This year is seeing like never before hordes of workers walking out on their jobs in search of higher wages, better working conditions, and in general just more livable lives. In what’s come to be known as the Great Resignation, workers in the restaurant and hospitality industry are leading the way. In April of this year alone, more than 740,000 people in the leisure and hospitality industry quit their jobs. According to a survey of 4,700 current and former restaurant workers by Black Box Intelligence, 15 percent of the workers left the industry within the last year, and another 33 percent said they hoped to leave by the end of this year.
The COVID epidemic has been partly to blame, but issues over masking and vaxxing have only exacerbated an underlying situation that was already beginning to fester. As far back as 2013, Salon magazine, noting that almost 10 percent of the U.S. workforce was in the restaurant industry, asked, “Why is it legal to treat them so poorly?”
The treatment is poor on all counts: wages are “appallingly low,” most workers receive no paid sick days, vacation, or health insurance, and kitchen work in particular is dirty, arduous, and often dangerous.
How does the industry do it?
Largely through immigration. Fully 20 percent of workers in hospitality are foreign-born, and the foreign-born percentage of dishwashers and kitchen help is 37 percent. As the pro-immigrant New American Economy website noted in 2015:
It is hard to imagine the country’s $700 billion tourism and hospitality industry without the contributions of immigrants. In 2015, foreign-born workers made up more than one out of every five workers in the sector—and even larger shares of those employed in more labor-intensive roles. In states where tourism and hospitality is especially vital, immigrants represent a significantly larger share of the workforce than the population overall.
These “contributions” have been going into the pockets of restaurateurs, not their American employees, and those employees have had enough and are moving out.
This prompted Domino’s Pizza CEO Ritch Allison to complain this week to CNBC’s Jim Cramer about the “slowdown in immigration.”
In the U.S. [Allison said] with minimal population growth organically, we do — we need immigration in our industry to continue to have enough team members. We need to see more immigration to continue to have a robust workforce.
As always, the attitude of the corporate C-suites is to keep up the cheap-labor infusion rather than improve the way they treat their employees.
Cramer echoed Allison’s complaint in his own CNBC “Mad Money” segment:
Ritch Allison started, I think, a conversation that we’re all going to have to talk about. We don’t have population growth in this country. … But more importantly, he’s saying, we cut off immigration. We stopped it, but the great thing about our country is immigrants come in, they become drivers. Next thing you know they own a Domino’s, then they own several places. That’s ending. We literally have to start thinking about an immigration policy that involves taking in people. Think about that. What kind of discussion is that when, not that long ago, the idea was that we’ve got to keep people out.
For corporations like Dominoes and CNBC, keeping people out is anathema. Take them in, take them in.
For more, see CNBC website.