By Laura Pratt
Labour issues and the restaurant industry have been uncomfortable bedfellows since time immemorial, the relationship became particularly strained during the pandemic, when so many restaurant staffers left the bedroom altogether, amid shutdowns and unsteady-looking futures. And those with their eyes on the scene will tell you the situation was dire before COVID and hasn’t improved dramatically since it receded. That’s because, when the dust settled and restaurants looked to re-build their rosters, there was no one to be found. Indeed, says Bruce McAdams, associate professor, School of Hospitality, Food, and Tourism Management at the University of Guelph, the labour crisis plaguing the restaurant industry today is nothing short of “existential.”
There’s never been a shortage of challenges that the industry hasn’t been able to “duct-tape its way through,” he says. This time, he’s not so confident about an industry that’s been slammed for its long hours, low wages, and unsavoury working conditions.
The first thing McAdams asks students in his “Introduction to Foodservice Management” course is what it’s like working in the restaurant industry. They respond with harrowing descriptions of stressful, long hours, arduous work and holiday shifts. More than that is what those in the academic space term “emotional labour” — or “having to deal with cranky customers and how those people weigh on your mental health and well-being.”
“That’s a huge problem to overcome. Addressing this reality calls for stakeholders coming together to destigmatize foodservice work.” This is new territory for the restaurant industry, he says, recalling his early forays into it and how the expectation, then, was to simply “suck it up.” More recently, he wrote a paper on mental health and all 20 of his interview subjects said they spend “a significant amount of time” handling their employees’ well-being and mental health.” Additionally, a recent study done in New Zealand showed what Gen Zs dislike the most is having to work with people. “It’s almost the perfect storm against the industry right now.” And the scene is exacerbated by a demographic tidal shift that’s seen the pool go shallow and the bathers take shelter.
There are 1.1 million people in Canadian foodservice, and some 50 per cent of Canadians have worked in the industry. But Canada has a shrinking pool of 15-to-19-year-olds, with 20-to-24-year-olds basically flat. These sectors account for almost half the foodservice workforce. Additionally, young people are delaying work in favour of education and volunteerism.
Before COVID, job vacancies in Canadian foodservice hovered around 65,000. Thanks to the pandemic and the widespread fear it engendered around shutdowns, the summers of 2021 and 2022 saw approximately 162,000 foodservice vacancies; today, there are 98,000. The situation is particularly dire in rural areas, says Chris Elliott, chief economist and VP of research, Restaurants Canada.
What happened to restaurants during the pandemic is well known. The foodservice industry was regularly in the mainstream media talking about having to introduce furloughs and pivot to takeout. Restaurants generally became more chaotic as a result — the government declaring starts and stops, owners bowing under debt loads, people leaving in droves and every workday short on staff, with those in attendance scrambling. In no time, it became all about survival.
McAdams resists pointing figures for the current crisis. “I’m not an economist,” he says, “but from a micro point of view, the greatest single issue holding restaurants back right now is the lack of quality management in their operations, the lack of leaders.” That’s the case, he suggests, because managers switched industries during the pandemic “because they were furloughed or it was a gong show.” A continuous labour shortage followed, with a dearth of people to cover shifts, requiring management to step in — not a sustainable model.
It’s not surprising, McAdams says, that hospitality schools suffered declining enrolment among domestic students during and post COVID. A Canadian Tourism Human Resource Council study asked respondents if they would recommend a job in hospitality to their family. Pre-pandemic, 60 per cent said yes; after the pandemic, just 40 per cent did. McAdams has his 40 fourth-year hospitality students in his leadership course write weekly reflections on their hospitality placements. “What I read is sometimes horrifying, often sad.” Their stories about the work environments, sense of satisfaction, and opportunities for growth and development, are disheartening, he says. Half the people in his four-year program don’t intend to stay in the industry after they graduate. “It’s a heartbreaking place we’ve created.”
With the exception of some champions trying to improve things, he says, there’s not a collaborative approach from industry stakeholders to addressing the labour shortage. As someone whose first job in restaurants was in 1979 when he was 14, he says the scene is a far cry from what it was. “As an industry, we’re almost in intensive care.”
More than that, he says, the labour crisis and the disengaged workers it’s produced have reduced the quality of restaurant’s products. “Labour,” he intones, “impacts everything.”
Another issue McAdams singles out invokes the supply side. There are “far too many restaurants in this country, if you actually want to get to the nuts and bolts of the labour issue,” he says. He blames this on low barriers to entry and a franchise system whose overseers are haphazard with their franchise sales, placing restaurants in locations with no chance of success, keenly aware that their top-line royalties are not dependent upon profits.
The Opportunity
Still, McAdams is not without hope. “It always gets worse before it gets better,” he says. Ultimately, he believes restaurants are resilient. While restaurant workers don’t save lives, per se, he says, the pandemic revealed that they do improve life. He says stakeholders need to regard the labour issue with so-called “cathedral thinking,” a concept drawn from the Middle Ages, when people worked on projects they wouldn’t live to see finished. “That’s what we need to understand, that this isn’t going to be fixed in five years.”
And in the meantime, he believes working environments have improved, thanks to the removal of some of the mental-health stigma and the eradication of some of the kitchen-based harassment. “In my day, if a chef threw a plate at my head, I’d duck. Now, if you throw a plate, you’ll be cancelled.”
As for the enduring problem of emotional labour, wherein guests feel more entitled, more willing to raise their voice, companies are not putting up with it. “They’re firing customers, putting policies on menus and front doors saying this is a safe work environment, you must respect our staff. That sort of line has been drawn in many places as we try to restore the balance of power with our customers.”
Another meaningful legacy of the pandemic, says David Hopkins, president of The Fifteen Group, is that it forced restaurants to figure out where they made their money, and respond accordingly, with some closing for all but their dinner rushes and others shuttering in the early days of the week.
Beyond that, says Hopkins, “we’re paying our staff better to retain them, which needed to happen.” Inflation and COVID have prompted restaurants to raise their prices and, he says, those that did this wisely could pay their employees more as a result, and give them better standards of living, which bumped retention. “That’s a great thing.”
Indeed, says Elliott. The pandemic fallout is “forcing operators to examine the culture in the workforce, and be more mindful of how valuable staff are to the success of the business. As Warren Erhart of Whitespot Restaurants has said, ‘It’s not about the great resignation now, it’s about the great retention.’”
Individual restaurants can beat the labour challenge with progressive policies and strong, people-centric leadership, McAdams says. “The best operators I know are fully staffed now and continuing to raise the bar. They’re paying for [employees’] work shoes, offering benefits, saying if that’s what it’s going to take to have them stay with me, so be it. I can’t operate my business without it.”
The trick, he believes, is for restaurateurs to break out of a woe-is-me mindset, where they’re glued to labour statistics, gloomy Restaurants Canada statements about shortages and Bank of Canada predictions of recessions, and instead start viewing individuals as assets. “They need to say, ‘I must convert this 17-year-old who seems to be enjoying their summer work in my restaurant to thinking about this as a career opportunity.’”
In other words, restaurants need to focus the same attention on the experience of their internal customer as they do on that of their external customer. “That takes a cosmic shift in energy,” McAdams says. “And that’s how we can get through this.”
