Vaccine? Check. Passport? Check. Anyone to serve you at your destination? Uh, we’ll get back to you.
Lesson summary
Hi there, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English lesson number 374. JR is the producer. He uploaded the transcript, how-to video, and the rest of today’s lesson to PlainEnglish.com/374.
Coming up today: The global hospitality market is suffering from a shortage of workers. Across the world, hotels, restaurants, bars, and tourist attractions are scrambling to fill vacancies as demand recovers from the pandemic-induced recession. How would you like a thousand dollars to work on the Great Barrier Reef?
The English expression we’ll review today is “have a hard time.” It’s not a difficult expression, but it’s good to review it. We also have a quote of the week. So let’s get going!
Labor shortages as economies open up
A bed and breakfast on the Jersey shore; a traditional pub in England; and a tour boat in Australia. They’re very different businesses thousands of miles away from each other, but they all have one thing in common: they’re having a hard time finding workers.
As economies in the developed world restart after over a year of hibernation, businesses are waking up to an unexpected nightmare—a lack of trained workers to meet surging demand. Consumers, flush with cash they saved during the pandemic, are ready to travel again and enjoy restriction-free life of dining out, tourism, and shopping. But businesses that serve these consumers say they can’t find enough workers.
In the US, there are eight million job openings, the highest ever. In Australia, job vacancies are running 40 percent higher than they were pre-pandemic. Eighty percent of Britain’s restaurants had vacancies for both front-of-the-house and back-of-the-house positions.
The shortage has several causes. Many people who work in the hospitality industry are transient: they move where the jobs are to serve tourists. But with the tourism industry shut for so long, many of those workers left town, and haven’t come back. City centers are high-cost locations that heave with tourists and office workers—during the lockdowns, they were ghost towns. Workers at big hotels, restaurants, convention centers, and tourist attractions simply went home or transitioned to other industries, like delivery or logistics.
Each place faces its own challenges. Over the last thirty years, Europe’s economy has slowly integrated, so that people could easily move across borders to fill demand in the world’s second-largest economic bloc. But the lockdowns shut national borders, making it harder for companies to fill jobs with workers from outside their home country. Brexit hit the UK at a bad time: many of the hospitality workers there had come from Europe. They left during the lockdown and may never come back.
Australia was spared the worst of the pandemic, but the Australian economy relies on temporary workers in its agriculture and hospitality industries. This source of labor dried up, and the country is cautious about letting foreigners in again.
And in America, the government was unusually generous with stimulus and unemployment benefits for most of the pandemic. That saved many families from financial distress, but it’s giving workers extra negotiating leverage as economy opens up. America’s unemployment rate, at 5.8 percent, is the lowest since the pandemic began—but is still high when you consider the record number of unfilled jobs.
Both businesses and governments are doing their best to entice people off the couch and into paid work—even if that work is different than what they had done before the pandemic.
The American state of Arizona is paying non-working citizens a bonus of $2,000 if they move into full-time work. Sunny Queensland, Australia is desperate for people to fill its jobs in the tourism industry. The state government announced a program called “Work in Paradise.” The program offers over $1,000 in cash, discounts on housing, and a travel voucher for anyone willing to move to the state to fill vacancies in the hospitality sector. The state Premier, Anastacia Palaszczuk, said there are jobs available as chefs, waiters, bartenders, tour guides, and deck hands on the boats that take tourists around the Great Barrier Reef.
Another tactic is to relax rules and regulations. Britain is famous for serving up draft beer at its pubs. But with few applicants, pubs are scrapping qualification requirements. Australia caps the number of hours international students can devote to paid work. That cap, however, has been lifted for tourism and hospitality jobs.
But many companies know there’s one big thing that would entice workers: more money. McDonald’s, Walmart, Chipotle, Bank of America, and Under Armour are among the companies that announced raises for employees; one McDonald’s restaurant in Florida was offering people $50 just to show up to an interview.
Not just for tourism
The biggest examples are tourism, but other industries are affected too. Specialized manufacturing, mining, construction, agriculture, child care—all these industries are having trouble filling jobs. I hope this is temporary; I hope prices adjust and wages go up and these jobs get filled. Because an unfilled job can have hidden consequences. If a parent can’t find child care, that parent is going to be limited in what he—but probably she—can do in her own career. If a builder can’t find people to build new homes, then housing prices will continue to go higher for everyone. And if there aren’t enough people to harvest the vegetables or work in the slaughterhouses, then food prices go up for everyone.
I do suspect that this is somewhat temporary. Covid scrambled everyone. Suddenly, downtowns that were full of jobs were empty. The people working there left; no reason to pay high rent to live in a place with no jobs. And I still think people aren’t sure how many of those downtown jobs are coming back. Once people have some confidence of where jobs will be for the long run, they’ll be able to move to those places. But if you’re a bartender or waiter or front desk employee at a hotel, you have a lot of negotiating power right now.
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