On Nantucket last weekend, an innkeeper cleaned the pool while his sales director drove the shuttle bus. Restaurant co-owners in Provincetown filled in as cook, hostess, and cashier. At Arnold’s Lobster & Clam Bar in Eastham, the owner was out on the patio busing tables, the office manager was in the kitchen making lobster rolls, and the head chef was slinging drinks behind the bar.

“I’m older than dirt so they try to keep me out of the kitchen,” said Arnold’s owner Nate Nickerson. “I’m out there picking up cigarette butts instead.”

With the unofficial kickoff of the summer season upon them, Nickerson and other employers on the Cape and Islands are scrambling to make up for a shortage of foreign workers created by a change in the seasonal visa program.


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