Cut all the claptrap about jobs Americans won’t do

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. Efforts to increase the number of H-2B visas has at least one man in Jackson Hole steaming. Cut the clap-trap about H-2B visas being necessary for “jobs that American citizens won’t do,” he says. They’ll do them, says Mike Craig, provided they get paid and are treated well.”Let’s clear the air of this rancid lie once and for all. It’s not the jobs Americans reject, it’s the obscenely low wages with no benefits and being treated with less respect than a dog that Americans have a problem with,” writes Craig, in a letter published in the Jackson Hole News & Guide.”I’ve talked to immigrant workers who live and work around Jackson. Many are worked 10 hours a day or more without so much as a lunch break. And time-and-a-half for overtime pay? Forget about it. All at wages that weren’t good wages for Jackson Hole 15 years ago.”Politicians have said more visas will help mom-and-pop businesses, but Craig says that is a lie. Those mom-and-pops, he says, are big-wheel, high-end outfits like Vail Resorts and Four Seasons.”What these ‘mom and pop’ multi-million dollar businesses want aren’t employees but legal slaves. If offered a decent affordable place to stay and an honest wage, there isn’t a job in Jackson Hole that wouldn’t be ably filled by an American citizen.”His advice is to send the “traitors of the working class,” as he describes Wyoming’s congressional delegation, packing.Sounds an awful lot like the rhetoric from the mining camps of the West a century ago.

The older you get, the bigger the airWHISTLER, B.C. Dale Reynolds began snowboarding at age 50 at Whistler, at a time when older people on snowboards were a distinct anomaly.But he persevered, and at the bottom of the mountain one day he got to talking with a man and the man’s 10-year-old son. The boy continually looked at Reynolds and then at his board.”I said, ‘I’m pretty old to be on a board, eh?'” Reynolds recalled in an interview with Whistler’s Pique.”He said yeah, then asked me: ‘Mister do you take air?'””I told him at my age I was more likely to pass air. The rest of the line probably appreciated that more than him,” added Reynolds.By one estimate, snowboarders now make up 30 to 40 percent of ski pass users in British Columbia. Overall in Canada, reports the Canadian Ski Council, 63 percent of ski hill users are on alpine skis, 31 percent on snowboards and 4 percent on snow skates. Many users switch from one to another.