Italy, Greece, France, Spain: all tourist destinations are faced with the same disappearance of servers, cooks or cleaning employees, put off by low wages and an unbalanced lifestyle. Employers are looking for the parade.
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This summer, you will wait. Wait for your pancake. Wait at the airport. Wait at the hotel. Because the arms will not be numerous enough to serve you, no matter where you plan to leave: from Colmar to Heraklion, Puglia in Perros-Guirec, from Saint-Tropez to Seville and to North America, the world Western tourism is concerned by the shortage of tourism employees, in particular for precarious seasonal contracts and their exhausting tasks. What was absorbable in the last two summers, due to the decline in the number of foreign tourists, should be more difficult this year: everything indicates that northern Europeans will resume their great migration to the sun.
What will they find on the beaches on the edge of the Adriatic, where, in Emilie-Romagne, 83 % of professionals do not find staff? And on the Spanish coast, where are 50,000 seasonal employees missing? In the same causes -known for a long time -, the same effects, whatever the state of the labor market or its mode of regulation: professionals in the hotel and restoration make the observation of the attractiveness of their sector, lack of qualified personnel and the difficulty in accommodating them.
The holes in the schedules will result in ad hoc closures, an increased versatility request for employees or disorganization that can harm the quality of service, as is already the case in the airports of Paris, London or from Amsterdam. This last case is symptomatic of a sector which preferred to separate from a part of its workforce during the Pandemic of COVID-19, despite the aid implemented by governments. Few employers expected such a rapid rebound in the activity and some have, for lack of visibility, preferred to do with the means at the summer of 2020, without rehiring their usual seasonal workers. The leisure sector was the last to recruit after the crisis, in a general context of lack of workforce.
“We cannot pay better”
During the periods of closing of cafes and tourist places, employees of the hotel and restaurant hotel turned to other sectors in tension and “found that it was more sympathetic elsewhere, better paid and less restrictive” , underlines Pascal Pedrak, secretary general of the CFDT Ile-de-France, in charge of hotel, tourism and catering. In France, the increase in salaries in the sector, which entered into force on 1 er April, was quickly caught up in that of the minimum wage, due to inflation. This same inflation which, in parallel with the reimbursement of the loans guaranteed by the State, limits the room for maneuver of restaurateurs, affected by the rise in prices of raw materials.
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