In a sharp reversal, restaurants that once grappled with widespread pandemic-induced layoffs are now struggling to find enough workers to fill positions as diners return and business begins to rebound.
Across the country, many restaurant owners have pointed to unemployment benefits as the reason people aren’t applying for jobs, but the rank and file of the restaurant industry say the lack of workers is the result of a widespread exodus from an already unforgiving industry, which was made even more unforgiving by the pandemic.
According to a report from the National Restaurant Association, employment in restaurants and bars has been on a steady incline since the beginning of the year. But the restaurant industry is still down 1.8 million jobs from pre-pandemic employment levels, with full-service restaurants experiencing the most significant job losses since February 2020.
Resident Taqueria in Lake Highlands is one of countless restaurants in the Dallas area flooding job boards and social media sites with job postings. Owner Andrew Savoie said he’s been trying to fill two line cook positions for months with no luck, and he has a third position opening next month. The jobs start at $9 an hour plus tips. He said he’s worried about how he and his employees will manage if they can’t fill the jobs soon.
“It’s hard to find people right now. There are so many openings. But where did everyone go? Nothing comes in or, if it does, you’re seeing just not well-put-together job applications with no résumés or anything,” he said.
Savoie never had to let employees go during the pandemic. The openings he has in his restaurant are the result of natural turnover in the industry, he said, but it doesn’t make them any easier to fill. He believes that the lack of qualified candidates is the result of workers fleeing the industry when jobs dried up last year.
“We have a skill job, and if you’re not being utilized, you have to find another skill,” Savoie said. “I’m not sure where people have gone, but they’ve gone off to find another skill in the meantime. Will they come back? I’m sure they will, but I’m not sure when.”
Other jobs recently posted in a Dallas service industry Facebook group: cooks and cashiers at Greenville Avenue Pizza Co. with starting pay of $13 to $16 an hour, a part-time dish/prep cook at Thunderbird Station paying $12 to $14 an hour and a morning line cook at La Reunion paying $15 to $20 an hour. Many eateries are even touting sign-on bonuses.
Christopher Slijk, an associate economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said the Texas labor market has experienced a rather rapid recovery over the past few months, but it’s still a far cry from pre-pandemic levels, particularly in the hospitality industry.
In a survey conducted by the Dallas Fed in April, 56% of the Texas service industry executives who participated said they are currently trying to hire or recall workers. About 52% of respondents said they currently have a reduced employee headcount, with the average headcount decline hovering around 27%.
“Of those that were trying to hire or bring people back, about two-thirds said they were facing a lack of applicants. That was really consistent across the board,” said Slijk.
Roughly 42% of the executives surveyed listed generous unemployment benefits as a main roadblock in the hiring search, meaning potential employees are more lured by unemployment benefits than service industry jobs.
Slijk said it’s possible some people in the restaurant industry are choosing to stay on unemployment benefits rather than return to their service jobs, but suggestions as such are purely anecdotal, and it will be months to a year before there’s enough data to have a granular picture of the labor shortage and its root cause. He noted, though, that Dallas was already facing a tight labor market prior to the pandemic, and some of what employers are experiencing is a preexisting condition.
Without supplemental pandemic payments like the $300 weekly federal benefit, Texas’ average unemployment benefit is around $246 a week with a maximum payout of $521. Dozens of Texas business groups have lobbied for the state to end the extra federal unemployment pay, and Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday announced that Texas will do just that — opt out of the additional $300 payments to jobless Texans effective June 26.
Britt Philyaw — executive director of the Heard That Foundation, a Dallas nonprofit that provides support for hospitality workers — said she doesn’t know of anyone who has turned down restaurant jobs to stay on unemployment.
“I find it really disturbing some of the things that I’ve seen on social media. I don’t like that the labor shortage is being politicized and how it is being said that people are lazy or they’re making more money on unemployment. I don’t think it’s the truth. The people we’ve worked with throughout the pandemic who were on unemployment and got their stimulus checks were not making ends meet,” she said.
What the pandemic did, in her opinion, was highlight the instability of restaurant jobs. The quirks of service industry work like tips and irregular schedules are often draws for many people in the industry, but they were cast in a different light when the pandemic hit, Philyaw said. Suddenly the things that were once perks of the business were no longer worth sacrificing health insurance, predictable pay and stability for.
“Something that is desperately lacking from the conversation is the fact that 70% of the population that works in the industry are women, some of them single with kids. I think that should be a huge part of the conversation,” Philyaw said.
The service industry labor market was already tight before the pandemic, and with even more jobs than there are workers, Philyaw said employees have the ability to be choosy about who they do go work for, which is making it even harder for employers, some of whom are offering sign-on bonuses and raising wages to attract new hires.
“People in front-of-house and back-of-house [of restaurants] are shopping around,” she said. “And they’re looking for things they value, like ‘Am I going to work in a safe environment? Am I going to work in an environment where I’m not going to be harassed or bullied or forced to work for free?’ So there’s just a lot of things at play, but I really don’t think it’s as simple as the stories that grab the most attention.”
For Andrea Winn — a longtime restaurant professional who’s held server, sommelier and wine director positions at Dallas restaurants like Bolsa and Abacus — the decision to leave the industry came when the downtown Dallas restaurant she was working at reopened over the summer and management did not adhere to capacity limits, mask mandates and other safety protocols.
She took a full-time job as a wine and beer buyer for Whole Foods, stepping away from the industry she loved and had worked in since completing her degree in history and getting out of a desk job she loathed. It wasn’t easy to leave the dining room — she was saying goodbye to higher pay, flexible hours and the ability to travel when she wanted — but the benefits outweighed the cons, she said.
“I have a job now [at Whole Foods] where I am guaranteed a certain amount of hours every week, I know how much I’m going to get paid, and I have health insurance and sick time. The sick time was a really big thing because working in restaurants, unless you are really sick, you are expected to work sick. You’re looked down upon, and your schedule will be threatened if you don’t [work],” Winn said.
There is a common perception that restaurant workers are young, uneducated and in the industry out of necessity, Winn said, and such thinking makes it easy to believe that the shortage of workers is due to an unwillingness to work. But the reality is the industry is made up of seasoned professionals like her who sought out restaurant and bar careers and are now choosing to pursue careers that offer a better quality of life, she said.
Many people she knows made the decision to leave the industry last year when jobs were unavailable or wildly unpredictable to go back to school or pursue careers in the fields they studied in college, she said, and they don’t seem to have plans to go back. As for Winn herself, she said she’s turned down a handful of restaurant job offers, but now works a few shifts a week as a sommelier at Trova Wine + Market in Dallas just to scratch the itch of being in the bustle of a restaurant.
“I get to hold on to my full-time job with my full-time benefits and my sick time, but also get to do the thing that I love at least once or twice a week. I think that is something more people in my position are going to do,” she said. “I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to taking a full-time tipped job at a restaurant again — because those people are making piles of money — but there’s no benefits, and once you have that, it’s really difficult to go back.”
