Original title: California restarts economic activities and the catering industry is facing a shortage of personnel. Source: CCTV News Client
The state of California in the United States has fully reopened its economic activities on June 15, local time, and has lifted restrictions on passenger capacity in restaurants, stores and other retail industries. While the people are eager to return to their normal lives and enjoy eating out, the state’s catering industry is facing a new round of staff shortage crisis.
Since May 2020, although California’s catering and hotel industries have added 420,000 jobs, they are still about 450,000 jobs less than the level before the epidemic. According to the employment data released on June 18, local time, California lost more than 2.7 million jobs during the epidemic. Although it added more than 100,000 jobs in May this year, it is for California, which is in urgent need of manpower to restore the economy. Still weak.
The California Restaurant Association had earlier estimated that as many as one-third of restaurants in the state would not be able to weather the difficulties caused by the new crown epidemic or would face bankruptcy. The person in charge of the organization has also said that for those catering owners who have survived the epidemic, the shortage of industry personnel will be a brand new crisis they face.
Although California Governor Newsom has said that the state’s economy is recovering, many of the catering owners in Los Angeles who have been hit hard are still frustrated with the status quo. As it is difficult to find a sufficient number of chefs, waiters and kitchen staff, the pace of resuming normal business has slowed sharply. Many restaurant owners describe the recruitment of restaurants as a nightmare, and they have never encountered such a situation. The restaurant refuses many diners who come to patronize every day. Because there is no staff to serve these guests, the seats can only be left unused. The increase in vacancy rate is a fatal blow to the financial structure of the restaurant itself. For this reason, many restaurants are forced to shorten business hours and provide cash rewards for recruiting new employees, which intangible increases the cost of the restaurant.
Not only is California’s restaurant owners facing the crisis of manpower shortage, but the restaurant industry across the United States is also affected by the shortage of personnel. The American Restaurant Association reports that the restaurant industry will lay off 2.5 million employees in 2020. With the gradual opening up of the economy in some states, the catering service industry’s manpower shortage has improved, but as of April this year, there are still nearly 1.4 million vacancies in the catering and hotel industries across the United States.
Faced with the problem of staff shortage, many experts and scholars have also analyzed several factors that lead to the scarcity of job seekers in the catering industry, including the instability of the industry, and restaurant employees are mostly made up of temporary workers. In addition, there are many factors such as long working hours, scarcity of benefits, and low wages, which force them to choose other industries that can obtain higher salaries. Some people in the catering industry said that the fear of the new crown virus is still lingering. After struggling with intermittent lockdowns, home quarantine, and changing health regulations, they have become nervous. There is so much certainty that I can no longer engage in this industry. In addition, the extension of federal unemployment benefits provides a buffer period for workers who stay at home. At present, there are still about 2 million people in the United States receiving benefits. After a long period of rest and thinking about the future, some people have chosen a new career path. (CCTV reporter Liu Xu and Xu Xiao)
(Edit Lei Lu)