Orlando eatery owners up wages
Say hiring woes are ‘compromising’ the industry
About six weeks ago, Kirt and Maxine Earhart did something they hadn’t had to do in many years: they put a “hiring” sign in the window of their restaurant.
To entice job applicants to Maxine’s on Shine, a brunch favorite that’s operated in Orlando for almost 10 years, the Earharts increased wages to at least $10 an hour and started a tip-sharing program so everyone makes $15. They offered a day’s pay for employees to get vaccinated. And in the summer, they are giving their staff a week of paid vacation time.
Slowly, they’re finding new employees, but they are still about 10 people down from the 28 they employed before the COVID-19 pandemic hit — one of many businesses struggling to find workers. Being short-staffed has forced Maxine’s to open only four days a week and shorten dining hours.
“People left the industry,” said Maxine Earhart. “That’s what’s really happening.”
Republican lawmakers have mostly blamed hiring difficulties on the enhanced unemployment benefits people are collecting — weekly $300 checks from the federal government on top of a maximum state payout of $275. Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis reinstated the requirement to apply to five jobs a week to stay in the unemployment system.
Department of Economic Opportunity Secretary Dane Eagle said he has not ruled out stopping the federal payments before they expire in September.
But restaurant owners who spoke with the Orlando Sentinel, like the Earharts, rejected the notion that higher unemployment compensation is the only thing deterring job candidates. Rich Templin, a lobbyist for Florida AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions around the state, said the biggest issue is that jobs in the tourism and service industries don’t pay well and don’t provide benefits.
“We are seeing a major reset of the labor market in this country because of what we just went through and what we’re going through right now. What business owners are saying is, ‘We want you to come back under the old rules and be paid poverty-level wages,’ ” Templin said. “And people are saying, ‘no.’ ”
The minimum wage in Florida is currently $8.65 per hour or about $18,000 yearly for a full-time employee. It’s scheduled to increase to $10 in September and eventually hit $15 in 2026 after voters approved Amendment 2 in 2020.
Some businesses are responding by raising pay now.
Orlando-based Hawkers Asian Street Food, which operates 11 restaurants and is looking to hire 86 employees, has committed to paying all non-tipped employees $15 per hour in the next 30 days. The tipped minimum wage will go up to $8.
The restaurant chain also is increasing the bonus employees receive for referring a new hire, offering retention bonuses and increasing the discount employees get on Hawker’s food, said spokeswoman Esther McIlvain.
“We’ve got to be an employer of choice,” said Hawker’s CEO Kaleb Harrell, after the “max exodus” of workers from the restaurant industry in March of last year.
John Rivers, founder of the Winter Park-based 4 Rivers Smokehouse chain, said every one of his restaurants is hiring, totaling more than 100 open positions. He said the restaurants are operating at about 70% of the staffing level they need, which has forced the
company to shift corporate office employees into restaurant work.
On a recent weekend, Rivers himself worked shifts at The Coop, his other restaurant in Winter Park, and the company’s human resources department has helped fill in at the 4 Rivers location in Daytona Beach.
Just recently, 4 Rivers has raised its minimum wage to $10, and Rivers said tip-sharing adds about $4 per hour on average. The company also is offering bonuses for staff who refer new employees. Rivers, whose company in a normal year does about $50 million in business, pointed to the enhanced unemployment benefits as one reason employers are having a difficult time hiring.
“People are choosing to stay home and continue to collect this stimulus check, and it is absolutely compromising, if not crippling, the industry at the moment,” Rivers said. But he added that it would be “naive” to think it’s the only thing, citing the number of people who chose to leave the hospitality and service
industries for other jobs during the pandemic.
By May 2020, when statewide unemployment peaked at 14.5% and joblessness in Orlando surged to 22.6%, the tourism industry had lost 460,500 jobs, about 36.8% of its workforce. It’s since gained back about 302,000, according to figures from the DEO.
But as of April, at least 487,000 Floridians were still out of a job, out of a labor force of more than 10 million people. And about half of the 1.3 million jobs that were lost because of the pandemic and government shutdowns still haven’t been recovered.
Alonzo Rice, 37, of Orlando, is one of those employees reconsidering if he wants to back into restaurant work after he was furloughed and then permanently laid off from his $9.50 an hour position at Burger King during the pandemic.
He hasn’t collected any unemployment but has been able to find other work, first helping people collect jobless benefits at $19 an hour and later stacking boxes on palettes for $11.50 — more than he’d make if he went back to fast food.
“I would love to go back because you get to interact with people, you get to make them feel good about coming to your store. It’s just the pay has to be competitive, and it has to match today’s market,” Rice said. “That’s the No. 1 motivator, I believe, why the workforce is not returning to these jobs. Because if you’ve moved on to something better, with benefits, better work environment, why would you go back?”
Maxine Earhart and Harrell said a large portion of the industry’s workforce has transitioned to delivering for Amazon, Uber Eats and GrubHub and aren’t keen on returning to jobs that keep them on their feet all day in hot kitchens.
“The pandemic just kind of put them over the edge,” Harrell said. “Working in a kitchen is tough work, and frankly it’s harder than driving a car for DoorDash.”
Some business owners also pointed to the shortage of teenage and college-age employees who are forgoing summer jobs; workers with health conditions; or kids too young to be vaccinated who are still afraid of catching the coronavirus.
Often overlooked are working mothers who were forced to leave jobs because schooling went virtual, child care facilities shut down and elderly family members who needed to be cared for.
Since April 2020, at least 172,400 women in Florida have left the workforce completely, said Andrew G. Nixon, press secretary for the DEO, although many groups believe that number to be an underestimation.
“For most women, it’s not a choice,” said Heather McCulloch, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Closing the Women’s Wealth Gap. “You literally cannot go back to work if your kid is sitting at home.”