By Maggie Perzyna Recent media reporting about the hospitality industry has been dominated by stories about mass resignations and workers leaving for white-collar jobs. Many sources cite a combination of low wages, instability and the lack of a decent working environment as factors pushing workers out of restaurants and into better paying, more secure jobs. […]
The Canadian labour market, and particularly that of the foodservice sector, surged back with significant growth in February 2022. That’s according to the latest data from Statistics Canada, which showed that the Canadian economy added 337,000 jobs last month, offsetting the losses in January by a wide margin. The labour force participation rate rose to […]
By Laurent May In spite of the challenges of the past two years, there is a future for the restaurant business. Automation has a big role to play, but that doesn’t mean good old-fashioned human hospitality is out of style, or ever will be. We need one just as much as we need the other. […]
By Tom Nightingale The rollercoaster that Ontario restaurants have been on throughout the last two years makes Canada’s Wonderland look tame by comparison. Operators and staff have had to get used to drastic shifts to how they can operate, often at short notice, on numerous occasions throughout the pandemic. The latest of those came earlier […]
While the ongoing conversation around the restaurant staffing crisis has largely focused on kitchen staff and hourly front-of-house team members, it’s worth remembering that the challenges are also felt by restaurant management. As kitchen and dining room staff turnover increased dramatically throughout 2021, so did that of restaurant management positions. In both limited- and full-service […]
The Canadian economy lost 200,000 jobs in January amid stricter public health rules put in place to slow the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, according to Statistics Canada data. As the foodservice industry has come to expect over the last two years, it was hit hardest than most, The decrease marked the largest drop since […]
Foodservice’s staffing issues are nothing new, but the circumstances of the last two years have seen it snowball into a full-blown labour shortage. In September 2021, the number of unfilled jobs in the sector in Canada grew to nearly 200,000 vacancies. Restaurants Canada’s Senior Economist Chris Elliott notes that the association realized that the labour […]
Canadian food industry associations are calling on the federal government to create an “emergency” temporary foreign workers program to address the chronic labour shortages still being seen in the sector. The Canadian Press reports that the group of 10 associations representing the food and beverage processing sector includes Food and Beverage Canada, the Canadian Poultry and Egg […]
A common topic of discussion in the latter half of 2021 within the foodservice industry was the ongoing labour shortage. That has been well-documented, but what about those staff who have been clocking in to their restaurant shifts throughout the pandemic? COVID-19 hasn’t just caused the workforce to shrink and stretched restaurant operations in both […]
By David Hopkins Ontario’s minimum wage is going up again on January 1, 2022. And this time, unlike in the past, the minimum wage for servers will also rise significantly. It is set to increase almost 20 per cent, from $12.55 to $15 per hour. This comes at a time when most restaurants are trying […]
