The hospitality chickens come home to roost

Perhaps that’s not surprising and the number of problems emerging recently merely highlights the Island’s weaknesses which have, at least not since World War II, been tested by anything so serious as a global recession.

So Jersey’s half-hearted attempts at diversifying the economy have been shown up recently by our relatively poor performance compared to some of our competitors, notably our closest neighbour Guernsey and, heaven forbid, even the Isle of Man.

This does not detract from the enormous success of Jersey’s finance industry nor the foresight of the States in building up significant reserves in the good times.

That has certainly helped to make life much easier for us compared to some of our bigger neighbours. However perhaps we could have been in an even better position had some of the stated policies we were supposed to be pursuing actually been delivered.

The latest chicken to come home to roost is due to our lack of enthusiasm to diversify the economy and, in particular, our neglect of the Island’s second, or is it the third or fourth, most valuable industry, tourism.

Headlines in this newspaper earlier this week highlighted the anomaly of a hospitality industry struggling to find more people to employ from outside of the Island while there are significant numbers of young Islanders out of work.

Apparently the industry can’t persuade Jersey-born people to work in tourism. Now there’s a surprise.

This particular roosting chicken is the result of a marked lack of interest by leaders of the tourism industry to employ and train local people in the past. The situation has improved recently because the industry has shrunk to the point where it now only consists of those with a long-term outlook and a high degree of professionalism. They realize that the industry can’t rely totally on importing cheap labour.

So gone are the days when hoteliers and others would be in business for a lucrative six months a year, paying their imported staff the least they could get away and then going off to spend the profits in the Caribbean during the winter.

When the going got tough, they were the first to throw in the towel and sell their business to the quickest property developer able to offer a ridiculous sum.

Of course employing cheap foreign labour is a feature of the tourism industry in many areas of the world and you would be lucky to find an Englishman working in a low paid job in an hotel in London, for example.

There are also significant advantages in employing well-skilled and enthusiastic foreign labour with experience from outside the Island. Jersey society has certainly benefited from the influx of people from Portugal and Eastern Europe, many of whom have stayed on and become even more valuable members of the community.

However a policy of relying almost totally on imported labour creates different problems in a small island community like Jersey. The major problem is that if cheap foreign labour is available, why bother with locals who are not interested in such menial jobs in any case?

There are some bright spots, of course. The obsession with food and the enormous success of TV food programmes have made catering and cooking ‘cool’. Local youngsters are now more prepared to work in the kitchen, although I suspect they would still prefer to skip the kitchen porter stage.

However unless they are very lucky they are unlikely to find many well paying jobs where their employer is prepared to spend the money on training and improving skills. Unfortunately that problem is fairly common in all industries in Jersey, perhaps with the exception of financial services.

There are indeed some dedicated and far-sighted employers, but most simply wait to see what arrives on the boat.

Yes, of course there will always be a need to import some staff, particularly as local applicants won’t have the qualifications and experience because they haven’t been given the chance to acquire them.

But there’s not much point in hospitality employers bemoaning the fact that they can’t find Jersey staff when all they are saying is that it’s too much trouble and expense to train up inexperienced locals.

Certainly those industry leaders quoted in the news story about staff shortages are willing to commit to training and providing long-term career prospects, but there’s not many of them and they have got to make a profit as well. Why should they pay more than the minimum wage to any staff of any nationality while the industry they are in struggles to survive?

It could be said that this is not just a case of roosting chickens, but of chickens and eggs. Had the industry been made more attractive to local applicants in the past, it might now be more profitable and sustainable. But that would have required a States that was also more committed to diversification and the future of tourism than has proved to be the case.

So those local youngsters who are currently unemployed are unlikely to rush into a job in hospitality.

There are a few – a very few – jobs that offer a good long-term career in hospitality with prospects, but who would want to work at minimum wage for maximum hours during the few months that your employer is actually open for business?

The situation might be different if there were an increasing number of establishments open all year round. However any chances of extending the tourism season have been destroyed by shortsighted policies like closing heritage sites in the winter.

That’s what I mean by chickens coming home to roost.

Peter Body is the editor of Business Brief magazine