Thread by @BartenderHemry

A brief thread on this, using my own place of employment (a restaurant in a fancy hotel, part of a multi-billion dollar hotel group) as a case study.

Currently we're only open 4 days a week because we're short-staffed. Why are we short-staffed? Well...

https://twitter.com/hassankhan/status/1434180427162345474

Company policy is that we have to contact all former employees from March 2020, in order of seniority. Aw how nice.

Except our former GM now lives in TN, our former bar manager lives in Mexico, our cocktail server lives in MI, our former line cooks are 1) in Guatemala and 2)dead

But the policy is good, in theory. In practice, they've chosen to implement it by...forcing the few people who do still live here after a year and a half to *reapply for their jobs and pass a full background check.* Which takes weeks, during which time many people find a new job!

Another result of this policy is our full-time dishwasher comes from a temp agency, which parasitizes both the property and the dishwasher himself, presumably bc he can't pass a background check but possibly just because reasons.

Of the few staff we have managed to bring back through the gauntlet, we have a server who has been demoted to food runner because "there aren't enough shifts." Which is entirely because we're only open 20 hrs a week. But we can't open more because "sales aren't high enough"

So basically we have this beautiful property with unlimited money that's stuck in a catch-22 where we can't expand our hours or hire more people...despite there being a huge pool of local restaurant workers available.

It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen.

This probably deserves its own thread, but another reason it's tough to attract people back to their exact original old jobs is *within 45 minutes of the first COVID closures the restaurant fired all staff and told us we couldn't cash out our PTO.* This was an industry standard!

Mind you, this was of course before anyone knew there would be enhanced UI. The restaurants straight up said "fuck all y'all, go starve" and now a year and a half later are like "dO yOu wAnt to ReAPply fOr yr job"

(I came back because my old manager begged me and I liked working with him. Two weeks later he left for another job)

Anyway fuck every restaurant owner/group that claims they can't find staff. It's 100% because they are extremely dumb, and they also treated their workers in just about the most evil fashion possible at the beginning of the pandemic.