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Hospitality Staffing Crisis Plagues Sydney As Foreign Workers Remain Absent

The hospitality staffing crisis during the pandemic has had far-reaching effects. 

With travel restrictions impacting foreign workers on certain visas, bars, pubs, and restaurants are feeling the absence.

Overseas workers have become less inclined to want to move to Sydney and Australia lately because they are worried they’ll be treated how they were during the pandemic.

On today’s episode of This Arvo In Sydney, we talked to different managers working in Sydney’s hospitality industry to find out how Sydneysiders cope with the absence of foreign workers. 

New South Wales regional areas and Sydney were losing more people than they gained for a while. The state used to rely heavily on overseas migration and students, while now the city has embraced a hospitality crisis.

Sydney hospitality business and managers think young people don’t want to work as hard and are struggling with inexperienced staff. 

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I think a lot of owners, managers, are tiptoeing around performance managing staff because they believe they’ll leave.”

Steven Speed, Manager at Fortune of War, said.

They’d rather have somebody there to do the job than have no one there. I am the opposite, it causes me a bit of stress, but I’d rather work one man down a clown.”

Filip Moravec, Manager at Donny’s Bar, said many of his friends overseas were unwilling to return to Australia because of how they had been treated before.

Many people switched industries during the pandemic to more secure work, such as trades, construction and office-type work.

Recent data shows that 1,500 hospitality job ads in Sydney on Seek are waiting to be filled. 

Hosted by Sacha Barbour, This Arvo in Sydney is a 10 to 12 minute daily news podcast made just for Sydney! Listen now on the Listnr app.