MIAMI — As demand in the leisure and hospitality sector roars back to life during a wave of reopenings, Miami-area employers say they are finding it increasingly difficult to fill roles to meet it.
It’s the unexpected paradox the region finds itself one year into the pandemic: customers everywhere — and not enough workers to be found.
Friday, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported U.S. payrolls had increased by 916,000 in March — a trend led by the accommodation and food services sector, which added 215,900 jobs.
In the Miami area, state data, which lags a month, show accommodation and food services added 1,200 jobs in February, though the local sector remains some 37,000 jobs short of where it was prior to the pandemic.
One of the largest gains was in the leisure and hospitality industry, where restaurants and bars added more than 176,000 jobs nationally. But those numbers are only a fraction of where they were a year ago, before the start of the pandemic. Employment in leisure and hospitality are down by 3.1 million workers, more than 18%, since February of last year, according to the Labor Department report.
Restaurants in Miami feel it. They’ve faced unprecedented difficulty in finding staff.
In an industry where 40 percent of the staff is made up of part-timers, some have switched careers.
“It’s not that we’re not getting qualified people. We’re not getting any calls at all,” said Jacqueline Pirolo, co-owner of Miami Beach’s Macchialina Italian restaurant, a fixture on South Beach for more than nine years. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”
Getting potential restaurant employees vaccinated may be the first step, said Sergio’s Cuban restaurants CEO Carlos Gazitúa, who also is a director of the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association. He said many employees have stayed away for concern of working in the only industry that regularly deals with unmasked guests.
“People are scared in their hearts. You have to say, ‘Let’s attack that first,’ ” Gazitúa said.
While Florida was one the first states to reopen, its public-facing workers weren’t prioritized for vaccines, as they were in other states. Florida announced everyone 16 and older will be eligible for the vaccine this Monday, and Gazitúa hopes workers will return in the 30 to 60 days afterward.
The restaurant workers who have stayed in the business are burned out, several restaurant owners said, and the industry needs more people to relieve them. Gazitúa said he has hired staff looking to work fewer than seven days, even if it meant less money. He’s paying bonuses to workers who are working six days.
Gazitúa’s own mother, who founded the business with one store in 1975, has been working as a busser in one of the restaurants during staff shortages as he bounced from one restaurant to another.
“The money doesn’t matter. It’s about burnout,” Gazitúa said. “People need to spend time with their children. They need a life. They need some down time.”
What if workers don’t return after two months? Pay them to come back, Gazitúa said. He has floated the idea of asking the government to pay employees half their $300 stimulus, even while they are working.
“I know it’s a desperate move, but we’re in desperate times,” he said.
It is not clear if full, prepandemic employment will be restored, as many workers remain on the sidelines of the labor force. That is especially true among women, who economists say have taken on a disproportionate share of the burden for caring for home-schooled children.
Jonathan Plutzik, co-owner of the Betsy Hotel on Ocean Drive, said many who worked in the local hospitality industry before the pandemic appear to have moved on with their careers — or moved out.
“Some workers have reoriented, rethought, or moved and otherwise changed their lives in this 12-month COVID lock-down,” he said. “They have come out in a different place, either physically or emotionally, in terms of what they wanted to do.”
Employers are always weighing decisions about whether to raise wages to attract staff back — but said ongoing uncertainty about the course of the pandemic continues to make hiring decisions challenging. Owners and operators may also be using the pandemic to permanently shave their pre-pandemic ranks to make operations more efficient.
Said Plutzik: “A smart business person may be asking themselves: Did I really need two of those people versus one now, or three versus two, to get things done.”
