The Mast-Head: No Room at the Inn

BookHampton sent around an email this week asking if anyone knew of any smart college students who might enjoy working in a bookstore for the summer. The Main Street stalwart is hardly alone in looking for seasonal staff. Kathy, who oversees the production of The Star, said that she never remembered so many employment classifieds this late in the season. It’s not a good sign.

Up on Martha’s Vineyard, whose excellent Vineyard Gazette is a favorite at The Star, things seem just as bad. The lead story of its Memorial Day weekend issue called it a worker shortage. Business owners there were optimistic about the season ahead but saw a “critical shortage of housing” as responsible for the absence of available help.

Annie Cooke-Ennis, a shop owner and president of an island business group, told the Gazette, “I’ve had a couple of employees fall through because their housing fell through. That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me.”

Unlike the East End, where a large portion of the work force rolls in from many different places every summer, Martha’s Vineyard’s employers draw on a significantly more constrained labor pool, but the parallels are obvious, and worrisome, since that island has been a leader in public-private affordable housing.

We have heard of enticements here, such as finder’s rewards for new staff or signing bonuses like those of Major League Baseball. It is not clear at all that these have helped. Also making things difficult there, as here, is the inherent difficultly in attracting good people to work in jobs that end once the city olk head home in the fall.

Calls for seasonal, dormitory-style housing have been heard here periodically. As East Hampton and similar vacation meccas try to figure out how to help meet businesses’ needs, creative thinking about the problem will be needed.