Hospitality Industry gets Socked by Cost-Of-Living Crisis
With Britain’s increasingly detrimental cost-of-living crisis taking its toll, many different population subgroups have been negatively affected, most noticeably the hospitality industry.
“The prices have been going up. The minimum wage has not,” said Krista Shepard, 29, a Latvian bartender who has been working in Covent Garden for six years. “I knew what I was signing up to when I moved to London, but obviously I wasn’t ready for this latest event,” said Shepard, a mother to a two-year-old son, in reference to the cost-of-living crisis after the unpredictable Covid-19 Pandemic.
With rising prices on everyday expenses such as groceries, bus fares, and tube fees, hospitality workers are struggling to balance the higher expenses with a pre-pandemic salary.
During the pandemic, the UK government offered furlough payments of up to £2,500 to those who couldn’t work or those whose employers could not afford to continue paying them. Now, two years later, furlough payments have mostly ceased, yet many are still struggling.
The hospitality industry in the UK uses a base rate payment system for employees, typically around £8 — £10 per hour, where staff receives a check at the end of the month for service charges. Shepard, while on her smoke break, said that a problem with the furlough payments was that it was not calculated from your base payment and your service charge, but only your base payment. Meaning hospitality workers were not receiving furloughs that accurately represented their pre-pandemic pay.
Not only are everyday expenses rising, but housing expenses are as well.
“My friend’s rents are going up by an extra £200 or £300 a month,” said Jasmine, 26, a dresser in the costume department of the Royal Opera House. “During Covid, a lot of people were given supplement money that they are now having to pay back,” Jasmine commented on the increase in rent.
During the pandemic, there were mortgage supplements given to landlords in order to continue to house their tenets, which landlords are now having to pay back. This is causing landlords to increase rent prices in order to maintain their pay. Jasmine went on to say, “people that own houses are increasing the rent to supplement the money that the government is now making them pay towards mortgage.”
With hospitality workers now having to pay increased prices for groceries, rent, tube fees, and many other everyday expenses, there is no feasible way for them to live in the same position they were in before the pandemic. On top of the added expenses, many places where hospitality workers are employed are not operating at the same capacity as before the pandemic. Meaning bartenders and waiters are not able to make as much money with fewer patrons to serve.
“It’s just life in general… anything is going up,” said Magi Marras, 26, an Italian bar manager who moved to London in 2016. Marras included that she is having to find ways to save money including going “to Lidl instead of Tesco because it’s more expensive.”
With the increased cost of living and the decreased patronage of hospitality businesses, along with the unchanging wages of hospitality workers, it is almost impossible for hospitality workers to maintain a comfortable style of living since the pandemic.
