Chef and restaurant proprietor Gareth ‘Gaz’ Smith, who runs Michael’s in Mount Merrion in Dublin, held a meeting with his senior team on Wednesday. Michael’s currently opens only four days per week, from Thursday through Sunday.
The meeting was to discuss whether to capitalise on excess customer demand by opening for a fifth day.
“We decided against it. We don’t have enough staff. We only have enough floor staff for four days and I don’t want to squeeze them too much,” he says.
Smith “ducked and dived” during the enforced closure periods during lockdown with a variety of new ventures, such as a sauce-making business and home meal kits. The main aim was to keep the Michael’s team together for reopening when the time came.
“Some days I wondered why the f**k am I doing all this? But all those moves I made during lockdown, all that work, it was all about retaining the team. It all paid off because we were like coiled springs, ready to go once the restrictions ended. I couldn’t imagine trying to find chefs right now.”
The industry has battled a shortage of chefs for years but it was exacerbated by the pandemic. Now the shortage is said to be just as acute with staff such as kitchen porters. There is now also a dearth of waiting staff, bartenders, hosts and workers for all sorts of other front and back of house roles in hospitality businesses across the State.
This is despite the fact that there are 28,440 workers in the sector still receiving the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP), by far the largest cohort of any part of the economy. Many businesses blame the PUP for providing a disincentive for some staff to go back to work.
Trade unions and other workers’ advocates, meanwhile, blame low wages and tough working conditions in hospitality and tourism for some of the problem. Many staff also left hospitality during the pandemic for other sectors that operated more stably during restrictions, such as grocery retailing.
Whatever the cause, the chronic labour shortage is stunting the recovery all across the sector and prompting calls for State intervention to address the skills gap. This week, the popular Bunnyconnellan Coastal Restaurant in Myrtleville, Cork, has told customers it would remain shut all week “as a direct result of the staffing crisis”. Its opening hours beyond Sunday have yet to be confirmed.
We will tell young people that a lot of general managers started out waiting tables. This is a career that can take you all over the world. But this problem – the shortage – is not unique to Ireland
Mario's restaurant in Ranelagh, Dublin, told customers who sought to book tables last Sunday that it would be unable to accommodate them because it hadn't enough workers. In the city centre, the upscale Hugo's on Merrion Row currently opens only for five days, with last orders on Sundays at 8pm. Proprietor Gina Murphy has told some diners that Hugo's is affected by the staff shortage.
Restaurants, hotels, cafes and tourism businesses fought hard to convince the Government to let them reopen fully over the summer. It seems incongruous that a large slice of them cannot operate at full capacity now, when most of the public health constraints have been removed.
The Restaurants Association of Ireland (RAI) estimated in the summer that 25 per cent of outlets might not open when curbs on indoor dining were eased in July. Adrian Cummins, the RAI's chief executive, estimates that "95 per cent" of hospitality businesses currently have open positions that they cannot fill.
"It is a very significant constraint on the recovery of the sector," says Paul Kelly, the chief executive of the State tourism agency, Fáilte Ireland. It is about to launch a new publicity campaign using social media coupled with radio advertising to convince prospective workers to consider hospitality and tourism as a career. "As the country reopens, we need people like you," it will urge them, beneath the hashtag #bethepulse. It is also launching an "industry toolkit" to coach employers how to attract staff.
“We will tell young people that a lot of general managers started out waiting tables. This is a career that can take you all over the world. But this problem – the shortage – is not unique to Ireland. It is happening everywhere,” he says.
PUP is acting as a barrier to people returning to work. It is directly leading to a skills shortage as we speak
In the UK, the labour shortage is acute and has been worsened by Brexit, which has cut supply lines of migrant workers. The pandemic compounded this. The number of chef jobs advertised in Britain was up 62 per cent in July compared to February 2020, according to caterer.com. In the US, research by the website Joblist found one-in-three hospitality workers did not intend to return to the sector this summer after the economy there reopened.
German and Dutch restaurants are desperately turning to Spain, Portugal and Greece for culinary staff. According to Statistics Netherlands, there are 14,000 unfilled positions in the hospitality industry there.
One of the problems for Irish policymakers is that nobody knows the full scale of the shortage here. Fáilte Ireland’s Kelly says the situation has been “far too volatile and dynamic” until now to calculate the extent of the problem: “We’re waiting until things settle after reopening. In September or October we will do the research. For now, we just know that the problem is across the board.”
The RAI’s Cummins says he has been lobbying on the issue for close to a decade. In 2018, he said data from a Government skills committee suggested the shortage of chefs at that time was up to 8,000 and growing quickly. “God knows how bad it is now. It is the single biggest issue we are getting calls about.”
Research conducted in recent weeks with businesses for Fáilte Ireland has found that 88 per cent of tourism and hospitality operators are having difficulties recruiting new staff. More than two-thirds have had difficulty rehiring their old workers from before lockdown.
The number one barrier to recruitment cited by survey respondents was the PUP, followed by higher wage expectations among candidates, a drain of international workers abroad, and jobs in the sector being perceived as “unstable”.
Excel Recruitment, one of the top staffing agencies for the sector, recently said in its 2021 salary survey for hospitality that kitchen porters are becoming “an endangered species”. It noted “dramatic increases” lately in the wages for entry level workers, to replace others who are quickly promoted up the ranks. It says wage inflation is more modest for more experienced staff, possibly because companies simply cannot afford huge leaps in pay.
According to Excel, the average hotel manager gets paid around €85,000 plus a bonus, which is similar to the pre-pandemic period, as per the pay rates outlined in its 2019 salary survey. Restaurant managers are earning an average of €42,000, while executive chefs get an average of €75,000. Meanwhile, bar staff rates have increased from €12 per hour to €13 over the pandemic, while wages for wait staff have gone from an average of €11 to €11.50, it says. A chef de partie (a fully qualified chef with no extra responsibility beyond a specific section of a kitchen) is, on average, paid €32,000, the same as in Excel’s 2019 survey. The pay hikes, as cited by Excel, hardly seem dramatic.
Recruitment sites such as Jobs.ie are creaking under the weight of hospitality roles, which vastly outnumber all other ads on the site. Sectoral poaching seems rampant. For example, Excel carries an ad for a company that wants to hire four-star or five-star hotel receptionists to work the front desk of a “corporate building” in Dublin for €13 per hour, but with social hours of 8am-4pm Monday to Friday that would be a dream in hospitality. Meanwhile, the Spitjack restaurant in Cork is offering kitchen porters “exceptional gratuities and tips”. Alfie’s in Dublin city centre is advertised for wait staff for €30,000.
Fáilte Ireland subsumed CERT, the old State hospitality training agency, in 2003. But now the State tourism agency provides training only to existing staff who want to upskill. Solas, the successor agency to Fás, now sits at the apex of the government system for pumping new staff into the sector, by distributing funding for courses through the Further Education and Training (FET) system.
Maybe the time has come for tourism to be a subject of its own on the secondary school curriculum
The Solas chief executive, Andrew Brownlee, is in no doubt as to the major causes of the crisis.
“PUP is acting as a barrier to people returning to work. It is directly leading to a skills shortage as we speak,” he says. “There are skills shortages in many sectors – personal services such as hairdressing, construction and tech. But hospitality faces the most complex problem and is most affected by PUP.”
Brownlee says the situation may be helped as the situation with attendance at third level colleges normalises and formerly part-time working students and are no longer able to claim PUP, which will begin to be unwound next week.
Irish Hotels Federation (IHF) president Elaina Fitzgerald is also sales director of the Fitzgerald's Woodlands House Hotel & Spa in Adare, Limerick. She says many hotels got through the summer reopening period by bulking up staff numbers with young, first-time workers who had just done their Leaving Certificates. They would have been ineligible for PUP as they were not working earlier in the pandemic and, in many cases, worked the summer before starting college this September.
“We have to work more on promoting careers in hospitality for young people. We have to get into the schools. Maybe the time has come for tourism to be a subject of its own on the secondary school curriculum,” she says.
For chefs, the traditional staffing pinch-point in the sector, Fitzgerald says many businesses are now hiring abroad. In December 2019, just ahead of the pandemic, the Government loosened rules on awarding work permits for non-European Union chefs. The national quota of 610 was removed and a cap of two per restaurant was also scrapped.
“Hotels either recruit directly from colleges in Europe, or they use agencies to find chefs further afield. A lot recruit from Dubai, where you will find a lot of experienced chefs from India, Malaysia and Bangladesh. Working in Dubai, they will be used to the western style of service. South Africa is another option.”
Under the rules of the State scheme for facilitating essential workers for permits, the minimum salary must be €32,000: “In some cases, that might be higher than what an Irish chef would ordinarily earn for a similar role.”
Perks are important to attract staff. Woodlands built a staff accommodation block 10 years ago, while workers get all their meals and live-in staff get leisure club membership. Such perks are important not only for hotel recruitment. The Spitjack in Cork promises that all its kitchen porters can “order a free dish and a hot beverage straight from the customer menu” while on duty.
Fitzgerald highlights a need for more training programmes to help drive staff up the ranks, as there is also a major shortage of managers: “That is inevitable when there is also a shortage of foot soldiers.”
Brownlee says there is now a “big imperative” for Solas, along with education and training boards (ETBs) and the entire FET system, to “step up now” and try to fill the training and skills gap.
“There has been so much structural change. All consumer-focused industries have been transformed by the pandemic,” he says.
In February, the Government announced the launch of a range of new training programmes for hospitality in conjunction with Solas, ETBs, the IHF and Fáilte Ireland. One programme aims to “develop team leaders” for the hospitality sector while another is to build the skills of supervisors.
Until the staffing crisis eases, you will see some kitchens, unfortunately, using more pre-processed foods
Brownlee also highlighted the Skills to Compete initiative, which aims to retrain workers who lost their jobs due to the pandemic. About 13,000 had entered the programme by late summer, he said.
Fáilte Ireland’s Kelly said the agency is working to “see where the gaps are” in hospitality and tourism education and training. “Enticing those on PUP back into the hospitality sector, and not losing them to others sectors, will also be part of the challenge,” he says.
Cummins, meanwhile, is critical of what he sees as a fractured system for training for the sector – “the whole thing is a mishmash”. He would like to see one body responsible, as CERT was before 2003.
Back at Michael’s in Mount Merrion, ‘Gaz’ Smith is prepared to wait until staff are available before expanding further to meet customer demand.
He acknowledges that some people may be turned off careers as chefs by the perception that there is a culture of bullying in the profession amid a tough working environment.
“The natural environment of a kitchen can be pressurised, but it should not be aggressive. But there are pockets in the sector where that goes beyond pressure into bullying. Screaming and shouting creates a bad workplace. But I think the issue is becoming less prominent than it was because chefs are now understanding that you catch more bees with honey than vinegar”.
He says he gets “two or three texts a day” from other chefs asking if he has any leads on people looking for work.
“Until the staffing crisis eases, you will see some kitchens, unfortunately, using more pre-processed foods, which is a bad thing. You will also see smaller menus and shorter working weeks, which I think is a better way of coping. The one thing that everyone has to understand is that we are all going to have be a little bit more tolerant of these kind of changes from now on.”
