To think that if the hospitality industry is struggling to fill vacancies...

[Susie477]

It should pay higher wages?

The hospitality industry is facing a ‘jobs crisis’, we are told. Restaurants are complaining that they can’t recruit the workers they need to re-open after lockdown. Many of the foreign workers they previously relied on have gone home after Brexit & covid, and they are struggling to recruit British workers to do minimum wage jobs with unsocial working hours.

So why not offer to pay more? Businesses accept that they have to pay competitively to recruit senior executives and justify high salaries by citing ‘market forces’. Why doesn’t the same apply to ordinary workers?

One of the alleged benefits of Brexit was supposed to be that the U.K. economy would be forced to break its addiction to an unlimited supply of cheap immigrant labour. So why isn’t it happening? Why aren’t wages rising?

We are going to Lake District for the first week in June, DD will celebrate a special birthday whilst there. DH has relatives not far from where we are staying so I asked for pub/restaurant recommendations.

DD picked out a pub, I rang last week, asked to make a booking “no bookings are being taken as I am short staffed”. Ok, no problem.

I then tried to ascertain how busy they might be on the birthday evening, at about 6.30/7, to decide whether we just turn up.

The woman that I spoke to was so rude it was unbelievable. Told me she had been there 40yrs (so guessing landlady, it’s family run) but had no idea how busy it could be, as it was different every week.

I had explained it was a special birthday, we had never seen the pub before, so had no idea of size etc, just wanted some guidance, rather than turn up and be told a 2hr wait. She really didn’t want to know, just wanted to shut the conversation down. She actually said “I am sorry I can’t help”. I very much felt that I was inconveniencing her by calling and asking a few questions.

If a potential customer is treated like that after a 4 month closure, I do wonder how staff are treated - she could well struggle to recruit the staff she needs! Our relative was shocked by the response we got.

The market for eating out will also take some time to recover. Many people have just got out of the habit of eating out. I predict that a number of chains are going to fail. The casual dining sector was already saturated.

I firmly believe that paying low wages to people prepared to work for peanuts and life in crap accommodation is great for governments but not for humanity longer term. We need a resettlement of wages at the lower end and jobs that people are happy to work in longer term

^The problem is that eating out is already expensive, poor value for money and unaffordable to many

What is "poor value" or "expensive" in this context^

If DP and I go out to eat, we generally go to a mid price independent and have one course and a drink each, or sometimes a starter and maybe an extra drink and that already costs around £50-60 which is more than enough to make you think about how often you do it and whether it's worth the money.

It’s all comparative.
To me eating out is expensive but that’s my perspective.
Dh is always amazed that I will spend nearly £3 on a cup of coffee when I can make one myself for pennies.
I know it’s the ambience, meeting friends etc etc that you pay for. This is why pubs and restaurants have to offer something extra. Like I said I am not a drinker so for me spending £20 on a few glasses of very average wine is expensive. Add this to a meal which due to my circumstances is usually no better than one I could eat at home for a fraction of the cost and there are your reasons for me finding the whole affair expensive.on top of this I often have soft drinks and paying £2 for a glass of pop grates on me, unless the ambience/mood is right etc but that is subjective.
Others who don’t cook/ don’t enjoy having friends to their house/ don’t enjoy hosting or whatever will have a different perspective.

I agree that the perks of a hospitality job are what make it, not the wages.
If food & accom prices could rise along with wages that would be doable but many people round here would baulk at paying £6 a pint or £20+ for a main meal on a regular basis.
So our hospitality businesses will fail and we will all then moan about how we miss our lovely village pub & artisan restaurant etc & only have travelodges left.
I think many employees are doing their absolute best & certainly not getting rich off of their business. I also think many young workers need to buck up their ideas.

I feel for the hospitality sector this past year. Yes they've reopened but still can't run at full capacity because of social distancing plus the additional costs of table service and any ppe and screens etc. Until social distancing is scrapped I don't think it's possible to increase wages, they have to be able to return pre covid profits before they can even think about it.

@C8H10N4O2 I think the casual dining sector was always based on people choosing to eat out rather than go home for a meal. So it had to compete on price. In the olden days (when I was young so 70s and early 80s) a meal out was an occasional standalone treat not something tacked onto a day's shopping.

Where I live there's many pensioners and the busy cafes are the soup and a roll for a few quid ones. They can't pay much on that.

@Velvian that was my thread and your account is completely inaccurate. It is my friends cafe and she needs an additional person to work Saturday and Sunday as she is already in both those days! You can sit there and judge if you like but a manger of a small cafe in a garden centre or such is usually on maybe a quid more an hour than the other workers and for that money you're expected to work every shift where someone doesn't turn up, every weekend as that's really the only time when you're busy, and do everything managerial as they don't pay anyone to be assistant manager or supervisor. That and be on call essentially all the time when the A level student sets fire to something or can't cash up. It's a very thankless job and the only way it stays open is that mums (usually) are tied by childcare and have little confidence in their own abilities.

Care homes can't just "pay their staff more". The funding they get for the residents from local authorities is inadequate as it is.

The government will be making more cuts to local authorities so there's no way that care homes will be getting more money to cover increased costs.

@BritWifeinUSA

It’s the same here in the US and we haven’t got Brexit to blame. It’s the insecurity. No one wants a job in the industry that’s going to be one of the first to be shut down and one of the last to reopen again.

And where you're thrown under a bus when it comes to catching diseases.

Also do you know most independent coffee shops make almost nothing from coffee? The rent for espresso machines is massive so unless you're making twenty coffees per twenty minutes like Starbucks you only make money from the cake and sandwiches.

I think many employees are doing their absolute best & certainly not getting rich off of their business. I also think many young workers need to buck up their ideas

The pub owners i see in Devon certainly are.
As for young people should "buck up their ideas" you exemplify why no one wants to work in the sector.

Why doesn't the industry offer staff a decent career path? training? status? works in Europe.

I left hospitality during covid and would never return. A lot of my colleagues did the same.

Furlough opened their eyes to a life in which they could see their family and friends and actually have a fucking life, instead of literally missing family weddings to be screamed at by horrible customers. As a restaurant manager I lost track of the amount of 18 year olds I had to console over the years, the amount of pints spilled on me, grown men and women an inch away from my face screaming and demanding free stuff etc. There was a massive staffing crisis for kitchen staff prior to covid so this has only made it worse. People don't want to work 12 hour days on their feet without even being able to go to the toilet to serve people food that they send back. It's a shit way of life.

@HPFA

Care homes can't just "pay their staff more". The funding they get for the residents from local authorities is inadequate as it is.

The government will be making more cuts to local authorities so there's no way that care homes will be getting more money to cover increased costs.

So they'll just get no one. But hey, some will get their inheritances so they can be even richer.

@HPFA

Care homes can't just "pay their staff more". The funding they get for the residents from local authorities is inadequate as it is.

The government will be making more cuts to local authorities so there's no way that care homes will be getting more money to cover increased costs.

We know this and keep voting for it.

[quote littlepattilou]@Susie477 I agree 100%.

It's about time the hospitality industry stopped treating people like shit, and offered a proper wage, with a set amount of hours, (not zero hours contracts,) and proper sick pay/holiday pay etc.

This serves them right, and they brought this all on themselves.

They were happy to pay shit wages and give unsociable hours, (and not a set amount of hours) to people. It's been very hard for many people born in the UK, and made managing their finances very difficult.

But foreign workers didn't care, as their meagre £100 a week was worth 10 times more back where they came from, and they lived 15 to a house here in the UK, so had very little outgoings over here.

But now Brexit and problems with citizenship (and laying people off during covid,) has resulted in a huge gap in hospitality workers, and NOW the companies are going to have to pay decent wages to people (and give regular hours,) if they want to gain - and KEEP - staff.

As you said 'businesses accept that they have to pay competitively to recruit senior executives and justify high salaries by citing ‘market forces’. Why doesn’t the same apply to ordinary workers?'

Excellent point. About time unskilled and not very well educated people were treated more fairly. Too much shit has been thrown at the working classes and the poor for too long.

The tide has turned. And about fucking time.[/quote]
Totally agree with you except for your last paragraph. The tide has not turned, on the contrary, more and more small business in hospitality will close if their profit margins are very small or negligible. It's all about profit, if you can't make a healthy profit, why bother having the headache of a business?

Few people truly understand how Brexit is going to impact the UK in the next 10-20 years. It's going to be huge.

@Ihaventgottimeforthis

I agree that the perks of a hospitality job are what make it, not the wages. If food & accom prices could rise along with wages that would be doable but many people round here would baulk at paying £6 a pint or £20+ for a main meal on a regular basis. So our hospitality businesses will fail and we will all then moan about how we miss our lovely village pub & artisan restaurant etc & only have travelodges left. I think many employees are doing their absolute best & certainly not getting rich off of their business. I also think many young workers need to buck up their ideas.

Buck up their ideas of having a living wage, a secure number of hours/contracts, employee rights and not being treated like shit? How dare they, eh? The employee's not getting rich is not their problem .

*Bertiesshoes your experience is why I am somewhat cynical about independent always being better. I find the service you get from chains is better because there is some accountability with head office. With retail there are usually better return policies with chains.

That applies to retail and hospitality - actually I think Pizza Express is better than most of the local Italian restaurants. People rave about one in particular and I wonder if we're talking about the same place.

Small businesses will not close if their product is good and their service is good. Word gets around. However, a lot of small business owners think the world owes them a living and word gets around about that, too.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but most hospitality venues haven’t been allowed to open fully for over a year. Where will they find the money for higher wages just now?

Early years is the same. We have an astounding amount of pressure stress and responsibility. Undertake years and years of education and training and are responsible for caring for the most important people in the world.

I’m 42, hold a degree and manage a baby room. I get 10p over minimum wage and this is industry norm.

Then people wonder why we can’t recruit quality staff.

People complain about the minimum wage that it is not enough to live on and needs to be higher, but then are not prepared to pay more for services to facilitate this.

Staff deserve to be paid a fair wage, not the bare minimum, for the job they do but that means prices have to rise for customers. I am happy to pay more so that the staff serving me have a decent wage.

Wages will have to rise. Some businesses will close and prices will go up - that is how it works. Large numbers of retail workers have lost jobs so that will offset the issue to a degree. However a lot of European workers have gone home. We have had cheap and flexible labour for too long. We should rejoice at a change that benefits the lower paid

Foreign workers were happy to work for that wage so that's the wage. If British workers don't want to work for that wage, there is nothing stopping them walking away from the job, but that is the wage. You can't demand higher pay just because.
Perhaps the UK voters who voted for Brexit weren't aware of how these employment rules and regulations were going to impact on their hotel stays, fruit picking etc. etc. etc.
Tough. The UK worker will have to knuckle down and get on with it if they cannot find workers from now outside of the UK and in the EU to do the job for them.