Restaurants Still Fight As Unemployment Nears Pre-COVID-19 Levels: Industry Body – Winnipeg | The Canadian News

Amid the damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of Canadians are losing their jobs, many continue to struggle to find work, and some industries find it very difficult to find staff to fill vacant positions.

Although Statistics Canada says that unemployment has generally returned to pre-pandemic levels, difficulties continue for the foodservice industry, which, according to an executive from the Canadian Restaurant Association, has a highly visible impact. .

“It’s less hours, it’s people who have to change their menus to make it easier and to serve people with fewer staff,” said James Rillett, vice president of the association for central Canada.

“Some (restaurants) close one or two days a week, when they normally wouldn’t. It’s having to redeploy staff and, in many cases, the owner has to work additional shifts.

“When we were faced with all these closings and from week to week, people didn’t know if the restaurants would be open or not, a lot of people would just say: ‘I owe it to my family and myself to get a job that I know’ will be here for the week In week ‘”.

Rillett said the impact of the pandemic has led to the need for a cultural change in the industry.

“I think the industry is in a place where they say we need to make sure that people see them as professional jobs, and that they can start in a restaurant and move up, and maybe become owners, managers or executives in food companies. “, said.

About 3,000 restaurant jobs that were taken by valued employees in Manitoba before COVID-19 remain unfilled, according to labor statistics.

Canada’s workforce is measured monthly by Statistics Canada’s Workforce Survey, whose director of labor market information, Vince Dale, says is one of the most important studies in StatCan.

“Every month, we select a sample of what we call houses … and we communicate with the people in those houses, and we ask them a series of questions about their activities in the workforce: if they worked, if they looked for work, if they were not in the labor market, what they were doing, ”he said.

“So basically we take a snapshot every month of roughly 50,000 households in Canada, and the data that is collected through that process is what ultimately ends up as the unemployment rate.”

Dale said statistics on both sides of the equation, supply (people) and demand (companies), are used to get an accurate picture of the country’s employment situation each month.

Salary fluctuations are an important part of that picture and are compared to the statistics of other Stats Canada researchers who measure inflation.

“That has been a challenge,” he said, “because the job mix in Canada has varied considerably over the past 18 months due to COVID.”