The experience of guestworkers at a United States tourist resort

Abstract

This article examines temporary employment among foreign workers at the Okemo Mountain Resort, a tourist ski complex located in Vermont state in the north-eastern United States. I discuss the meanings associated with the international displacement of these workers, focusing especially on the ideas and imagery surrounding 'mobility', 'work,' 'travel' and 'youth.' By describing their experiences, along with the practices and discourses of the employer and the US State, the case study shows how Okemo's strategy of hiring a flexible foreign workforce is connected to the multiple meanings through which these groups represent their experience of temporary migration to the United States in the context of increasingly precarious labour relations. The ethnographic analysis proposed by the research provides a counterpoint to the 'macro-analytical' approach employed by most studies on the issue of foreign temporary work in the United States.