Kristine Sherred

The News Tribune

TACOMA — Usually open seven days a week, Gwendolyn Stence has nixed Mondays at her restaurant in Tacoma because she simply does not have enough cooks.

“I have offered cash signing bonuses, higher than usual starting pay, and we are getting zero hits,” the owner of Rock the Dock Pub told The News Tribune in May.

A new hire with some experience would start around $17 an hour, $3.31 above the minimum wage in Washington state, Stence added. The median hourly wage for a cook in America is $12.10 — or about $25,000 a year.

Brandon Escovedo oversees all 13 restaurants under The RAM umbrella. The company restructured last year and streamlined menus for efficiency, “to eliminate the need for an extra body,” he said, but he still needs more cooks as he prepares for a busy summer.

The Church Cantina, a Latin pub in South Tacoma, recently wrote, “hiring like everyone else,” with a laughing cat emoji on Instagram, where food-focused feeds have, since April, been drowning in similar calls for servers, dishwashers, hosts and cooks. Intertwined with these pleas for workers are posts about updating — or maintaining — mask requirements as Washington state heads toward its June 30 “reopening” following a year of rules and reduced capacities.

Millions of people remain unemployed, and restaurants operators are doing what they can to attract applicants. Some, like Stence, are offering cash bonuses and higher starting wages; others are restructuring their tipping system to share the pot from front-of-house to back.

So why aren’t they finding the workers they need?

“That’s the $10 million question,” said Jim Vleming, an economist for the state Employment Security Department focused on Pierce County. In Washington, the leisure and hospitality sector gained 8,100 new jobs in April, more than any other. Compared to this time in 2020, the industry has regained more than 62,000 jobs, though statewide unemployment hovers around 6 percent.

Reasons cited in the nationwide hand-wringing over understaffed restaurants include the responsibility of child care keeping parents — especially women — at home, the ongoing risks associated with a very public-facing job, and the reality of an industry known for low wages and little benefits, which affects financial stability as much as emotional and mental well-being. All circumstances have worsened during the pandemic.

Others have lamented the extra $300 per month in unemployment benefits at the federal level, which Republican governors of 23 states are moving to end. Worker groups, including One Fair Wage, counter that wages were already too low, and employees kicked to the curb last March haven’t forgotten that feeling of betrayal: More than half of nearly 3,000 restaurant workers surveyed by the organization since last fall say they have considered leaving the industry due to unstable pay.

In Washington, the unemployment benefit remains intact. Though that “might factor into it slightly,” said Vleming, he believes the situation is far more nuanced.

“It’s a completely weird time,” he said. “You definitely have a group of people who were working in restaurants prior to the pandemic and have decided against it.”

Vleming agreed that everything from child care to the unstable hours and public-facing nature of restaurant work have likely factored into people’s decisions to avoid returning to the industry, or entering it in the first place.

New world for restaurants

The restaurant industry has always been unique, but one of its strengths — flexibility — in the pandemic became a liability.

Anna Brady told The News Tribune she had been a bartender and server for 15 years, but Pierce County’s return to Phase 2 in April was her last straw. Fewer customers means fewer tips, she said, which translates to overall lower income. Washington is one of only seven states that requires employers to pay the full minimum wage; the rest allow employers to pay a subminimum wage to tipped workers, including 15 plus Puerto Rico that pay just $2.13 an hour.

That instability is precisely why Bruce Mann, an economics professor specializing in local economies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, is not surprised restaurants have hit a hiring wall.

“To me it makes a lot of sense that they’re having trouble finding people,” Mann said, noting restaurants commonly hire entry-level and part-time workers, and “those are the ones where people come back the slowest” in a recovery.

Put plainly, he said, “They’re not the most attractive option right now. It’s an industry with a relatively high mobility of workers — it’s an easy industry to get into and it’s an easy one to leave.”

Mann, too, views the unemployment boost as nothing more than a modest, in some cases necessary, cushion — a breather after a tumultuous year — for Americans to rethink their desire to work in “a difficult working environment with crazy hours.”

Andy Cook has worked in the industry for decades, now as a restaurant consultant for Harbor Foodservice with clients up and down Western Washington. The labor pool was already shallow, he said, and the nature of the business specifically appeals to supplemental income workers who, for one reason or another, haven’t jumped back into the deep-end, or aren’t yet ready.

“I’m hearing the same thing from such a variety of people — it’s a real thing,” Cook said. “Last year it was online ordering. Now it’s, ‘Oh my god, Andy what am I doing wrong? Why can’t I find anyone?’”

A scan of Craigslist ads for restaurant jobs in Pierce County, for instance, reveals that many restaurants are indeed hiring — but for 20 to 30 hours a week, night and weekend availability required.

That schedule can be grueling in the best of times. If an employee could choose the 20 hours, said Vleming, we might not be having this conversation.

“It’s a whole different ball game now with this economy,” he continued, one that requires consideration of the “psychological factors” of a global health crisis and the fears, emotional rollercoasters and unanswerable questions about the future.

In Washington, the sudden onslaught of job openings coincides with the state’s official reopening date, June 30, when COVID-19 restrictions like 6 feet between tables and a ban on bar seating will expire. Restaurants are preparing for a hectic summer.

Everyone interviewed for this story mentioned “pent-up demand.” That’s great news, right? For restaurants, the new reality falls somewhere between yes and yikes.

“Things are pretty unsettled,” said Peter Levy, whose group Chow Foods owns two restaurants in Tacoma and two in Seattle.

Levy referenced the “mixed messaging” of allowing vaccinated adults to go maskless in public places, which neither his employees nor customers will do for now. The difference between 25 percent capacity and 50 percent, with spacing requirements, makes little difference, which means his “skeletal” staff remains at less than half of its pre-pandemic level. Menus based on seasonality have shrunk because they only have three cooks instead of five.

Fatigue has compelled many seasoned workers to leave the industry all together, he said.

For years restaurants have struggled to find and retain good cooks, where paychecks can be two to three times smaller than their server and bartender counterparts. When the pandemic hit and takeout took over, said Levy, “It really just opened up our eyes to, ‘This has been ridiculous, continues to be ridiculous and we need to do something about it.’”

While Chow’s two fast-casual restaurants always pooled tips, now Cooks Tavern in Tacoma and Gwendolyne Joe’s in Seattle do, too, pushing kitchen pay over $20 per hour. That move helped to retain staff through the worst of 2020 and, Levy hopes, as society flocks to social centers they missed for so many months.

At Primo Grill in Tacoma’s Sixth Avenue district, co-owner Charlie McManus trusts we are on that path, describing his current viewpoint as “cautiously optimistic.” But first, he needs more staff to bring the restaurant back to seven days a week, with its standard late-night service, while still extending two consecutive days off.

Since opening in 1999, he said, “We’ve been through a lot of turmoil. This is probably one of the most challenging times, but we’re on the upside of this. If we knew last March that we’d be doing what we did for a year, a lot of people would’ve thrown in the towel. We limped along as a society and we’re looking out the other side of it.”

They had resisted hiring without an end date in view, he added, especially as a small family business that provides health insurance and competitive pay. “Frankly, we weren’t sure when we’d be able to operate at enhanced capacity. We value our staff and we want people to earn a living wage at the restaurant, but we couldn’t hire up if we didn’t know what was happening.”

Perhaps, then, the industry is just in a holding pattern.

“There are so many things that need to go right to keep a restaurant going,” said Vleming, the state economist. “It’s a tough formula, and I think there’s a lot of nervousness. We’ll know more in a month, and we’ll know more at the end of the summer, but until then, it’s kind of a mixed bag.”