As Hilton Head enters tourism renaissance, will there be enough workers to meet demand?
On April 4, Erika Waronsky did something she had never done before — she closed one of her Hilton Head Island restaurants, Sandbar Beach Eats, for Easter.
This, despite how busy Hilton Head restaurants are on Easter Sunday. But, looking 10 days ahead to the island’s biggest annual event, the RBC Heritage golf tournament, when capacity on the island was expected to catapult to 79%, she decided it was best to give her employees a break.
“We were being pushed to the limit with a skeleton staff, and we had to take a day to regroup and let everyone rest,” she explained.
In advance of Heritage and the start of the tourism season, Waronsky hired 10 people to work at the Sandbar and her other restaurant, Carolina Coffee and Crumbs.
“I gave them a shirt and said, ‘Come on, let’s go,’” she said.
Thousands of spectators flocked to the island for RBC Heritage Presented by Boeing, a PGA Tour event that ended Sunday and was a test for staffing levels gearing up for the summer season. Behind the scenes, the economic boost comes with an asterisk.
Waronsky is one of many business owners in the Lowcountry who have felt squeezed by staff shortages this year. The area’s labor shortage is not new. The region has long struggled to maintain enough workers to meet the demands of tourists, especially on Hilton Head. If restaurants and hotels suffered from staffing shortages before, the problem is likely reaching a fever pitch.
Some town and business leaders point to a lack of affordable housing and transportation on the island and surrounding areas as the reason for the shortage. Others say COVID-19-related stimulus checks and unemployment benefits have reduced people’s motivation to return to work.
The gap may be particularly acute this year as freshly vaccinated tourists flood the island after being cooped up at home for the past year. And Department of Labor data indicates businesses in Hilton Head and Bluffton will likely get fewer visa workers this spring and summer.
“Grocery stores, hotels, catering businesses, restaurants, retail stores — we’re all pushed to the limit right now,” Waronsky said. “The workforce shortage is the new pandemic. People are getting vaccinated, they haven’t traveled in a year, they’re going to come here.”
Waronsky said she is not sure of a solution. But she is worried that some businesses will have to close if they don’t have enough workers.
“I hope that we are able to figure it out before it’s too late for a lot of us,” she said.
A wicked problem
Workers needed. Estamos contratando. We’re hiring. Jobs available. Apply now.
Each spring, as tourism season begins, the signs pop up outside Hilton Head, Bluffton and Beaufort restaurants, hotels, golf courses and landscaping companies. Ads in English and Spanish populate job search websites such as Indeed, Facebook, Craigslist and South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce’s job search engine.
Businesses battle for workers in a competition of wages, and timing is everything.
Some employers, Beaufort Area Hospitality Association executive director Ashlee Houck said, are trying to regain the workers they lost when the pandemic slammed the hospitality industry. Houck said some veterans sought work outside of the field.
“A lot of people are blaming it on the unemployment benefits,” Houck said, but the pandemic overall has been the excuse for many to not go back to work.
“We’re hoping that we can somewhat invigorate the area to get back to work because our area is so [dependent] on tourism,” Houck said.
BAHA and Beaufort Memorial Hospital are hosting a combination job fair and walk-in vaccination clinic May 4 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Holiday Inn and Suites Beaufort on S.C. Highway 21.
Beaufort and Jasper counties’ accommodation and food services industry employs more workers than any other industry in the region, according to 2020 data from DEW. But it has the lowest average annual wage, $24,596, and the third-highest turnover rate, 18.4%. Many workers balance two jobs to afford the Lowcountry’s high cost of living.
Still, the salary for hospitality workers here is greater than any other metropolitan area in the state. The Myrtle Beach area has more than double the number of hospitality workers, but they make an average of $22,360 each year.
George Casalicchio, owner of Chez Georges Bistro and Bar on Hilton Head Island, said he tries to cultivate a workplace that not only pays well, but trains burgeoning culinary talent and hospitality professionals. But it can be hard to find people who want the jobs, especially to work in the kitchen.
“To find people that want to push themselves in a culinary aspect, to try to get better every day, rather than just sort of coming in and punching in and such, is extremely difficult,” Casalicchio said.
That isn’t everyone, he said. Many employees are interested in careers in hospitality, and for them, the tiny South End bistro is the perfect training ground. “There are people who are yearning to do [this work],” he said.
“Every day that goes by is an additional heartache”
Some jobs, said Rachel Maddox, vice president of landscaping company Maddox Contractors, are nearly impossible to get people to do.
One of those, she’s realized, is roadside trash removal and mowing.
“Our job listing is always posted on the South Carolina [Department of Employment and Workforce] website, and we have posted on social media and Indeed,” she said. “It never really worked out on Craigslist. But it’s hard, and it’s hot.”
But Maddox, whose company contracts with the South Carolina Department of Transportation for mowing and litter pick-up on I-95 in Hampton and Jasper counties, has been able to get workers through the federal government’s H-2B visa program, which supplies employers with temporary, nonagricultural laborers from other countries.
It is the visa most commonly used by Hilton Head and Bluffton’s hotels, resorts, landscaping companies and golf courses. To receive temporary labor, employers must show they have exhausted all efforts to find “able, willing, qualified, and available” American workers. The workers, employers say, make good money — they must earn the average wage paid to workers in their field wherever they are working.
Last year, Maddox Contractors was approved to receive 20 H-2B workers to mow from April to November. This year, Maddox said, she does not expect to receive any; her request for six workers was not processed by the time the U.S. reached the 66,000-person annual cap on H-2B workers in February.
Maddox is depending on the cap being lifted so that her business can fulfill its contract. “It’s a pretty crappy situation,” she said.
“If we don’t get our employees, then we’re not sure if we’ll have to cancel the contract,” Maddox said. “That’s been a question that we have been mulling over in our heads because … we’re on a time frame, and if we can’t complete the work, especially not having the labor force here, then we lose the contract.”
First-quarter data from the Department of Labor indicates that 93 H-2B workers have received visas to work in the counties, a markedly lower number than had been approved in previous years, although the cap, set by Congress, has remained the same.
Annual data released later may indicate that more were approved for visas during later quarters. But Veronica Birkenstock, president of H-2B visa processing firm Practical Employee Solutions, said those who need workers starting in April or earlier must file during quarter one.
“You have to file 90 days prior to your date of need, so you won’t see anyone filing now because there isn’t anyone who needs it,” said Birkenstock, who works with the Omni Hilton Head Oceanfront Resort and employers around the country.
In 2019, DOL data indicates, employers got 738 H-2B workers approved for Beaufort and Jasper counties’ job sites. In 2018, they got 729 approved.
Last year, according to DOL data, employers got 651 H-2B visa workers approved for temporary work in Beaufort and Jasper counties. But many never actually made it to the U.S., as former President Donald Trump suspended several non-agricultural visa programs last June in an effort to redirect job openings to American workers during the pandemic unemployment crisis.
The Omni is the largest employer of H-2B workers in the Hilton Head area. Warren Woodard, Omni’s director of sales and marketing, said the resort requested 110 H-2B workers last year, but none came because the program was suspended.
“If you go back to 2019, we requested 110 and received 110,” he said. “It’s been difficult because obviously we depend on those workers.”
This year, he said, they requested 69 temporary workers through the visa program and were approved for 33. Twenty-nine of those have already arrived. Woodard said that although the Omni is sufficiently staffed right now, it would be helpful to have the other 36 workers approved, which would require the cap to be lifted.
“We need to see if there will be a cap relief scenario that would allow those additional workers to come in,” he said.
Birkenstock said she believes the cap will be lifted, but the question remains when.
“Every day that goes by,” she said, “is an additional heartache, an extra day of added stress of not knowing what workers may arrive.”
This story was originally published April 19, 2021 at 3:01 PM.
