COLUMN ONE : It’s a Small World, After All : Euro Disney was decried as cultural heresy. But thousands of young, multilingual recruits have turned the prototypal U.S. theme park into a model employer in a Europe without borders.

MARNE-LA-VALLEE, France —  The hotel chambermaid was Irish. The fellow stocking the mini-bar was a Dane. The “Mexican bandit” in the sombrero at the Lucky Nugget Saloon was from France. The young woman at the information center, fielding questions in no fewer than four languages, was from the Netherlands.

Ever since the castle turrets and artificial red rock mountains began to sprout in the beet fields 20 miles west of Paris three years ago, the huge new Euro Disney resort complex has been portrayed as the quintessential U.S. transplant in Europe. European intellectuals decried the cultural invasion; labor unions raised alarms about U.S. employment practices; farmers blocked the park’s gates to protest U.S. trade policies.

But after almost five months of operation, a very different picture is emerging: Young, well-educated recruits from across Western Europe, taking advantage of laws that allow them to work anywhere in the 12 nations of the European Community, have flocked to Euro Disney for jobs that provide them with valuable exposure to fellow Europeans, as well as a priceless opportunity to hone their language skills.

As a result, the prototypal U.S. theme resort, pioneered in Anaheim, perfected in Orlando and exported first to Tokyo and now to this Parisian suburb, is emerging as the first truly pan-European employer.

“A lot of companies back home in Britain call themselves European,” said Stewart Brown, 25, an enthusiastic Scotsman from Glasgow who works at the Lucky Nugget as a headwaiter. “But they can’t compare with this. There are people from all the European countries working here. This is the first real European company.”

Timothy Wolf, senior vice president for personnel, says that almost 40% of the 16,000-strong Euro Disney “cast” comes from countries other than France, more than 22% from the 11 other EC countries. In contrast, less than 3% of the work force, mostly in management ranks, is American or Canadian.

“We have 85 different nationalities and 35 different languages represented here,” Wolf said. “To call this an American company is bordering on the inane.”

Officials at the EC headquarters in Brussels contend that the $4.4-billion resort is almost surely Europe’s most multinational private European workplace in recent history, at least since French kings imported mercenary armies to do their fighting.

Despite the scheduled arrival of “borderless” Western Europe in 1993, when the EC will abolish most national barriers to the movement of goods, services, money and people, few European businesses before Disney have recruited across national boundaries.

Altogether, according to the EC, less than 2% of the European Community’s 104 million employees worked in EC countries other than their own in 1988, the last year for which statistics are available.

Many companies position themselves as pan-European by virtue of workplaces scattered across the Continent.

Nestle, the Swiss-based food maker, has factories or distribution facilities in every Western European country, but each is staffed almost entirely by local workers. At IBM, which boasts of being a strictly European company on this side of the Atlantic, the 200,000 workers in Europe come from virtually every country, but only 1.3% of them work outside their home country.

Euro Disney is different--what Michael D. Eisner, chairman and chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based Walt Disney Co., called “a micro-version of what Europe will become in a few generations” as national boundaries grow less significant and workers think of themselves as European instead of French or German or British.

The reason can be traced to Eisner’s conviction that to succeed, Euro Disney had to attract visitors from all over Europe. “We wanted to be able to greet them in their own language,” he said. “It is our single goal to deliver a service. You can’t deliver service to someone who speaks only Italian, for example, if you don’t speak Italian and understand the Italian culture.”

In the months before the resort opened for business in April, Disney talent scouts visited 28 cities in 11 of the 12 EC countries, skipping Greece in the belief that few visitors would come from there. They sought bright, smiling young people willing to pull up roots and work for the minimum wage--take-home pay between $1,000 and $1,150 a month depending on their experience--in suburban Paris.

The result is a work force that is as diverse as the park’s visitors: 61% French, 9% British, 3% Dutch, 3% Irish, 2% German and 1% each Portuguese, Belgian and Danish, with a smattering of 27 other nationalities from all continents.

Executives here believe the European mix is a result that only a U.S. company could have achieved. “The common denominator between Germans, Italians and French is the American culture,” said Euro Disney Chairman Robert Fitzpatrick. “It is not one another’s culture. The icons for these young people who come to work for us, what they share in common, is a knowledge of American film, a knowledge of American music.”

When Disney executives began creating the new resort, they discovered that the necessary Europe-wide institutions and precedents did not exist.

The first shock, Fitzpatrick said, came when Euro Disney wanted to sell stock and discovered “there was no mechanism for a European issue.” As a result, the new European company, 49% owned by Walt Disney Co., was forced to stage simultaneous, independent offerings in several European markets. “It was the first confirmation to me that Europe was a concept but that it wasn’t a reality when you wanted to do things on that scale,” Fitzpatrick said.

The second hurdle was hiring. As the first company to engage in mass recruiting on a Europe-wide basis, Euro Disney executives quickly found themselves in uncharted territory. When recruiters arrived at a London hotel for an advertised interviewing session, they found lines stretching around the block. Another team of interviewers was flown in from Paris and worked through the night to meet with all the job candidates.

On the down side, the pan-European hiring spree also turned out to be considerably more expensive than Disney executives had imagined.

To lodge their new recruits, the company was compelled to build or secure low-cost housing for 3,400 people who could not find quarters of their own. The housing crisis came in part because the anticipated development of a private housing market on the edge of the new resort never materialized.

“We have been racing since last August to provide housing,” said personnel executive Wolf, “either housing that we have built ourselves, housing that we own or operate or social (public) housing reserved for us.”

Before the resort opened, Wolf said, more than 75% of the employees lived more than an hour away from the park. To transport workers, the company had to create its own bus lines serving distant areas. In some cases, late-working employees were taken home to Paris by taxi, a ride that costs about $100.

With added transportation and new housing, Wolf said, the percentage of employees living more than an hour away from the park has dropped to 25%--still a significant number.

Housing and transportation costs were cited recently by the London office of the Morgan Stanley & Co. brokerage house in its forecast that Euro Disney was likely to lose $41.8 million in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 1993. That estimate pushed Euro Disney stock down sharply on the Paris market.

Eisner, while declining to comment on Morgan Stanley’s analysis of Euro Disney’s short-term profit-and-loss picture, said he is “not concerned” about the long term. “Our company has always invested strongly to achieve a level of quality, and it has always rewarded us in the end,” he said. “We’ve already had a million Germans and a million British guests, and to have those numbers in France without a war going on is really something.”

The Euro Disney experience, both its successes and painful lessons, are being watched closely by other companies operating in Europe. Leonardo Inghilleri, personnel chief for Disney hotels here, is one of several executives invited to speak at seminars in Germany and other European countries on the subject: “How to Integrate the European Work Force.”

Like many of the European executives at the resort, Inghilleri, a 35-year-old Italian, is impressed with the early pan-European experience. He ticked off three lessons to be learned from Euro Disney: “Europeans can indeed work together. Europeans and Americans can work together. And employers have confirmation that if you are really committed to success, you do not have your country’s borders as a limit.”

Malcolm N. Ross, Euro Disney’s vice president for operations, said the ability to hire across borders gave the resort “the pick of the crop” of European youth. Ross, a square-jawed Briton with years of experience in the international hotel business, praised the employees as “adventurous types, full of self-confidence and willing to push boundaries, full of character, presence and language skills.”

Disney officials admit that language versatility was an early worry, particularly among the largely monolingual French population. But this problem disappeared with the recruitment of amazingly talented young linguists from the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Ireland.

“All of the Dutch we have on our staff are at least trilingual,” Fitzpatrick noted with admiration. “The closest group to the Dutch in terms of language capacity are the Irish, who, like the Dutch, have a tradition of going outside their country.”

Dutch employee Linda de Zeeuw, 24, staffs the desk at the information center on Main Street, fielding questions with equal grace in English, German, Dutch and French. She was recruited by Disney while studying tourism in the Dutch city of Breda. Like many employees, she has no long-range plans to remain at Euro Disney. She is still writing her thesis for her degree and will go back to Breda soon to defend the thesis.

“I like it here very much,” she said as confused visitors swirled around her. Like many of the employees interviewed at the resort, she welcomed the experience of meeting people of different nationalities and making friends with a diverse group of young people she would not have met at home.

Jesper Brenck, 21, a young Dane who works in the Disneyland Hotel checking and stocking mini-bars, said: “When I first came here, I was a little bit afraid about how people would get along. German people with Danes. French and Germans. Blacks and whites. But it has worked out really great.”

Brenck said he finds himself speaking all his languages--English, French and German as well as Danish--with hotel guests and his fellow workers.

Heidi Klausen, 23, from the Danish town of Kolding, works as a clerk in the Emporium gift shop on Main Street. She said she took the job to perfect her French and English for three months this summer. After that, she plans to find a job back in Denmark. Klausen described her $1,000-monthly take-home pay as “lousy--it cost me money to come here.” She’s also not crazy about the two-hour commute, necessitated by the difficulty of finding affordable housing near the park. Still, she said, the unique experience is worth the cost.

Lucky Nugget headwaiter Stewart Brown said morale at Euro Disney is higher than it was at Disney World in Orlando, where he worked for two years. “I think the cast members here are keener,” he said. “In America, certain cast members know their jobs so well they just do them on autopilot.”

Euro Disney personnel officials report that turnover at the new resort is lower than in the U.S. resorts. In general, Fitzpatrick said, the European experience in hiring has been a pleasant success.

But when other European company executives quiz him about managing such a diverse group, he answers with certain reservations.

Because of the limited experience of the employees, most of whom are unmarried and 25 or younger, Fitzpatrick said Euro Disney management had to set up counseling centers and programs to help with culture shock. A system to advance salaries was established to help employees learning how to live on their own.

“It’s complicated,” he said. “It reminds me of my days as a university dean. You are bringing in young people not just from these various nations but young people for whom in many cases this is their first job and their first time away from home.”