Dallas Workers and the Purported Labor Shortage in the Restaurant Industry

[TexasTowelie]

Jose Gonzalez lost his job as bar manager at Midnight Rambler inside The Joule hotel last year, making him one of many casualties of Headington Companies’ mass layoffs after the onset of the pandemic. Gonzalez credits unemployment for allowing him to “hopefully wait for my job to come back at Rambler.” Time passed and the call never came. (Midnight Rambler reopened on March 26, nearly a year after closing.) Now a year later, others are currently in the position Gonzalez was before he found work with a spirits distribution company. They will soon have less flexibility than he had.

Next month, Texas workers will no longer be eligible for the federal Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation benefit, which had provided an additional $300 per week. On May 18, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would be opting out of the program. Some have lauded the decision. The Texas Restaurant Association, with nearly 40 other business groups, urged the governor to make such a decision in a letter “because of the critical labor shortage in Texas.” The TRA acknowledges it’s not a silver bullet.

However, removing the extra weekly allowance that had kept so many economically challenged folks afloat during the pandemic is not likely to Pied Piper workers back into dining rooms or kitchens or behind bar tops. The food sector was the hardest hit industry—one that was slow to rehire initially—and will likely have the hardest time recovering fully.

As dire as some say it is, employment has begun to rebound. About 13.8 million people were employed in leisure and hospitality jobs this March, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s up from 8.7 million last April after mass layoffs took place. That’s not nothing. Still, the latest jobs report from the BLS notes that while the leisure and hospitality sector has “added 5.4 million jobs over the year, employment in the industry is down by 2.8 million, or 16.8 percent, since February 2020.”

Read more: https://www.dmagazine.com/food-drink/2021/05/dallas-workers-and-the-purported-labor-shortage-in-the-restaurant-industry/?ref=mpw

[Sherman A1]

1. My take away from this is the person mentioned

Found another job and simply is not going to go back to the Restaurant Sector for employment. Combine that with a heavy participation in the Sector by women who are currently caught up in the childcare conundrum, the low wages, lousy schedules, general abuse by customer & employers and you lead to a case of folks not wanting to go back to this or other Service Sector jobs.