Page 34 - foodservice - June 2018

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PMRAONFAILGEEMENT
AVOIDING A DESCENDING
TONY ELDRED
FOOD SERVICE
There has been a great deal
of publicity in the media lately about the exploitation of workers in the hospitality
and retail industries. The main focus has been on the practice of not paying for excess or penalty working hours, and underpaying staff via an illegal hourly rate.
I find these reports quite depressing. They show the industry that I love in a very bad light and deter young people
– who we badly need – from applying for casual jobs.
It would be easy to
attribute these issues to general unconscionable behaviour on the part of hospitality business owners. To be fair, there is no doubt in my mind that some business owners do deliberately set-out to exploit those they employ, but the greater majority are victims of being caught-out in an economic pincer.
I am seeing this first hand in a number of businesses I deal with in my professional capacity as a management consultant. It goes like this:
Costs for food, beverage
and overheads and wages increase rapidly; but pricing doesn’t keep up due to the pressures of competition in an oversubscribed market. Margins decline. Public expectation for food quality and polished service – driven by television and social media – increases at the same time, making the need for skilled chefs and restaurant managers more and more important.
The job market cannot supply the skills needed in the numbers that are needed, so it becomes
a sellers’ market for skills. This pushes salaries for skilled people higher and higher. Business owners cannot operate without
these skills, so they are forced to pay whatever the market demands for key staff.
Take a head chef salary.
We are commonly interviewing people who are asking $100– 140k, with some substantially higher. You have to sell a lot of meals to cover a salary at this level. So the chef is getting big money, but the overall kitchen wage should not exceed 30 per cent of the food revenue. The only way to make this work is for the chef to reduce the rest of the kitchen staff to a skeleton and make them work excessive hours.
This can often create what I call a descending spiral of disaster. Subordinate staff in the kitchen get tired of the long hours and quit, putting the kitchen into chronic short staffing. This causes other staff to leave and it is
Tony Eldred operates Eldred Hospitality Pty Ltd, ‘The Hospitality Specialists’. Contact him on (03) 9813 3311 or at eldtrain.com.au.
SPIRAL OF DISASTER
WITH THE UNDERPAYMENT OF FOODSERVICE PROFESSIONALS INTERMITTENTLY IN THE NEWS, TONY ELDRED, CONSIDERS WHY IT KEEPS HAPPENING AND WHAT THE INDUSTRY AS A WHOLE CAN DO TO PREVENT IT.
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