SAN DIEGO (KUSI) – As the California economy finally begins to reopen, restaurants and business that have been shut down for months are starting to looking to hire new employees so they can once again fully reopen.
But, many of these businesses are having trouble finding people to work, since they are are being incentivized to stay home with payments from our government. If you make more money staying home, having extra free time, why would one commit to working 40 hours a week for less money?
Many say these people aren’t being lazy, they are just being rational.
In order to find workers, restaurants are promising more pay and benefits to get potential workers to commit to their job openings.
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What if all of the county’s restaurants reopened their doors following a year-long pandemic that forced massive layoffs and hardly anyone showed up? To work.
It’s more than a hypothetical riddle.
As drinking and dining venues across San Diego County and the nation get the green light to more widely welcome back the customers they’ve been craving since COVID-19 first shut them down almost 14 months ago, they’ve been confronting a near-crisis labor shortage.
While it initially caught employers off guard, it shouldn’t be all that surprising.
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San Diego is experiencing something of a perfect storm as it transitions into life under increasingly relaxed reopening rules driven by rising vaccinations and diminishing infection rates. That, in turn, has unleashed a torrent of job openings not only for restaurants and bars, but also for hotels, casinos, theme parks and other service industries at a time when enhanced jobless benefits remain alluring.
San Diego Restaurants Likens Search for Workers to a War : You Can t Find People
On 5/7/21 at 12:57 PM EDT
Amid the worker shortage across the country, San Diego restaurants are likening the search for employees to a war. It s like a war, just because it feels like this is endless, Dario Gallo, owner of Italian restaurants Civico by the Park and Civico 1845, told
The San Diego Union Tribune. After 14 months of COVID hell, you finally get the orange light to open up at 50 percent capacity and you can t find people to come back to work, David Cohn, co-founder of the Cohn Restaurant Group, added.
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It’s been nearly 2 ½ years since chef Travis Swikard returned from a high-profile job in New York to his hometown of San Diego with the goal of opening his own restaurant.
It took a year to find the right location, the former Bottega Americano space at 1195 Island Ave. in East Village. But ever since then, Swikard’s California-Mediterranean restaurant has been held up by the pandemic. As COVID-19 restrictions are finally lifting, Swikard has finally set a firm opening date: June 4.
Callie has long been the most hotly anticipated restaurant in the region, and not just because it will help reactive East Village, which has seen several restaurants come and go over the past five years. Before he came home to San Diego in 2019, Swikard spent 10 years in New York, working for world-famous Michelin-starred French chef Daniel Boulud, including from 2016 to 2019 as culinary director for three of Boulud’s properties.
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