HELP WANTED: Kitchen staff, caretakers, receptionists, bartenders, waiters, kitchen workers, cooks. And the list goes on.
With 68,000 people receiving unemployment benefits and only 10% working, local hotels and motels are still struggling to find help as an avalanche of tourists is expected to fall in South County this summer.
And this comes because the state sweetened the deal by allowing many returning to work to take federal unemployment benefits and make more money before they lose some of their state benefits. Still, the problem persists for these and other companies.
“The situation regarding hotels is so extraordinarily dire right now,” Sarah Bratko of the Rhode Island Hospitality Association told The Independent this week.
“South County is the perfect embodiment of that perfect storm,” she added.
Waves of tourists are coming
Summer tourists and vacationers alike plan to visit a South county soon that is now free of COVID-19 restrictions. With COVID restrictions gone and pent-up trips bursting among those incarcerated for a year, a boom in tourism is expected, according to local Chamber of Commerce and tourism officials.
However, hotels across the country are reporting difficulties in hiring enough housekeepers, kitchen staff and other hourly workers, including those they laid off at the start of the pandemic ahead of the summer season, to bring robust numbers of visitors to the area.
The visit may indeed be memorable, but hotel managers want to avoid online reviews of bad memories like this one recently for a Narragansett hotel.
“Great location for Narragansett but the place is old and needs renovation. There was no mention that the rooms are not cleaned and so I think there should be a discount. ”The customer review has been automatically translated from German.
“All they did was empty trash and replace towels that I had to grab in the hallway to do that … I wouldn’t have been happy, double the price for no room service and the overall dated and dirty condition to pay.”
In a shopping world where online reviews can have a significant impact on business during a busy tourist season, hotel and motel managers prefer reviews like this for a hotel in the same area:
“This hotel is absolutely phenomenal, we recently stayed here for 2 nights and my only complaint is that we couldn’t stay longer! We were definitely hesitant about Covid but they are taking all possible precautions. The staff is absolutely amazing… ”
Complicating hotel managers like Brenda Ball of Fairfield Inn and Suites by Marriott in South Kingstown and Marc Grandmaison of The Break in Narragansett – as well as many others – is this problem that South County represents a high cost of living for this type of worker, in the middle of the US business executive class .
One link to this problem is the limited number of immigrants taking jobs in hospitality, the cost of childcare, a lack of affordable housing, and additional government unemployment benefits, although the state is trying to compensate for this with measures that encourage people to work as well Encourage, said Bratko of the hospitality association.
The perfect storm
“This is all a perfect storm and South County bears the brunt of it, even though it can be found across the state,” she said. “There is nothing. It is very individual for the employees concerned, ”she said.
For example, a person who lives in Providence wants to work in South County but the lack of affordable housing prevents this move, public transportation to the area is difficult to organize for the hours required for work, the person cannot afford a car and some form of child care is needed, she said.
“It’s so frustrating. It’s been a hell of a good year,” she added.
Ball, general manager of their hotel, agreed. “It was definitely a fight. We’ve been running ads on Indeed, Craig’s List and having job fairs since February, ”she said.
Positions in housekeeping, maintenance, breakfast attendant, night inspection are available at the hotel, she said.
Grandmaison, General Manager at The Break – a hotel within sight of the Atlantic Ocean – needs bartenders, waiters, cooks, prep cooks, receptionists and housekeepers.
The managers work extra shifts, people have to be trained for different jobs and he keeps looking for more people before the hotel restaurant opens in just a week and booked tourists come on vacation towards the end of the month.
In North Kingstown at the TownePlace Suites by Marriott, General Manager Patrick Brown said he got a lot of calls – and a lot of no-shows for the interviews for the five positions he has open for reception, housekeeping, and maintenance.
Like other managers, he believes that requests for requests are part of receiving unemployment benefits, but that people may not really want the jobs. Suresh Bhalala, general manager and co-owner of Scarborough Beach Motel in Narragansett, has found the same thing.
“People call me but don’t come in,” he said. Victor Gee, an employee at the 18-room Wickford Motor Inn, North Kingstown, reported the same problem.
The attention, but lack of follow-up on the shortage, also leads some hotels to avoid full opening because they do not have the necessary staff to maintain the entire operation.
Bhalala said his 28-room motel has curtailed daily housekeeping services for those staying several nights. He said he didn’t have the staff to keep up with the work.
National edition
He and others in South County have company throughout the county.
“There were weekends when I had to release rooms because we didn’t have enough people to clean them,” Sloan Dean, CEO of management company Remington Hotels, recently told the Wall Street Journal.
The company has approximately 500 job vacancies across its 78 hotels across major brands such as Marriott International Inc., Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc., Hyatt Hotels Corp. and Carry InterContinental Hotels Group PLC, Dean said.
And the local managers who are filling the void are in good company elsewhere in the United States.
To meet demand, David Mariotti, general manager of Remington, who ran One Ocean Resort & Spa in Atlantic Beach, Fla., Said he spends about half of his 50-hour week doing household chores when it is, according to The Journal gets full.
He drives the laundry trolley, cleans guest rooms, stores linen cupboards and does other tasks that he did for training purposes before the pandemic.
Bratko of the Hospitality Association said their trade group had created a website where members can post job vacancies for people to see (rihospitalityjobs.org).
“With the creation of this new ‘Jobs’ website, our aim is to centralize the opportunities available to both employers and job seekers while the state reopens and recovers,” said Dale J. Venturini, president and CEO of the association.
State support
The plight of hotels, restaurants and other tourism-dependent businesses is the focus of state officials.
Currently, state officials recently state that only about 10% of the 68,000 recipients of unemployment benefit are working.
Governor Dan McKee said in a recent interview with The Independent: “People who are unemployed have to look for work because they are out there.”
“We have to make sure that the small businesses get enough staff or they won’t be able to take advantage of the robust economy to come,” he said.
Matthew Weldon, director of the State Department of Labor and Education, also stated in an interview with The Independent, “In South County in particular, the hospitality industry is the bedrock of the economy.”
“We have to do something and that’s why we’re doing it now. These changes, which we are trying to implement along with the return of the job search obligation during unemployment, should help bring people back into the labor market, ”he added.
Current law only allows people to earn less than their current weekly unemployment benefit. If they earn more, they will be cut off.
In addition, a person can only have 20% of that income free and offset before losing any money from their unemployment benefit.
A change in the law now provides a buffer so that, as Weldon noted, “You can make more money, keep more of what you make, stay connected and get back to work with the $ 300 federal bonus.”
The law now allows someone to earn up to 150% of their benefit amount and still be entitled to partial unemployment benefit, but not receive full payment. “As long as they get $ 1 from the state, they get whatever the federal government makes available,” he said.
In addition, unemployed people who earn money from part-time work receive a reduction in this overall benefit. The law now allows someone to keep 50% – from 20% – of the amount with no penalty, Weldon said.
Weldon also said the DLT reintroduced the requirement that unemployed workers document that they are looking for a job. It wasn’t enforced during last year’s pandemic.
Still, finding a job is not the same thing as looking for a job, hotel and motel managers said, with Patrick Brown of TownePlace Suites by Marriott remarking irony.
“Right now there are definitely a lot of hotel jobs out there for anyone who needs them,” he said.
