Anyone who works in the restaurant business has been experiencing somewhat alienating days since the Government decided to engage in a sad tug-of-war with the Judiciary in order to symbolically transfer some irregular immigrants to an Italian concentration camp built in Albania.

Is there a shortage of staff and potential workers are being rejected?

Why alienating days? The matter is always the same, the same for months now. Or rather years: the lack of staff, the shortage of people willing (little changes how much the pay amounts to) to sacrifice themselves to work in the restaurant world, to get busy while others are having fun: in the evening, at the weekend, during the holidays and in summer. Fewer and fewer Italian citizens are interested in living this life, both in restaurant rooms and in kitchens.

Every day to tell our stories we talk to entrepreneurs in this sector, restaurateurs, hoteliers, catering managers, artisans and farmers and every day it’s the same story: there’s a lack of staff, we can’t start new ones projects and projects that have already started are unable to develop, to have breathing space, to scale and grow and to reach a critical mass and a desired break even.

The madness of click day and other bad stories

Thanks to the commitment of the sector representatives (FIPE), the Ateco catering codes were included in the Flow Decree (however too limited) only in March this year and then there is the atrocious click day lottery. There isn’t an entrepreneur in this sector who doesn’t tell us about these steps as humiliations that hinder business. “The number of people eligible for options”, they shout every day from the Italian Federation of Public Businesses, “is still too low compared to the needs: we need more foreigners”.

Migrants from Bangladesh are invaluable in the restaurant world

In short, we need more foreigners, the demography is frightening, in the last decade we have lost hundreds of thousands of youth businesses, there are not the resources to run the companies (but not even to run the hospitals, to drive the buses or to carry out the artisan professions which are the backbone of living such as plumbers, glaziers, blacksmiths…) and what is the Government up to? He spends a lot of energy and a lot of money to send potential workers to a kind of hastily built concentration camp in Albania.

But why? On the latest disputed “load” of migrants there are some people from Bangladesh (which Giorgia Meloni considers a “safe country”…) considered on average the smartest, most precise, meticulous in specific catering and hospitality jobs: we insist on locking them in a refugee camp when they would be the salvation for a restaurant, a pizzeria, a bar that cannot find human resources on the market to carry out its public service. A paradox. Added to which are the long-term consequences.

Without migrants, no pensions: it’s arithmetic

“The demographic situation is such”, the restaurateurs themselves explained from the stage of the last National Forum of young restaurateurs of Confcommercio at the end of October, “that if foreigners do not arrive to give life to our companies or to open their own it will be mathematically impossible for us forty year olds to never retire.”

But if a simple restaurant manager gets there, how is it plausible that a government doesn’t get there?