Hotel, restaurant industries still seeing major employment crisis

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the hotel and restaurant industries have never been the same.

The majority of workers have either moved on to different careers or, for the most part, moved on towards retirement.

There are several voids to fill in each industry, so the million-dollar question becomes: Who’s going to fill them?

Jim Bence, the president and CEO of the Saskatchewan Hotel & Hospitality Association, said his organization is looking at a bunch of different options to solve the employment problem.

“The conversation was dominated by the crisis that we’re in: Trying to find employees or have them come back into our industry,” Bence said on the Brent Loucks Show. “There’s certainly a real lack of them right now.”

The pandemic has been the major source for all of the employment issues.

As thousands of workers in the industry were laid off due to the pandemic, many found new career options and haven’t looked back.

“When the pandemic hit, and you lay off hundreds of thousands of people, the big challenge then is you’ve got a lot of folks off work,” Bence said. “With that uncertainty, many took opportunities to get other training to go to other industries.”

As workers made switches to new career paths, some decided to look towards the future of retirement. Bence said the number of people choosing to retire was way higher than expected.

“We really are concerned about the number of retirements we’re seeing right now, (especially) early retirements,” he said.

There are three real possibilities that the industries are looking at to shape the future.

With many jobs to fill, Bence said it’s vital hotels and restaurants find workers for the positions sooner than later.

“One has to do with training and mobilization of Indigenous and First Nations,” he said.

“The second has to do with newcomers to Canada that are already here. There’s lots of refugees that have recently come, particularly from Afghanistan. The really exciting one would have to do with being able to attract foreign talent into the country.”

While three pilot project options seem to be the best ways to move forward, Bence said local workers will still have opportunities to find work.

“We really need to exhaust every single opportunity to hire local first,” he said.

On average, every seven out of 10 youth workers get their first job in the industry, according to Bence. Continuing to excite the youth about the endless possibilities will be a major factor moving forward.

“One of the creative things we can do is to get in front of our youth, particularly (students in) Grade 10, 11, and 12, and excite them about this industry,” Bence said.

The restaurant side of things is starting to see better results for the first time since the pandemic, but the hotel side of things has not been as fortunate.

“We are seeing revenues in restaurants starting to creep back up. But it’s those hotels that are just really, really struggling,” Bence said.