Two million fewer young people since 2000 to employ in the hospitality industry

If you work as a waiter or kitchen helper and are the only breadwinner in a group of four people, your family will be poor.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
21 May 2022 Saturday 15:58
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Two million fewer young people since 2000 to employ in the hospitality industry

If you work as a waiter or kitchen helper and are the only breadwinner in a group of four people, your family will be poor. This is the conclusion drawn by analyzing the salary tables of the Catalan hospitality agreement (annual salaries of 18,821 euros per year for a waiter in a bar in Tarragona) with the poverty threshold of a family with four members that the INE placed in the 2020 (two years ago) at 20,215 euros per year.

For this reason, those job offers used to end up covering young people or immigrants. In the first case, the UAB professor Josep Oliver warns of the demographic change that has taken place in Spain, where the younger population cohort has been reduced. In 2000 there were 9.3 million people between 15 and 29 years old, while last year there were only 7.3 million. Two million young people have vanished.

Since 1995, the drop in young people (16-34 years) in the working-age population (16-66 years) was even greater: 21%, which is equivalent to 2.5 million. “You have a demographic loss problem. Historically, the hotel industry was a mechanism for entering the labor market since experience was not required”, says Oliver, warning that this lack of young labor has not been sufficiently compensated by the arrival of immigrants or by geographical mobility. The greatest problems in finding labor in the hospitality industry are in coastal areas of Catalonia or Levante. These are areas where youth unemployment is lower than in other areas of Spain. A report by Oliver warns that while the average unemployment rate from 16 to 34 years old was 24.2% in Spain in 2020, in Catalonia it was 20.4%, in Madrid 19% and in Levante 18 %. There are fewer unemployed young people in those areas where they are traditionally most needed by the hospitality industry.

The secretary of hotels and restaurants of UGT Catalunya, Igor Abascal, adds that "young people have a different mentality and are not going to accept working according to what hours, so they move on to other activities such as delivery, for example". In the case of chambermaids, the unions have identified that with the pandemic, many went to work for people. In Catalonia, the Generalitat launched courses to encourage them.

In relation to foreign labor, Oliver believes that "what is happening is that the covid crisis has affected migratory flows, which have been lower than in the past," he adds. Esteban Sanabria, head of collective bargaining for the CC.OO. Catalan service federation, points out that many hotel and catering workers have also moved on to construction.

Therefore, faced with a declining workforce, it is necessary to look at wages carefully. In the case of Catalonia, the interprovincial collective agreement governs the entire territory except Lleida. The salaries are those that were agreed for the agreement that ended its validity in 2019. In 2020 and 2021 it was extended with a freeze and is currently under negotiation without there having been any rapprochement of positions. Therefore, a waiter earns the same today as in 2019. Just counting inflation, that worker has lost more than 10% of purchasing power.

Abascal fears that the employers – as has happened on other occasions – delay the salary negotiations beyond the summer. Thus, this campaign the workers will receive salaries from three years ago. Although the law allows the employer to claim for the agreed increases, it is difficult for an employee to get in the fall that the beach bar where he was employed months ago pays that regularization.

What happens in Catalonia can be extended to other areas of Spain. The Hospitality Employers of Spain found that in 16 provinces there was at least one professional category in which the salary was the SMI.


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