Restaurant owners whose businesses survived the first year of the pandemic are finally beginning to see their customers come back, but now thereâs a new problem this already battered industry has to solve: finding enough workers to be able to serve them.
âWe definitely are seeing a shortage in restaurant workers in the community,â says Joe Campana, a Colorado Springs entrepreneur who owns several area restaurants and bars, including Bonny and Read and Shame & Regret. âWeâve been OK, but Iâve heard it all over town. Iâve had a number of different owners call me in the last few weeks asking me to forward applications over to them, anything weâve got.â
Helping the Powerless Build Power
Oral histories of five activists whoâve worked in and for worker centers
Mary Altaffer/AP Photo
Activists rally outside New York Gov. Andrew Cuomoâs office to call on a $15 minimum wage.
Over the past quarter century, a new form of worker organization â worker centers â have arisen among groups of workers, primarily immigrants and African Americans, for whom unionization isnât usually an option, largely due to the limited scope of the laws governing collective bargaining rights. To tell the stories of these organizations, the Prospect
has conducted oral histories with a range of worker center activists and leaders. Here, edited and condensed for space, are excerpts from five of them.
â â
Common migration routes from East Africa to Europe. Route information adapted from the International Organization for Migration, August 2015, by Colin Kinniburgh. Countries party to the Khartoum process are shaded in orange (note: not all shown on this map). â
At the 1936 International Conference of Business Cycle Institutes, sponsored by the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, Vienna. Ludwig von Mises is seated in the center with mustache and cigarette. Gottfried Haberler also pictured, at right. (Source) â
In 1896, William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat from Nebraska, ran for president on a fusion ticket with the Populist Party. This cartoonist from a Republican magazine thought the âPopocraticâ ticket was too ideologically mismatched to win. Bryan did lose, but his campaign, the first of three he waged for the White House, transformed the Democrats into an anti-corporate, p
Brian Candee, who has been in the restaurant business for 30 years, normally gets 50 to 60 emails when he puts a help wanted ad on Craigslist. But when he was hiring for Dinh Dinh Kitchen, his new Southeast Asian-American restaurant in Bedford Hills in Westchester County, he got zero.
Zero.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “I actually anticipated that hiring wouldn’t be too difficult because of the reduction of restaurants. I figured there would be a lot of good, skilled people looking for work.”
Others in the industry are experiencing the same thing.
Christopher Bates owns several restaurants in the Finger Lakes wine region. But lately you can find Bates