Jim Conway started working in restaurants in 1982, making $2.13 an hour, plus tips.
And though the world has changed significantly in the nearly 40 years since then, his hourly wage has not. At the Olive Garden outside of Pittsburgh where he worked when the pandemic hit last year, he was making $2.83 an hour, the minimum wage for tipped workers in Pennsylvania, plus tips.
So after being furloughed for months last spring, Conway, 64, decided to retire.
Being paid the rough equivalent of a chocolate bar an hour from the chain was little incentive for him to stick it out longer in the industry after so many years, especially with tips no longer a reliable source of income and lingering health concerns about covid-19.
“The main issue for me was safety,” Conway said. “There are lots of people who don’t want to participate in the old ways.”
Conway is one of the millions of workers who left the restaurant industry during the pandemic and haven’t come back. The industry has 1.7 million fewer jobs filled than before the pandemic, despite posting almost a million job openings in March, along with hotels, and raising pay 3.6 percent, an average of 58 cents an hour, in the first three months of 2021.
Restaurant chains and industry groups say a shortage of workers like Conway is slowing their recovery, as the sector tries to get back on its feet amid sinking covid cases, falling restrictions and resurgent demand in many areas around the country.
The issue has quickly become political, with Republicans blaming the labor crunch on the Biden administration’s move to boost federal unemployment insurance supplement, which has been a central part of the government’s response to the pandemic for most of the past year. GOP leaders and business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce say the extra unemployment insurance is a disincentive for some workers to return to work.
In interviews with The Washington Post, 10 current and former workers expressed a wide range of reasons they are or were reluctant to return to work. Some, like Conway, have left the industry or changed careers, saying they felt like the industry was no longer worth the stress and volatility.
Others said jobs that didn’t pay enough for them to make ends meet no longer felt appropriate to them. Others left after disputes with managers — over issues around safety and pay — and other flash points that have emerged in the past year.
All described the pandemic as an awakening — realizing that long-held concerns about the industry were valid, and compounded by the new health concerns. And forced to stop working or look for other jobs early on in the pandemic, many realized they had other options.
“The staffing issue has actually a lot more to do with the conditions that the industry was in before covid and people not wanting to go back to that, knowing what they would be facing with a pandemic on top of it,” said Crystal Maher, 36, a restaurant worker in Austin, who’s become more active on the industry’s labor issues in the past year. “People are forgetting that restaurant workers have actually experienced decades of abuse and trauma. The pandemic is just the final straw.”
Tonya Breslow, the owner of Mis en Place, a restaurant staffing firm, said a huge number of restaurants she works with are dealing with shortages.
The firm recently surveyed 2,000 line cooks and back-of-the-house restaurant workers nationally and found just over a quarter, 26 percent, reported leaving the industry, while 41 percent of workers said they were still employed in the industry. That left about a third of respondents who had not gone back to work.
Of that group, most workers said they were not yet back, because they were either looking for the right opportunity, they had concerns about safety during the pandemic, or they did not plan to return to the industry.
As usual, the simplistic explanations pushed by conservatives don’t make any sense.
:)
It’s almost like the demand is there but supply isn’t because they’re not offering enough incentives and workers are choosing to go places that are less likely to get them killed. Weird, that.
Conservatives are so quick to wank themselves with the invisible hand until it works against them.
