What was the old saying? People don't flee jobs, they flee bad managers?
You can run a fast-food franchise, a pub, a hotel or any other front-line enterprise with skill and enjoy extremely loyal employees (at the cost of your profit), or you can run it like a hell on earth by extracting all profit you reasonably can.
For a long time, the latter was the standard model across the hospitality sector, especially as unionization and other forms of worker self-organization were never really present - now with covid haven thoroughly shaken everything up, employers are (finally) forced to up their offers. For a lot of them though, it might be way too late - good riddance.
A bad thing that I've realized about the latter scenario is that it is a vicious cycle. Here's what I mean:
1) You are a loyal employee who works hard and puts in the hours. You promise yourself that you will treat your reports well when you finally get a position of power.
2) You get screwed over by some higher up. You are devastated and everything you worked for is taken away. You vow never to let this happen to you again.
3) You claw your way back but you still hold on to what happened in point 2. You don't want to be a chump again so you take as much as you can (read: screw over others to get your own bonus).
At that point, it might make sense for a coordinated effort at least between the Western countries to drastically limit if not outright ban bonus payments and other incentive-based forms of compensation, including stock options above a to-be-discussed limit.
We have had three to five decades of de-regulation (depending on the country) and if there is one consistency that shows up everywhere is that as soon as you tie personal bonus payments of managers to their ability to mis-treat staff, they will fuck over their staff (and often enough, their company long-term) for their own short-term gains. Everyone suffers in the end, except "activist investors" pushing for short-term garbage optimizations before unloading the toxic company on clueless bag-holders.
> What was the old saying? People don't flee jobs, they flee bad managers?
This is a saying, but as far as i know it is completely made-up. I have seen no empirical data supporting it. On the contrary, here is some empirical-ish data contradicting it:
The hospitality sector is run the way it is due to the vast supply of labor that can and are willing to do that job, in conjunction with the weak minimum salary laws.
Wages and working conditions will get better if supply of labor is reduced and/or minimum salaries are increased.
You can run a fast-food franchise, a pub, a hotel or any other front-line enterprise with skill and enjoy extremely loyal employees (at the cost of your profit), or you can run it like a hell on earth by extracting all profit you reasonably can.
For a long time, the latter was the standard model across the hospitality sector, especially as unionization and other forms of worker self-organization were never really present - now with covid haven thoroughly shaken everything up, employers are (finally) forced to up their offers. For a lot of them though, it might be way too late - good riddance.