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!!!
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