Management

Peer 1
Krysta Craan
Week 3: Discussion Board
COLLAPSE
Week 3: Discussion Board
Impact of Increasing Minimum Wage and Eliminating Tipped Wage

The article Human Capital Challenges in the Food and Beverage Service Industry of Canada talks about the shortage of employees in the Food and Beverage industry of Canada in particular. In the hospitality industry in general, service employees are the ultimate front of your establishment. They are the ones in charge of delivering the experience that you catered based off of your establishment. Canada has seen a major downfall of food and beverage employees and this will continue to decrease. I am sure now with Coronavirus adding itself to the picture, it will definitely worsen. With that being said, by 2030 Canada may see some negative changes of unemployment for the food and beverage sector. “Although the specific data is a prediction, the trend is clear: there are not enough people seeking employment in the food and beverage industry to fill the jobs necessary to sustain it” (Bradley, et. al., 2017). For this particular industry, the industry needs strong employees as there a lot of negative factors they are working against.  The factors that are contributing to the shortages are demographics, low and unequitable wages, high turnover rate, poor image and leadership, and inaccessible untraditional worker markets. In order to overcome these shortages, the industry needs to better accommodate their workers. For example, rewarding employees, training employees to maximize their best potential, provide wages that are attracting to them and most importantly provide them with good leaders. The food and beverage industry need to create a new face for themselves because by outsiders it is not well respected as they do not perceive food and beverage employees as professionals. I personally believe that these challenges are widespread in the industry. In the United States, the food and beverage industry have similar issues. Through long hours and hard work, you don’t feel appreciated most importantly but it feels like you aren’t being paid enough. For example, 2 years ago I did an internship at a restaurant in Florida. I was part of back of the house on the hot and cold appetizer stations. I would come into work at 2pm to prep until service begins at 5:30pm, but the servers would come in at 4:30pm and would leave whenever their last table was done typically 30 mins after close max. As for me, I would typically leave 1 hour to 2 hours after close because there was cleaning to do after service. If I was getting paid well, that would be completely fine, but I felt that if I were a server, I would get paid twice as much for ten times less work. So, for me this is where the frustration lays. The industry has a bad reputation for not treating employees right and paying employees minimum wage. With some fixes here and there, the food and beverage industry will have better opportunities in place for them to be the best they can possibly be.