PARIS – For six months, Christophe Thieret has been waiting for France’s sluggish national barriers to be lifted so that he can reopen his company’s restaurants and hotels in a picturesque corner of eastern France and remember the 150 employees who were on leave months ago.

However, when he asked them to return for a reopening in mid-May, he had an unexpected headache: at least 30 said they weren’t coming back, and he tried hard to hire new workers just like he had to take action.

“If you close things that long, people think twice about whether to stay,” said Mr Thieret, a co-manager of the Heintz Group, which owns 11 hotels and three restaurants around the riverside town of Metz near the border with Luxembourg.

Restaurants and hotels across the country face the same problem. After months of vacation, workers in droves decide not to return to the hotel industry. This is a particular concern in France that is usually high on the list in the world most visited countries.

A shortage of perhaps 100,000 restaurant and hotel workers is particularly worrying, according to the industry’s largest trade groups, as hundreds of thousands seek work after France’s worst recession in decades. Employers say it is becoming increasingly difficult to lure job seekers into an industry whose future is more or less tied to the whims of the coronavirus and the uncertainty of vaccination campaigns.

Seeking help signs hang in restaurant and hotel windows across the country.

The missing workforce puzzle emerged when thousands of hotels and restaurants that weathered the crisis struggled to make up for an 80 percent decline in business since last spring. The Covid-19 lockdowns have cost France’s tourism industry, a cornerstone of the economy, over € 60 billion lost profit since last year.

“We know we’ll have customers again this summer – that’s not the problem,” said Yann France, owner of La Flambée, a restaurant in the popular northern coastal town of Deauville. “The concern is that at a time when we have to make up for a huge loss in sales, we are short of manpower.”

Some say the problem may not be as serious as international visitors are not returning to France yet and job seekers, including students, in need of work to help make ends meet, could eventually fill any void.

However, others say corporate uncertainty is the broader issue.

“The bigger problem is uncertainty about the future of the industry,” said Thierry Gregoire, owner of NT Hotel Gallery Group that owns five hotels and three restaurants around Toulouse. “Will things stay open or could another shutdown because of a new virus?”

For those already seeing signs of a labor shortage, it is now clear that a generous government-subsidized vacation program designed to help French employers keep staff on call has also caused unexpected drawbacks. In the six months that hospitality workers received 85 percent of their salary to stay at home, many had plenty of time to reassess their futures.

“A lot of people decide that they have other things to do than carry on in a job where nothing has happened,” said Thieret, who is also a representative of France’s largest hospitality trade organization, UMIH, the Union of Hotels and Industries , is. He added that thousands of other employers in the organization have reported the same recruiting difficulties.

Catherine Praturlon is among those who decided to completely change gears during the pandemic. She was a hotel manager in the Moselle region in eastern France for almost 30 years. She had considered doing something else but never made the leap.

As the government turned hotels on and off for months and travelers slowed down, the job got boring, she said. “They had no perspective on the future,” said Ms. Praturlon.

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May 2, 2021, 11:15 p.m. ET

Instead of returning from vacation, she recently quit her job and took you in another industry. (She said a confidentiality agreement prevented her from naming the field.) “The pandemic lit a fire under me to make that change,” she said.

Restaurant and cafe owners are especially cautious when it comes to losing skilled and seasonal staff as they prepare to cope with an expected increase in customers as those with open-air terraces begin on May 19, the first date of a gradual Reopening, may be reopened announced last week by President Emmanuel Macron.

The government will examine every 15 days whether the gradual reopening in the hospitality, culture, sports and related activities can continue or must be stopped depending on the course of the virus.

As in New York, London and other major cities where government restrictions have been lifted, fed-up consumers in France are ready to squander pent-up savings on gastronomic delights and the joie de vivre that has been denied them for many months.

France’s tourism professionals also hope that the imminent lifting A year-long ban on all but major trips from the United States to the European Union, just in time for the summer vacation, will pull Americans back from free spending after a long absence.

Job fairs, where employers typically fill vacancies, have been postponed due to a nationwide curfew and restrictions on large gatherings, making it more difficult to attract candidates in a sector that was already facing labor shortages before the pandemic.

Mr France, the owner of La Flambée, is trying to recruit a butler, a kitchen assistant and a chef de partie after some employees said they would not return to work – so far without success.

“The labor shortage is staggering,” he said. Restaurants in the Calvados area, where La Flambée is located, will need to fill 3,000 to 4,000 full-time and seasonal jobs to prepare for an expected surge in customers, he added.

Government subsidies were vital to keeping businesses alive. However, they do not necessarily guarantee that employers will be able to protect the most skilled workers.

Craig Carlson, the owner of Breakfast in America, a popular pancake restaurant in Paris, said the vacation programs, while essential to the restaurant’s survival, paradoxically put some of its higher-paid workers at a disadvantage.

While waiters, who earn France’s monthly minimum wage of 1,539 euros, receive their full pre-tax salary as part of the vacation program, cooks and managers who earn more had to cut about 15 percent of their wages to stay at home until the pancake house reopened.

For a manager, a single father with two children, the reduced pay means “he’s really in trouble,” said Carlson.

In Mr Thieret’s restaurants and hotels in Metz, the 30 unexpected vacancies are not yet weakening, as restaurants will be reopened gradually and tourism and hotel bookings are unlikely to return to preandemic levels quickly.

Still, it is a challenge to replace employees with years of and even decades of experience who decided during the pandemic that the work is no longer what they wanted.

“At first people said it was nice to relax at home for a month or two,” Thieret said. “Now there is a lack of long-term visibility in this industry and some people aren’t so sure they want to be in this industry.”

He works with other hotel and restaurant owners in the area to create retraining programs in hopes of attracting new candidates.

Mr France said he and the local restaurant and hotel owners also worked with employment agencies in hopes of attracting applicants in need of seasonal work for the expected crowds.

“We will try to limit the damage that has been done to our business,” added France.

“But when we don’t have workers, it becomes really difficult.”

Gaëlle Fournier contributed to the coverage.