My six months working as a chef a few years ago gave me a whole different perspective on the hospitality industry's labour problems.
While I was a full time employee, doing the work for my own reasons (the experience - certainly not the pay), I worked alongside a lot of agency chefs. The organisation couldn't attract anyone permanent who might actually have to live on the salary on offer.
Some of the stories I heard were real eye-openers. Particularly about where to eat (and where not to) in that part of the country.
The places where the menu ingredients were never fresh, or the head chef's hygiene standards were slack.
As an aside, it is rarely a good idea to eat out on a Sunday evening (Monday also for fish). Most restaurants won't have had a delivery of fresh food for several days. Also avoid places with long menus. Far too much stuff to have been freshly cooked: a lot will have been reheated.
The places (usually hotels) where the management treat the staff so badly that new staff members facing a torrent of shrieking abuse routinely walk out on their first day.
The luxury hotel where the head chef can't keep their hands to themselves. Where all female (in some cases male as well) members of the kitchen team run a constant risk of molestation.
These agency chefs were mostly mature guys with anywhere between 15-30 years of experience. Many had been hotel head chefs. After the initial lock downs were over, the staff shortages of the post-Covid world were liberating for them.
They left a world of seven day weeks, poor conditions and perpetual broken promises on pay and leave. Joining an agency meant most of them put about 30% on their take home pay. They could work the days they wanted and if a place turned out to be run by idiots, or the plain nasty, they could avoid it.
Sometimes as agency chefs they find themselves walking into situations to try to retrieve disasters. One guy hired to 'help out' with a wedding reception arrived on the day to find the permanent chef had stormed out, no food had been ordered or any prep done - but fundamentally that is someone else's problem to own. Who would ever go back?
Now I'm back in a different world where it is possible to earn more in a day, than some of these guys take home in a month, I do wonder how the hospitality industry functions at all.
Even before rocketing inflation put utilities and food costs through the roof, it seems much of the industry could only survive on cheap labour. Hence the agitation from the industry to let the poor of Eastern Europe return.
It might be a hard sell to the public when the cost of living has soared, but maybe we just don't pay enough for the experience of eating out.
Honestly though, an industry that can't (or won't) pay enough to attract the skilled labour it needs to function from the domestic labour market has more fundamental problems.
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