Hospitality has gone mad salary wise

[justasking111]

Family member a chef landed a job 28 hours a week £23 per hour. He's worked one week and has been poached by another business same hours but £28 per hour. We're talking about a bog standard tourism area here not a city or a Michelin star business. It's nuts this area is dead in the autumn winter and he's taken a job in the middle of nowhere.

We're going to be paying a lot more to eat out aren't we??

I’d imagine is what will happen is as people get squeezed financially they will cut down on eating out. Some places will go bust. Then there will be less jobs and out of work chefs, maybe wages will come down then or maybe eating out will become something only the well off minority can do.

some will go bust but many staff have left the industry so there isn't a wide pool.

NMW really should be for the genuinely unskilled doing the simplest/easiest of jobs, not a job that actually requires training/knowledge/experience etc.

Which jobs are they then? According to the 50 cleaner threads on mumsnet yesterday even cleaners deserve to command a high salary due to physical work! 😆

Guess I need to change career again!

But you can have great cleaners and shit cleaners so there's obviously skill involved. Different skills to a chef or accountant or whatever, but definitely skills.

A decent chef is really hard to recruit and keep tbh so not surprised, good that they are offering someone a decent wage 🤷🏻‍♀️

Higher wages for everyone are meaningless if they just result in higher prices. What we need is a) greater productivity and so we can afford to pay people more without raising prices b) a stronger export industry so we generate wealth for the country which can be invested in public services. I can't see either of the above happening with the current government.

What we will see is more businesses going under as a result of people not being able to afford to use them, an increase in unemployment and ultimately a decline in wages.

Eating out always used to be a luxury. It's relatively recently that it's been cheap enough for most people to be able to afford to do it regularly.

What we need is a) greater productivity and so we can afford to pay people more without raising prices

Low wages is one of the reason our productivity is so bad.

Is that the thread where some people didn't understand the difference between and employee and someone self employed???

Hospitality is paying the price for years of treating their staff like shit! Covid gave many people the opportunity to work better hours and many have chosen not to go back.

I agree in part. The problem with efficiency wage theory though is it only works in isolation, when other employers start paying higher wages the efficency gain from attracting the best quality workers is lost. It is much more sustainable to support wage growth from improvements in productivity than the other way around.

This. Dp used to be a chef, but changed career as it is hard hard work. Fwiw he now earns more than 28 quid an hour in an office job, in a job he is good at but that didn't require huge amounts of qualifications and is a far easier life than cheffing.

Your part of the problem. What is an unskilled job? You need people at all levels.

Are people really unskilled or is that what we have been conditioned to think and accept low pay along with the titles...

Hotel worker here. Chefs are in such high demand!

I agree, I've recently gone back into hospitality because I can earn more at a supervisory level and with a hell of a lot less responsibility than my last min wage job in care.
I'm foh so I'm not as skilled as a chef, it's about time they got a decent wage, they're trained, they have a lot of responsibility and it's high pressure and long and unsociable hours. Our chefs are down (and salaried) for 12 hour shifts, most work 12-15 hour days though, often without more than a quick couple of pee breaks, it's hot, hard work. For the head and sous chef theres menu creating and testing, function food planning, staffing, recruitment and management on top of the running of the actual kitchen. I have a great deal of respect for them, they do it because they're passionate about it (and can be absolute diva's at times!) but they deserve recognition for what they do and the training they've done.
FOH can also be demanding and hard work, especially at supervisor or manager level, it requires skills, ok maybe not a degree but good service really, really matters. Good food or accommodation is only half of the equation.

We're really busy at the moment, and for summer, with people already booking for Christmas, so it's not showing signs of abating just yet, but, I do think that the cost of living will have an impact at some point, but at the moment with a lack of staff employers are having to up their game in order to have any, and even more if they want good ones. I guess it's a bit of a catch 22 for hospitality employers at the moment, pay shit wages still and you won't have enough staff to keep going, but paying higher wages costs money.
I can't say I'm sad that the tables have turned a little bit to be honest.

Good. Let's get back to the days when people could afford to live on what they were paid, without numerous means-tested handouts from the welfare state.

Also, those who are better off, that were happy to have cheap meals out, while the hospitality staff were paid extremely low wages, need to check their privilege. The tax payer was effectively subsidising your cheap meals, via a huge array of in-work benefits, continuously dispensed to those who weren't paid enough to live on their wages.

Head chefs are usually fairly well paid aren't they? I worked for years at a global chain Hotel and the head chef was the highest paid, well over the General Manager etc.

Yep. There are far fewer skilled chefs since the pandemic.

One very good chef my husband knows realised just how much of his children's life he was missing. Is now a delivery driver and home for bedtime each night.

Where my husband works closes every Sunday/Monday so all the staff can get a good rest. Of course, they would love to be open but also can see that if they drive the kitchen staff into the ground, they will just leave.

Advertised for a breakfast staff. Early start but finished by 2pm, good wage. 1 applicant.

Sous chef went for an interview recently for 1st Head Chef job. He was told that if he broke the terms of his notice and left that day they would pay him a £1000 bonus. He didn't but only because the company had really supported him throughout the pandemic.

In a different company, but OH knows the chef- Head Chef advertised for a Sous Chef, invited an applicant for an interview and it turned out the 'applicant' was actually a recruiter trying to poach the Head Chef. He got chucked out of the kitchen!

So yes, prices will go up. But the price of the ingredients is now through the roof. OH now does a daily menu with what he can get in for a reasonable price. If people pre-book a Lamb meal from a menu and the price of lamb almost doubles within a month (it has happened) then the company has to honour that and make a loss. Butter is super expensive when you have to buy 50 blocks a week. 400 eggs a week are creeping up in price. The list goes on.....

So he now looks to see what is fresh and reasonably priced, and that's it for the day. Writes the menu according to what he can manage to get in- and almost every major catering company now add minimum order and delivery charges. (Due to petrol prices I guess) Which they never used to do. Which gets passed on. He even gets charged for delivery crates now.

It is much more sustainable to support wage growth from improvements in productivity than the other way around.

I don't disagree but we have a situation where wages have been devalued, & businesses haven't invested & now we have a skills shortage.

Well, now you know why poor people voted for Brexit. The minimum wage had become the de-facto maximum wage for a huge number of people in the hospitality industry. Poor people on low pay got pretty much nothing from EU membership. It's not like they were benefiting from cheap meals out, when they were paid so badly that they couldn't afford any of those nice things.

I live in a tourist area, and we used to get the same European workers coming over for the season each year (I knew many of them).

Post Brexit they don’t come.

Local businesses have been desperately trying to recruit high school students to plug the gap, which is unlikely to work as well.

Wages should be higher for all people not just the likes of Solicitors and Doctors who are vastly overpaid IMO. You shouldn't need to go to University to earn a decent wage, enough to buy a modest house and afford a few luxuries. The reason so many middle-class people were vehemently anti-brexit is because they had come to rely on there being a serf class of immigrants to do their shit work. That has now come to an end.

I agree that it'll be harder for businesses as they'll need to train them from scratch, but OTOH it's no bad thing for teens. I grew up in a tourist area and most of us worked in hospitality/tourist attractions during the summer. It was good life experience learning how to deal with the public, be professional, etc.

@Cameleongirl the kids don’t want to do it. They already have their own side-huddle businesses in web-design, games testing, tour-guiding, a few of them working for construction etc