Managing A Crisis!

I work as a manager for a well known and highly successful chain of restaurants. The chefs we need are skilled but work to a basic menu and standard recipes. The company is really struggling to recruit and retain chefs. We are always short staffed in the kitchen.

This has been made worse by the head office decision that chefs should be recruited at the National Living Wage rate of £7.50 an hour and on contracts that only guarantee 2 shifts or 16 hours a week.

The reality is that we are so short of staff many of these guys are working 7 days a week, anything up to 90 hours, often moving from branch to branch to fill gaps. No matter how many hours they work they only get paid at the single rate of £7.50 and the only way they can make decent money is to work themselves into the ground.

The managers have had to resort to setting up a WhatsApp group to message each other when we need to fill gaps in the kitchen. Chefs are running around all over the place.

All these extra hours should be completely voluntary but I've seen chefs who refuse to take on too many hours deliberately penalised by only being rostered for their minimum 16 hours. So you end up with a crazy situation where people are either doing so few hours they can't earn a living or so many they risk damaging their health.

The chefs don't understand the power they have in this situation. They waste time arguing with each other or squabbling with the front of house staff. They delude themselves into believing that one day a tribunal somewhere is going to award them huge sums in compensation for the way they've been treated.

That makes me laugh. It's never going to happen.

But if they just stood together and pushed they'd find the company is so desperate for their skills they could easily win huge concessions on pay, overtime rates and sensible hours. 

Come on chefs - time to wake up and smell the coffee!!!

 

It's About Time!

It's about time we all spoke out about the excessive hours that are being worked by chefs in UK kitchens. Up and down the country in hotel and restaurant kitchens chefs are working 50 or 60 hours a week, damaging their health and putting a strain on their family lives, often not even being paid in full for the hours they work.

Back in the 1880's society was appalled by conditions which prevailed in mills and factories where workers toiled in cramped and overheated conditions for 12 to 16 hours a day. Trade Unions campaigned for a 8 hour working day and a 40 hour working week and won. Those guys had sense. They understood that there has to be a proper balance in peoples lives. 8 hours for work, 8 hours for leisure and 8 hours for rest.

This principle held fast for over a century and was applied equally to hotels and restaurants. Under the Wages Council system a standard working week of 39 hours applied and if chefs or any other workers were needed to work over this on a voluntary basis it they had to be paid at a premium rate.

This changed in the 1990's when the Wages Council system was abolished and any form of regulation or collective bargaining to control working hours in hospitality was systematically dismantled by the global hotel and restaurant chains who had come to dominate the sector in the UK.

The only slight respite was enactment into UK law of the European Working Times Directive which among other things limited the average working week to 48 hours. This was weakened in the UK by providing a loophole whereby employees could opt out.

In their usual wholly unethical manner hospitality employers have taken unfair advantage of this loophole by including the opt out as a standard clause in employment contracts, rather than  allowing a conscious decision by workers in line with the spirit of the law.

As a consequence a whole generation of chefs have now been cajoled, bullied and brainwashed into believing that putting in excessive hours is a necessary element to succeeding in the trade. Thus we now see in kitchens the recreation of conditions that were eliminated in factories over a century ago. Cramped kitchens where chefs toil in overheated condition for 12 to 16 hours a day.

This is unacceptable in the 21st Century.

We need to build a campaign to take back our time and our industry. Campaigns such as this often begin with a small step. This is why the Unite Combine is issuing a call to all chefs to exercise their legal right to opt back to the 48 hour limit under the Working Time Regulations.

To obtain a campaign leaflet contact chefscombine@gmail.com