The UK Hospitality Staffing Crisis: Explained
+ queer farming, vegan egg yolks, and the systemic issues that need to be addressed to end food poverty
Nice Pear: a monthly feminist foodletter | Issue #030 | June 2021
Hello!
Hitting send on this email is going to be the last thing I do before I take a week (ish) off!
Off my day job (paid annual leave is a biiig perk of still having a day job)
Off freelancing (my out of office is on, baby)
Off this newsletter (just as soon as I hit send)
(mostly) Off social media (definitely Off mindless scrolling but I might post some cute caravan content)
not Off the blog (because I have been ‘off the blog’ for months now and I’m actually looking forward to having some time to get back into old-fashioned blogging this week).
So! This weeks’ essay is less an essay and more an ~explainer~ of the cumulative effect of Brexit and Covid on the UK’s hospitality sector, based on a conversation on this very topic with my husband/owner of Döner Summer.
👇 Scroll on down for The Essay & Things to Read 👇
If you’re new to this newsletter, you can read about it here & then forward it to all of your pals. If you’re enjoying Nice Pear you can always support it by becoming a paying subscriber, buying me a virtual cuppa, throwing some change in the tip jar, or just:
Photo by Amina Filkins from Pexels
The UK Hospitality Staffing Crisis: Explained
As a person who follows a lot of restaurants on Instagram, every other post on my feed seems to be from venues either hiring kitchen and FoH staff or temporarily closing for service.
So, why are restaurants, bars and cafes finding it so hard to get staff that they are frequently having to close?
Brexit
At the start of 2019, 43% of hospitality workers were from the EU, a number which has fallen to 39% by the start of 2021, with an estimated 300,000 hospitality workers believed to have left their jobs and returned to their home countries since March 2020.
And Brexit legislation has made it harder than ever to recruit EU, EEA and Swiss citizens in the UK.
Jobs in hospitality also tend to be vastly undervalued - making them less appealing to workers. The hospitality sector has the lowest average earnings in the UK, with just less than 40% of hospitality jobs paying below the UK’s national minimum wage and 60% of the UK’s hospitality workforce reportedly unhappy in their current jobs.
Combine British Nationals’ reluctance to work in the tourism and hospitality sector with the number of EU Nationals returning to their home country due to Brexit, and the recruitment pool was already dwindling, even before the pandemic.
Covid
The pandemic has had a knock-on effect on just about every sector, but hospitality has been one of the hardest hit, losing around £80.8bn of sales across the sector in the first 12 months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even since indoor dining reopened in the UK, the number of people eating in restaurants has already decreased significantly.
That downturn may to some extent just be a natural levelling-off, as we return to more ‘normal’ levels of eating out after a rush in the first week. But is also undoubtedly due in part to the number of restaurants temporarily closing for dine-in service, due to short-staffing.
Hospitality venues are under strict requirements to ensure that both workers and customers have information gathered for NHS test and trace. This is a necessary precaution to ensure that anyone who has been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for Coronavirus is able to isolate and contain the spread.
But regular test and trace isolation notices are having a huge knock-on effect, both on hospitality workers and on businesses.
Workers may be eligible for furlough if they are on sick leave or self-isolating because of coronavirus. But only if they were on the payroll before October 2020 (a scenario that becomes less likely over time as the hospitality sector has notoriously high staff turnover - more than double the UK average).
Other than furlough, staff may be eligible for Statutory Sick Pay - though not for the first four days. Employers are also advised to offer paid time off in the form of annual leave, or unpaid time off - but may still dismiss any employee who cannot attend work due to coronavirus as a “last resort”.
All of this means that hospitality employees may be losing out on work - and pay - due to the nature of their work in a high-risk environment. On top of already lower-than-average wages, this makes it harder than ever for workers in hospitality to make ends meet.
Employers and businesses too - especially small hospitality businesses running on notoriously tight margins - are struggling to bring in enough staff to cover every shift - resulting in closures and loss of income.
If employees are isolating - whether due to a positive Covid test or an NHS track and trace notification - they will eventually return to the business, which all but rules out hiring new staff to cover the shortfall. And even if businesses were to hire new staff, the deficit caused by Brexit is making that harder than ever.
Where do we go from here?
There are new proposals for “test and release” schemes in the UK, which would see workers able to return to restaurants after an NHS test and trace notification, on the condition of a negative Coronavirus test. This would drastically reduce the staffing issues caused when entire teams are asked to isolate for a single incident.
Ultimately though, the issue of finding hospitality staff isn’t just about Covid and Brexit.
Until we value the work of hospitality and the true cost of foodservice, and pay employees across the sector a real living wage, the struggle to staff labour-intensive restaurants will remain.
Things to read
Possibly niche content, but do any longtime vegans/veggies remember Tivall’s vegetarian hotdogs? They were very garlicky (and delicious). ANYway, if you do remember them and fancy a nostalgia trip, food52 have tested the best way to cook hotdogs 🌭
Eater’s Queer Table series is really interesting, I especially loved this on queer culture in farming and agriculture - two spheres (LGBTQIA and farming) that we don’t normally imagine together.
The pandemic has not only increased our reliance on food banks but also highlighted the systemic issues that need to be addressed in order to actually reduce food poverty. This is about food poverty/food banks in the US, though I’m sure some of the findings can be transferred here to the UK too:
A study showed that frontline organisations (ie. food pantries) and hunger advocacy organisations believe that they “should focus more effort on tackling the root causes of food insecurity, including poverty and structural racism within the food system…charitable feeding cannot go on as it currently exists”
In vegan news 🌱:
NotMilk is the latest vegan milk to hit shelves. Apparently created with AI, it claims to be more similar to dairy milk than other plant-based alternatives.
This GQ story on the ‘new’ veganism shows how today’s chefs are making vegan food more delicious than ever:
“ They have embraced the constraints of cooking without animal products as a kind of mad science project... They are cooking with creativity, exuberance, intellect, and soul”.
In Vice Bettina Makalintal gives us a good explanation of TikTok’s latest food trend: vegan egg yolks.
Where to find me
June has been a slow month for me, which is fine. I've been enjoying the weather, driving to the coast at weekends, spending time with family and friends. Some writing and pitching have still been done, but it’s taken a backseat this month.
In June I sent 7 pitches, got 2 rejections, and no commissions -yet!
As always, you can find me @ZoePickburn on Twitter, Insta, and other social media, and you can say hello@zoepickburn.com with stories, commissions & foodie chit chat.
And that’s all folks! I’m just about to get in the sea, order a cone of chips, and try to hunt down an elusive vegan Mr Whippy on the Yorkshire Coast.
Thanks!
Zoe
Freelance writer & journalist, food blogger (she/her)
If you enjoy Nice Pear & want to support it (or any of the other content I create online) you can always become a paying subscriber, buy me a virtual cuppa, or throw some change in the tip jar.