Businesses are bleeding as Covid-stricken staff force closures and new workers can’t be found
With Covid running rampant - forcing the closure of hospitality and other industries that can’t get staff - we might as well be in lockdown.
Opinion
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In the first week of March the long-delayed mega hotel development The Continental at Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula will finally open its doors.
After years of being buried behind scaffolding and having drained a few developers of tens of millions of dollars, the new operators intend opening, Covid or not.
A prominent chef, Scott Pickett, has been recruited and the venue will feature a range of food options ranging from fine dining to pub food in the bar.
I know about the opening date because of the impact the latest wave of Covid is having on the hospitality industry across Melbourne, Victoria and the rest of Australia.
This week, two senior executives of this multimillion-dollar operation was forced to stand in the main street of their new home town begging for people to come and work.
They handed out a card that read: Experience isn’t essential, all you need is a smile and a love of working seaside.
Isn’t it extraordinary that a five-star, brand new, food and beverage venue - with a star chef - is so desperate to open, it’ll take just about anybody?
Good luck to Continental Sorrento but as one of the executives told me — as hundreds of people walked past — if she can get six new workers from the street card gamble, she’ll be delighted.
It’s a similar story right around Australia for employers, within hospitality particularly, being slammed by Covid-battered workforce shortages.
Everywhere you look, from local strip shops to major supermarket chains, employers can’t get workers. I even heard this week of an inner suburban Australia Post outlet closing in the middle of the day to anything but parcel collection from behind a locked door.
As the Herald Sun reported on Wednesday, the Chapel Street precinct has around 35 per cent of the workforce across 2200 businesses down with the virus or isolating from a close contact.
In what would normally be one of the busiest trading weeks of the year many doors are slammed shut.
Three restaurant owners I know of in that South Yarra area have a combined roster of closed days to share staff and at least open, albeit irregularly.
Normally they would be in solid competition for diners.
One trader, Justin O’Donnell, says the precinct is in the worst shape it’s been since the pandemic began and traders would be better off in lockdown.
And it’s not just small businesses being hammered. KFC is running out of chicken – who would ever have considered that? And the fast food giant’s share price has slumped.
Public transport rosters are in disarray, even before a full return to work next week, as Covid patients and close contacts are forced to isolate.
It’s a perfect storm with state and federal governments staring at red ink as they try and budget their way through this third wave, and with lockdowns now seemingly off the table forever.
Victoria announced this week it would provide more exemptions for close contacts in key industries, as the number of people linked to Covid cases continues to surge.
Employees in emergency services, education, transport, freight, custodial facilities and critical utilities will be eligible to return to work even if they live with a positive case.
The change follows similar rules applied to food distribution staff earlier in the week, in which both the employee and their employer must agree on their return to work and they must be fully vaccinated.
But government handouts have dried up completely, at a time when many employer organisations, let alone workers, believe they are most needed.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison seems wedded to the idea that he can somehow just hope and pray that Omicron will come and go, and he can sneak to an election and win before the economy tanks.
Surely the PM is kidding himself as a Covid-weary electorate realises that the latest variant might not be as bad as Delta, but that it spreads much more easily.
Already – right or wrong – he has been tagged by his critics for a slow vaccine rollout and now the unavailability of Rapid Antigen Test kits and a worker shortage tsunami smashing businesses.
He might, as he said last election night, “have always believed in miracles” but this idea that we can somehow sit at home and wait for Omicron to disappear is delusional.
He’ll need more than a miracle, he’ll need divine intervention. The first thing he needs to do, despite the voter blowback, is to open the international borders to foreign travellers – all foreign travellers who have applied for a visa and are vaccinated.
Arriving with a negative test before boarding the plane should mean no quarantining and an ability to travel and work, to fill the backpacker gap and student workforce problems.
Australia ought not to be closed to foreigners but running advertising campaigns in Covid-ravaged Europe and parts of the US to attract skilled youngsters to come and live for a few years in a relatively Covid safe environment.
At home, some leadership is desperately needed to get that four to five per cent of unemployed people out working to fill those economy-destroying job vacancies.
Why then, would you — given that every shopfront window in every city and town in Australia is crowded with job vacancy ads — let people sit around unemployed?
For a start, employment benefit recipients should be allowed to keep their dole for a month or two as well as work and hopefully stay working.
If they then walk away from a perfectly good job, take their taxpayer benefits off them.
The time for handouts and lockdowns might be over but unless we can find workers to keep Australia open you might as well lock us down.
DISLIKES
Covid bingo — seems every day I know someone else with it.
Admire and like Mike Amor and Rebecca Maddern but we all know live mikes mean someone is listening.
The beer snob who checked his watch as I sat outside a pub this week with a cold one at 11.30am.
The madness of holiday traffic.
LIKES
Aussie golfers Cameron Smith and Matt Jones finishing one and three on the PGA event in Hawaii.
Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball winning a Golden Globe.
Hobart as an Ashes venue.
Celebrating this year my 50th year working in the media.
Originally published as Businesses are bleeding as Covid-stricken staff force closures and new workers can’t be found
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