Italy also lacks arms before the summer

In Italy too, the hotel and catering industry is struggling to hire or retain employees. The sector employs around 350,000 seasonal workers, and there is a shortage of 40% for the summer season which has already started. Jildaz Mahé opened in 2014 the “French Square” in Rome, an establishment that brings together around ten food trades: restaurants, creperie, bakery, wine cellar, on a total of 1000m2. The company employs 34 people from ten different professions. Jildaz Mahé is already seeing a frank and massive return of tourists:

“We have seen a huge influx of French people for a month and a half. The French have rediscovered their second love, coming to spend a weekend in Rome. This also applies to all the big countries that like to travel, the countries of the North, of Eastern Europe. There are a lot of Poles in Rome at the moment. The restaurants are full but the quality of service has gone down a lot.”

The pandemic has been there, and some of these employees have converted to other jobs that are less restrictive in terms of working conditions. Some have gone abroad, notably to France, attracted by better salaries:

“I have friends in Saint-Tropez who have recruited Italians who are hard workers when they feel like it, and who have gold in their hands. They discovered that there was a brain drain there. is ten years old. And there, it is the escape of the golden hands.”

The other explanation is the citizenship income, a sort of Italian-style RSA, created just three years ago, when until then there was no minimum wage in Italy.

“There was finally a capacity to resist quietly thanks to this income, observes the Frenchman. And when it was necessary to put people back to work according to the old standards, therefore with a salary well below French standards, they did their calculations and only returned to the workplaces in the catering industry who had salaries well above the minimum income.

Add to that training problems and disjointed schedules, late at night and on weekends. Given the crisis, Italian employers have said they are ready to make a move, but only on the condition that employers’ costs are reduced.

One region stands out, Liguria, around Genoa, where a bonus, partly financed by Europe, of 2,000 to 6,000 euros, is offered to employers who hire seasonal workers in accordance with the rules of labor law and in good conditions. . The contract must last at least six months and even nine, for bars and restaurants. The idea is to make the sector more attractive and less precarious, by lengthening the season and improving working conditions.

Find this column on the website, the app and in the international mobility magazine French abroad.fr