Walt Disney Company is offering $1,000 bonuses to recruit new housekeepers and select kitchen staff at its Florida theme parks, just months after laying off some 32,000 employees. Housekeepers, making $16 an hour, and line cooks, earning $18, can receive the money if they stay on the job for at least 90 days, according to the company’s website.

Disney, the world’s largest theme-park operator, also reinstated its paid summer internship program, which lets students live in dedicated apartments while they work in the Orlando, Florida, resorts.

It’s a sign of how tight the labor market has become, with domestic travel roaring back at a time when many potential workers are still at home. The overall unemployment rate in Orlando was 5.6 per cent in April, a third of what it was a year ago.

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At Florida’s Walt Disney World, which includes four theme parks and a couple of dozen hotels — about 33,000 of the more than 41,000 members of the Service Trades Council Union have returned to work, according to Matt Hollis, president of that worker coalition. About 15,000 of the 32,000 workers at California’s Disneyland resort have returned, the company said.

Disney, which was forced to close its theme parks around the world due to the coronavirus, announced plans in September to lay off 28,000 employees, a number that later grew to 32,000 companywide. Most of them were at its domestic resorts.