Australia's Hospitality Staffing Crisis Isn't All Bad: Influential Members of Sydney's Hospo Community Weigh In

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Reader: if you are currently looking for a gig in hospitality, you should know that you are hot property. Right now, the industry is struggling to find staff across the board, from front of house talent to head chefs to bartenders to dish pigs (as a former washer of dishes in commercial kitchens, I am allowed to use that term).

So the questions here are why and what. Why is there such a shortage of workers? And what can the industry do about it?

There's never been a greater consumer demand for the experience of eating and drinking out. Firstly: 'tis the season. The fact that holidays are approaching and now we've got the longer daylight hours of summer mean that extreme socialising is an effortless no-brainer. But also, in places where the lockdown timeframe was particularly extensive — like in Melbourne and Sydney and other parts of Victoria and New South Wales — the human reaction to the re-opening of our cities is akin to letting a house-bound kelpie off the leash in a paddock of dumb sheep. It's focused high-energy mayhem!

So the demand and enthusiasm has never been higher. But the restaurants, bars, cafes, clubs and snack bars that have so gratefully returned from the business-threatening challenges of COVID, are under a new kind of pressure.

We had the chance to speak to a cross-section of Sydney hospitality greats to get their personal insights on how they're impacted by this issue, why it's happening, and the pros that accompany the cons of this situation.

Jeremy Blackmore of Tio's and Cantina Ok!, Kobi Morris who is Head of Operations at the Paramount Coffee Project and Reuben Hills, and Issac Martin — social media/brand consultant and burger enthusiast behind @issac_eatsalot — joined our latest instalment of live-stream series Hot Takes & Takeaways (a super entertaining panel which we highly recommend you watch in full here hosted by the fantastic Gen Fricker).

Blackmore explained: "The issue for the industry in the whole is that we're normally buoyed up by heaps of holiday- and working-visa people, international students, and there's just a huge amount of those people who aren't here anymore... Especially the bigger venues are struggling at the moment."

Issac Martin, a former pastry chef and line cook who has an ear to a lot of working chefs, described the "wage wars" going on with competition to recruit being at an all-time high for hospitality workers across the spectrum.

"It's just ridiculous what some venues are going to the lengths of offering kitchen hands [for example]... They'll literally be offering kitchen hands fifty dollars an hour to work a weekend."

How important are wages, ultimately? Like in any industry, the increase of a base salary or hourly rate is always almost a positive for the workers. So, as demand softens and those itinerant members of the hospitality community return to our shores, restaurants and bars, will this impact be long-term?

Watch the insightful discussion below (and if you're handy at pouring beers, making coffees, designing elite menus, washing dishes or running a restaurant: call us. We know a few people who would be very interested in getting your details...).

You can watch the full first episode of Hot Takes & Takeaways on our Facebook page. If you'd like to learn more about what restaurants are doing to survive — and thrive — during this tough time, check out Uber Eats' Enterprise Hub.