Many restaurants are introducing additional days off or leaving seats vacant due to staff shortages.
(Photo: dpa)
Berlin Oliver Riek has worked in top gastronomy in Hamburg for a long time. Fixed-term contracts, weekends that can hardly be planned, little income despite a noble menu. The restaurant expert complains that the guest should use his tip to subsidize the stinginess of the establishments. At some point it was enough for him and he switched to system gastronomy.
Riek is not an isolated case. Around 300,000 employees turned their backs on the hospitality industry at least temporarily in the wake of the corona pandemic and looked for something else – around two thirds of them mini-jobbers. This has exacerbated the shortage of skilled workers that existed before Corona.
This will not change as long as the working conditions in the industry do not change fundamentally, believes Guido Zeitler, head of the Food-Genuss-Gaststätten (NGG) trade union: “We must expect that migration will continue if countermeasures are not taken .” In June, the number of employees subject to social security contributions in the industry was still a good four percent below the same month in the pre-crisis year of 2019.
An online survey of around 4,000 employees in the restaurant, hotel and catering industry, the results of which were presented by Zeitler on Tuesday, shows what is wrong from the point of view of the union. According to this, a good third of those surveyed, most of whom have been working in the industry for more than ten years, cannot imagine working in the hospitality industry for much longer. Only 37 percent answered the question with a clear yes, the rest are undecided.
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Lack of staff, time pressure, stress and a short-term change in working hours are perceived as the most stressful. Eight out of ten respondents who cannot imagine working in the industry any longer cited the low pay as the reason.
Read more about labor shortages
The agreed starting wages for specialists in the hospitality industry are between 2076 euros gross per month in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and 2535 euros in Rhineland-Palatinate. In the tourism stronghold of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a skilled worker is only at the minimum wage level, said Zeitler.
It is true that the union has recently conducted collective bargaining almost across the board and has in some cases pushed through considerable wage increases, which approached 30 percent in the lower wage brackets. One reason was the increase in the minimum wage to twelve euros from October, from which the collective bargaining partners wanted to stand out.
However, according to the latest available data from the Federal Statistical Office, only 23 percent of employees in the hospitality industry work according to collective bargaining agreements. In 2010, the rate was still 37 percent.
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According to Zeitler, what the union regulates in a collective agreement does not go down well with the majority of people. From his point of view, the declining collective agreement is mainly due to the fact that the employers’ association Dehoga also accepts members who are not subject to any collective agreement. However, the Institute for Labor Market and Occupational Research (IAB) shows a significantly higher collective bargaining coverage of almost 40 percent for 2020.
Zeitler also complains that the number of training contracts concluded in the hospitality industry more than halved between 2007 and 2021 to a good 43,000 most recently. This development is also exacerbating the labor shortage in the industry.
Hospitality is difficult to unionize
This can already be felt everywhere, says the NGG boss. Restaurants introduced additional days of rest or cut the menu, hotels could not occupy all rooms because there was a lack of staff. In order to change that, the NGG has made a number of demands. She is campaigning for a skilled worker in the hospitality industry to earn at least 3,000 euros gross per month.
However, the union does not rely on their own strength to enforce this. The industry is very fragmented – 80 percent of the companies have fewer than ten employees – and is characterized by high fluctuation and a large proportion of mini-jobbers.
This makes union work difficult. According to a study by the Economic and Social Science Institute (WSI) of the trade union-affiliated Hans Böckler Foundation, the degree of organization of the NGG in the hospitality industry is less than ten percent.
Zeitler therefore demands that the state strengthens collective agreements by making them more generally binding. In addition, public contracts, such as catering in public authorities, should only be awarded to companies bound by collective bargaining agreements.
Working conditions and pay in the industry should be monitored across the board. And politicians should keep their hands off the Working Hours Act. Because if the daily working time, as demanded by Dehoga, is extended to up to twelve hours, this would act as a “fire accelerator” with a view to the migration of staff.
“The hospitality industry urgently needs to change course in order to become more attractive again,” says restaurant specialist Riek. Otherwise the industry is threatened with an exodus.
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