Anyone working in the restaurant business has been experiencing somewhat alienating days since the Government decided to start a harrowing tussle with the Judiciary to symbolically transfer some irregular immigrants to an Italian concentration camp being built in Albania.

Are there staffing shortages and potential workers are being rejected?

Why alienating days? It’s been the same issue for months. More precisely, years: lack of staff, lack of people willing to sacrifice themselves to work in the restaurant world (with little change in the amount of pay) while others have fun: in the evenings, in the evenings on the weekend, on holidays and in the summer. Fewer and fewer Italian citizens are interested in living this life, both in restaurant rooms and in kitchens.

Every day we talk to entrepreneurs in this sector, restaurateurs, hoteliers, catering managers, artisans and farmers to tell our stories, and every day it is the same story: there is a lack of personnel, we cannot start new projects and projects. Those who have already started cannot develop, cannot have breathing space, cannot scale and grow, and cannot reach a critical mass and desired level. break even.

Click day madness and other bad stories

Thanks to the determination of industry representatives (FIPE), the Ateco catering rules were included in the Streaming Decree (albeit very limited) in March this year, followed by the dreaded click day lottery. There is not a single entrepreneur in this industry who does not describe these steps as humiliations that hinder our business. “The number of people eligible for options,” they shout every day from the Italian Federation of Public Enterprises, “is still too low compared to the needs: we need more foreigners.”

Bangladeshi immigrants are valuable in the restaurant world

In short, we need more foreigners, the demographics are scary, we have lost hundreds of thousands of youth businesses in the last decade, there are no resources to run companies (but not even to manage hospitals, drive buses or buses) to practice trades professions such as plumbing, glazing, blacksmithing, which are the backbone of life.. .) So what is the Government doing? He spends a lot of energy and a lot of money sending potential workers to some sort of hastily constructed concentration camp in Albania.

But why? On the latest controversial immigrant “burden”, some people from Bangladesh (which Giorgia Meloni considers a “safe country”) are considered, on average, to be the smartest, most meticulous and meticulous in certain catering and hospitality businesses: we insist on lockdown Throwing them into a refugee camp when it would be the salvation of a restaurant, a pizzeria, or a bar that cannot find human resources to provide public services in the market. A paradox. Long-term consequences were also added to these.

No immigrants, no pensions: it’s arithmetic

“The demographic situation is such that if foreigners do not come to breathe life into our companies or open their own, it will worsen,” said restaurateurs at the last National Forum stage of young restaurateurs at Confcommercio at the end of October. It is mathematically impossible for us forty-year-olds to never retire.”

But if the average restaurant manager can get there, how is it conceivable that the government can’t get there?