Opinion: Here’s Why So Many Restaurants Are Short-staffed

Article content

Some restaurant owners report that they have had to reduce opening hours because they are understaffed, and emergency revenue assistance like CERB has been hinted to be the culprit. As the narrative goes, who would want to work when they could stay home and still cash a check?

Article content

One problem with this narrative is that restaurant employment problems did not start with the pandemic.

When talking about restaurant work, it is important to delve into the systemic problems that characterize the hotel industry: physically and psychologically demanding work, uncertain hours, salary theft, long shifts without breaks, harassment … they are just the tip of the iceberg. . If you are a woman, someone of color, have different abilities or do not have the status of a citizen, the barriers multiply. This is not the experience of a small swath of society, it is the experience of more than 1.2 million people who were employed in the hospitality industry, of all ages and backgrounds, working to support themselves and their families. families

Article content

What workers really want are living wages and safe workplaces. These are human rights, and insisting on them is not a “right.”

Blaming government support for the labor shortage also fails to acknowledge that both owners and workers benefited. Programs like rental assistance and wage subsidies helped establishments stay afloat. Although far from perfect, the government’s responses were designed to help an entire industry in crisis, not just workers.

While CERB provided much-needed income assistance when restaurant workers were laid off with the onset of COVID-19, it was often still below living wage in many cities. Another thing that is below living wage is the minimum wage that many restaurants are rehiring at. The pandemic has been a time for all of us to look in the mirror and reorganize our priorities, and it should come as no surprise that workers want more than $ 13.50 an hour while at risk of exposure to COVID-19.

Article content

We can imagine how difficult it is for restaurant owners to feel like the rug has been pulled from underfoot with the job situation changing so rapidly. But this change has been a long time coming. Many of us used to dream of what the industry could be like if we and our colleagues could earn enough to save money or start a family, so that we were not constantly exhausted. We were waiting for the government to change our industry, but with the pandemic, some of us have realized that changing policies can sometimes take too long and that the need was too urgent not to change things ourselves.

Every day, as volunteers with the Canadian Restaurant Workers Coalition (CRWC), we see positive changes in the hospitality industry: more employers are offering living wages or working to achieve it, and are working with employees to achieve safer workspaces and advocate for mental and physical health. at work. These are people who are reinventing what it’s like to work in a restaurant and changing the narrative in an effort to create workspaces where human rights are not a blue sky scenario, and where people can work with dignity and pride.

Article content

There is no blueprint for this new way of working. The process can be slow, complicated, and unclear. But as we return to find crowded dining rooms, cafes that become meeting places and bars that welcome celebrations among friends, we need more people to fight for an industry that counts on success not only because of its opening hours, sales weekly and mentions on social media, but for the longevity of careers and the well-being of their workers.

Rachel Cheng, a community organizer, photographer, and former waitress, is a volunteer with the Canadian Restaurant Workers Coalition and the Montreal Restaurant Workers Relief Fund. Kaitlin Doucette, a longtime restaurant worker, sommelier, educator, and organizer, is a co-founder of those two organizations and a graduate student at Concordia University.