As 2 million jobs go unclaimed, restaurant employment remains unfilled. 

During the pandemic, many people took the opportunity to change their routines as well as their careers.


Especially in the restaurant industry, many companies had to close or lay off workers. And now, nearly three years after it began, the industry is still struggling: 2 million hotel and leisure jobs are still open, the Washington Post reported Friday. And while many industries have recovered, leisure and hospitality still has 500,000 workers below 2020 levels.


Part of the problem is that people who used to work in these jobs—many of them with low pay and no benefits—have moved on to jobs that offer them a better quality of life. They can now make more money than in the service industry or have benefits such as paid vacations and health insurance.


“It’s this restructuring that’s going on that explains why many industries can’t find workers,” Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economics professor and former Labor Department chief economist, told the Post. “Their employees went elsewhere.”
While its ramifications are industry-wide, the effects also affect businesses at an individual level. My colleague heard from chefs and restaurateurs in New York who had to cut their workweek to less than seven days, citing a labour shortage. Others are changing their business practises to attract new employees.


Alex Sirigu, general manager of a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has raised wages by up to 20 percent and is closing earlier in the evening in hopes that workers will see the benefits. “People who were working in restaurants found new jobs,” he told The Washington Post. “They’ve all moved on.”


Now, the recruitment is mostly a younger group with entry-level candidates, he said. Many older workers have retired during the pandemic, and there has been a general shift away from jobs with a lot of face-to-face contact, such as the service sector. However, some economists see this as generally positive.


“It was a good development—it raised wages and fundamentally changed the structure of the labour market,” labour economist William Spriggs told the Post. “Workers trapped in low-paying jobs escaped by moving to higher-paying fields.”


However, this has left the leisure and restaurant industries in a bit of a tailspin as jobs go unfilled and restaurants struggle to survive.

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