The restaurant and hotel sector suffers a severe shortage in the number of specialized workers due to the continued closure of recruitment from abroad, Al Qabas reported.
A government report revealed a decrease in the total number of food services workers during the period between March 2020 and March 2021, with a total of 8,641 workers.
While the head of the Restaurants Federation, Fahd Al-Arbash to the daily that restaurant owners are unable to work in light of the continued closure of the recruitment of foreign workers and the scarcity of specialized workers with experience such as “cooks, bakers, sweets makers” and others, said Jabr Al-Sharif – the owner One of the delivery companies: “The continued closure of the recruitment of workers from abroad and their shortage in the labor market contributed to the increase in salaries and their transfer between companies due to the presence of competition and financial temptations offered to them.”
While Al-Arbash acknowledged that the labor in the local market is not specialized in working in restaurants and it is not easy to train them to join the food industry, he pointed out that the salaries of workers in the field of catering services have more than doubled, due to the lack of labor in the market, the cleaner in the restaurant used to get 150 dinars in the past and now his salary reaches 300 dinars, while the salaries of workers in specialized fields in restaurants amounted to a thousand dinars, after it was 400 dinars.
As for Jabr Al-Sharif, he pointed out that the lowest salary of delivery workers has reached 350 dinars, and working in this profession has become tempting for workers in other fields whose salaries are lower.