Boomerangs – return of the baby boomers

One way of tackling the current staffing shortages in the hospitality sector is to encourage older people to come out of retirement and back into the workforce, if only for a few shifts per week.

The Government’s recent Work Bonus Scheme announced at its Jobs and Skills Summit has provided an impetus in this regard, in that it has raised the amount pensioners can earn before their pension is affected by an additional $4000 per year. However, according to Tourism Training Australia Chair John Hart OAM, this is still not enough to make a significant difference.

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An argument to be made for attracting older workers

“Our amount of hospitality industry vacancies have increased to over 350,000 – we've actually filled 73,100 in the first quarter, but the number of overall vacancies is still rising, because as quickly as we backfill them we get even more opening up, given consumer demand is so strong,” John tells us.

“Particularly in the foodservice sector, we’re seeing very high levels of activity – of those 360,000 odd vacancies, 83 per cent are in foodservice, so we're really seeing incredibly strong demand. If you look at the turnover results, we're way above previous numbers in both spend and visitations: average spends have increased, visitation has increased and we're seeing those increases extending from dining to takeaway.”

John acknowledges there is an argument to be made for attracting older workers into the industry: “They’re a workforce which disperses: even in the regional areas you’ve large number of grey nomads who move all around the country and can work as they’re moving – so it’s a very mobile workforce and certainly willing and able to work.

“But this has to be seen as one measure among many, part of the solution but not the solution. We’re never going to get the types of numbers we need out of a measure like this and I can’t see we're going to get any significantly greater movement in the Work Bonus Scheme because the cost to Budget is too high for the benefits that Government get out of it, so I don’t expect that they’re going to move any further on it. That $4000 a year increase came with a pretty large budget allocation so it’s a very expensive measure for a relatively marginal benefit at that sort of level.”

John says more work needs to be done towards making hospitality more attractive as a career prospect – “We have to be more flexible in the way we allow people to work, to accommodate every possible potential employee. But even if we do that, we're still going to find it very difficult to compete with other occupations and industries where they’re able to offer even greater flexibility – we can’t have people working from home in a restaurant, so we’re right up against it in the perspective of working with people from other occupations.

As to how to make the industry more appealing for older workers, John says it’s “horses for courses” – “You’ve got a whole lot of different sources of labour that are going to want different things. You’re probably going to have people returning to the workforce after having kids, be they males or females, that are going to want to work school hours – they might want to work six days in the middle of the day; whereas you might have others that would prefer to work four longer days instead of five as a full time employee.

“I also think we’re at a point where frankly we can’t afford to be too demanding of any potential employee in terms of skills and experience, it’s just not part of where we are at the moment. We used to say that “upright and breathing” was fine, now just upright is fine and the breathing’s optional! We really are getting to a point of absolute desperation, so we can’t afford to be too fussy – if there’s a warm body there that’s willing and able to work, I can almost guarantee they'll be snapped up.”

Older staff are keen to work

Restaurateur Barry Iddles, proprietor of iconic restaurant 360Q on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, has recently pursued a strategy of bringing older workers back into the workforce. He explains how this came about: “Last May I was in Port Douglas and a friend of mine was running the floor in the restaurant I was visiting. She was short-staffed so I decided on the spur of the moment to help out by clearing tables. Someone leaving the venue saw me and asked how I old I was. I said ‘I’m 67’ and they responded, ‘Well, I’m not that old and she won’t give me a job.’ That planted a seed in my mind about employing some older staff because they’re keen to work. At around that time my daughter had just come back from travelling around Australia and she’d said, “You know Dad, with all the overseas workers away because of Covid, the only people working right now in hospitality are travellers and retirees’.

“At 360Q we regularly send out postcards promoting our change of season menus, so I decided that for our next one to promote the autumn/winter menu, I’d include on the bottom right hand corner a call-out for staff. What it said was ‘WE’RE HIRING – Juniors, come and we’ll teach you the art of hospitality; Millennials, come and show us what you can do; Retirees and Baby Boomers, come back to the workforce for one or two shifts a week.’ 

Barry got 12 senior staff as a result of the ad – all of whom were new to hospitality. “Our oldest is 78 – she phoned a few times, no one got back to her, and I decided she’s got to be fit and keen to keep trying, so I gave her a call and thought, I’ll get her in for an interview. Now she does a couple of shifts a week and busts my manager’s butt every day asking for more!”

Barry says what older workers can bring to your business is life skills, and that’s often more important than hospitality experience. “It’s not particularly hard to train people up with those basic waiting and serving skills and all the older workers I’ve employed are quite intelligent. I have a 70 year old worker who is a retired nurse, she moved to the area and wanted to meet people, and working in a restaurant is a great way to do it – we do a lot of women’s club lunches and she’s met heaps of people through that. She’s brought in one of her friends to work here as well – they do a four to five hour shift once a fortnight.”

“I think the Government is trying to help – there’s a new Visa introduced late last year, the 400 Visa which is a 3 month Visa designed to bring people in from overseas. After three payslips you can apply to have them on a 408 which means they can stay 12 months – if they’re amazing you can keep them on, if they’re no chop you can send them home. They can’t work for anyone else while they’re here, only for you – I think that’s a good system. We had an Indian guy who kept wanting to be sponsored and that was too difficult, but when the 400 Visa came through I was able to put him on that and we’ve now extended it via the 408 for 12 months.”

He acknowledges staff shortages are not just a legacy of Covid: “We’ve been struggling for a while as an industry to attract and retain local talent. Being a chef used to be seen as glamorous, but it’s bloody hardcore and I think today more people realise that. I turned 68 on Friday and I did a couple of events on the weekend back to back, and I can tell you every joint ached – but I can still outdo the young ones!

But, he says, the best way for Government to create some incentivization would be to “get out into the secondary schools and teach kids that a career in hospitality can be about a lot more than just cooking. They need to let kids know that it’s a path to learn business management skills and that you can create and build your own business. I created a business which was turning over $18m and that’s just by using my brain – I didn’t get enough formal training. I know that when I was at trade school they didn’t focus enough on business studies, didn’t teach you about profit and loss, how to run a business, how to keep your costs down.

“You can go to work every day, or you can create your own business and be savvy about it – make sure each person in that business is generating a profit for the business. So part of what you learn is how to get other people working for you to grow your business and become profitable. And I think that’s what the focus should be on teaching our kids, that hospitality is an actual opportunity for a lucrative career.”

Market research report shows older workers returning to hospitality sector

The Big Shift, a recent market research report commissioned by shift work e-platform Deputy on the changing landscape of Aussie hospitality, also found older workers are coming out of retirement to work in the sector. According to labour economist Dr Shashi Karunanethy, who analysed the aggregated data from Deputy customers of Australian shift workers in hospitality, this is likely due to businesses making a concerted effort to improve labour conditions to encourage older generations back into the workforce.

“Our research found there was an overall generational shift or relapse where Deputy data recorded an increase in the share of baby boomers and gen Xers into the industry, which also marries up with anecdotal data from Deputy’s clients,” Shashi says.  “In light of the staffing shortages, hospitality employers have had to reach out to existing community members, even family and friends to plug those working gaps.

“We also found that during the pandemic a number of baby boomers had prematurely retired, then came back came out of retirement into the workforce. We dug deeper into that to try to understand why, and part of it was due to cost of living pressures with inflation and utility bills biting – that was certainly weighing on the minds of older Australians and some of them considered working, then re-entered the workforce partially as a result of those concerns.

“We saw the largest generational shift in the older workers in the fast food sector as well as sit down restaurants –  a 1 to 2 percentage point increase. That may not sound like a lot but gen Xers and baby boomers represented 9 to 10 per cent of the workforce so this is equivalent to a 10 per cent increase.”

The research showed that one way hospitality employers tried to entice workers back into the industry was by making labour conditions more flexible. “Talking to some of Deputy's platform users, we found that besides the obvious incentive of wages as the primary motivator, another was flexibility in adjusting to each generation's needs.

“This is not specific to older workers – young workers who are students have to work around their study schedule, and young parents have to work around childcare availability and school drop in/drop out.

“But we found that older workers also have a need for flexible working hours due to grandparenting duties which became a major discussion point. So it was really the employers effectively asking each worker what their ideal work hours were, then manually adjusting work hours across availability of workers.”

Shashi adds than when examining the concerns of seniors considering re-entering the workforce, three points stood out: “Firstly, they were reluctant to re-enter the workforce because they thought ageism might restrict their ability to find work. Secondly, most were unfamiliar about pension rules and whether they stood to lose their pension by taking on casual work. That suggests the need for more awareness of what pensioners can or can't do and also more flexibility about pensioners coming into the workforce without losing their pension, so they have the option to come back to work if they choose to.

“Thirdly, affordable childcare was a key barrier for some seniors to re-enter the workforce because, as mentioned, they’d taken on the responsibility of looking after their grandchildren. Therefore, more affordable childcare would potentially release more older workers to re-enter the workforce.”