico this year. But when the club opened in 1999, “We had trouble finding dependable local help,” McCallum recalls.
“Local labor is hard to get,” he notes. “You’re competing with industry, which is paying phenomenal salaries.”
So in its second year, the property turned to a staffing firm to help it hire seasonal laborers with H-2B visas. The firm offers English and Spanish classes as a value-added service, McCallum notes, and representatives of the company come to the course two days a month to teach English to the Hispanic workers.
The club, however, cannot go to the staffing company, which takes care of the necessary paperwork, until it proves each year that an insufficient number of local workers have applied for the maintenance positions.
“We have to run a newspaper ad for three consecutive days to advertise for the job,” McCallum notes.
That’s why taking the extra steps to provide good training for the workers it does find can pay off. The course hired its first six Hispanic workers in 2000, “and of those six, we invited five of them to return,” McCallum says.
Home Away from Home
As many properties have learned, when some “part-time” workers are made to feel comfortable enough with a club (and vice versa), they will come back season after season. And others like them will usually follow. When superintendents at these properties need additional temporary help, they now routinely look first to their current Hispanic employees for recruitment leads.
The Island Country Club employs 16 seasonal employees from Mexico, mostly from the Monterrey area. |
“They only bring to the workplace people they know will produce,” notes Furey. McCallum, who says many of his temporary workers are related to each other, agrees. “If I need an extra person, I use the guys on the crew to recommend somebody,” he says.
Equipment training and language lessons are not the only ways to retain productive employees and get them to steer others to where they’ve worked, these clubs report.
Reflecting a growing management priority at many properties, McCallum says Island CC makes every effort from the start to make its Hispanic workers feel right at home in their “temporary” surroundings, through steps designed to take the fear out of being a stranger in a foreign land.
It starts with reimbursing temporary employees for their travel expenses when they arrive. “The first day on the job, they’ve got some pocket money,” McCallum says.
The process continues once the crew members have their first paychecks. “When they get paid, we take them to the bank on pay day,” he adds. Club employees also take them to a money transfer service so they can send money home, and make arrangements to take them to the grocery store.
In addition, Island CC’s owners are financing a $100,000 renovation project to convert a former retail building into rental
housing for the seasonal workers.
The building, located across from the course, includes nine two-man bedrooms, a state-of-the-art kitchen, multiple washers and dryers, a locker room area with five showers, a satellite TV dish, phone service, a pool table, and a basketball goal.
Is there a payoff from this expense? McCallum certainly thinks so. “We probably run a 90 percent retention rate, which is much better than we did with local labor,” he says.
In Virginia’s Fairfax County, Furey says the park system offers another perk to enhance the skills of its Hispanic workers: teaching them to play golf.
Full-time employees, who have playing privileges, give golf lessons to seasonal workers after hours. Learning the game, Furey says, not only enhances the workers’ quality of life and appreciation for their jobs, it allows them to better understand what golfers want and need in a course.
The Right Matches and Signs
Steve Valdez, a GCSAA consultant and former golf course employee, teaches a golf course etiquette and time management class to Hispanic workers, and has made presentations on “Spanish for Golf Course Maintenance” and “Getting Started with Hispanic Labor: Legal & Communication Issues.”
Beyond additional training and other efforts to help part-time workers adapt to their new jobs and life, Valdez says superintendents should also take the time to learn about Hispanic culture and regional distinctions.
International employees at The Island CC watch safety videos in their native language and are trained by a Spanish-speaking staff member. |
“Different places in Mexico not only have different dialects, they have different attitudes and personalities,” notes Valdez. “You have to know how to pair them up (to work together.”
One of the questions he gets asked most frequently by superintendents about their Hispanic employees, Valdez says, is “Why do they have such great work ethics?”
The simple answer, he says, is that “They’re getting paid a lot more than in Mexico—and they appreciate it.” Daily wages that Hispanic workers earn in the United States are generally 10 times what they make per day in Mexico, Valdez notes.
Valdez also believes that spoken language is less of a barrier than employers might think to successfully making use of good foreign workers.
“Only 17 percent of our communication is verbal,” he says. “All the rest is pictures, drawings, sign language, and facial expressions.”
Extended Life for H-2B Exemption
The H-2B guest worker program, which allows U.S. employers to hire international laborers to perform temporary, nonagricultural work, got a boost last year from the Save Our Small and Seasonal Businesses Act of 2005. The bill exempted “returning” foreign workers from the annual cap set by Congress. The exemption, initially set to expire on September 30 of this year, got a last-minute extension to September 2007 (see news report, pg. 6). While general public sentiment mounted this year to limit the influx of foreign workers, the H-2B program, which many clubs and resorts use to hire and retain foreign workers, was usually cited as an effective mechanism for trying to control the problem of illegal laborers. As written, the program limits the number of foreign workers who can receive H-2B status to 66,000 per fiscal year (Oct. 1 to Sept. 30), dividing the allotment of H-2B visas into 33,000 during each half of the year. And under the SOS Act, workers who came to the United States under the program in any of the past three years and returned this year did not count toward the cap. To qualify for a visa, the seasonal, one-time, peak-load or intermittent position must last less than a year, and employers must demonstrate that there are no qualified and willing American workers available. Certification under the H-2B program is issued to the employer, not to the worker, and cannot be transferred from one employer to another or from one worker to another. |
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