Page 11 - BusinessWest May 26, 2020
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 the governor has left some wondering just what to do, especially when it comes to many of the precau- tions they’ve been taking for the past 14 months.
“There are definitely factions within manage- ment teams and organizations that are saying, ‘yay ... let’s throw away all the masks and do away with all the social distancing and just get back to the way we used to operate,” said Wise, noting that EANE’s hot- line has been flooded with calls on various aspects of the reopening plan and mask mandates. “But then there are concerns about whether people have been vaccinated or not. Do businesses put something
out that says, ‘if you’re vaccinated, you don’t have to
“Some people were a little shell- shocked with the announcement.”
NANCY CREED
wear a mask?’ And if they do, will there then be peer pressure for people who haven’t been vaccinated
to stop wearing a mask because they don’t want to stand out?”
Changing on the Fly — Again
Peter Rosskothen, owner of the Log Cabin Ban- quet & Meeting House, the Delaney House restau- rant, and other hospitality-related businesses, has lived through a number of announcements from
the governor and has become adept at changing on the fly. Still, this change is abrupt and huge in scale.
“This reversal is traumatic in
some ways,” he said the day after the announcement came down. “Everything we’ve been doing for the last year and half is out the door in 10 days. Think of all the things we were doing ... and now we’re just flipping a switch and going back to the old way, like with buffets. Now it’s suddenly OK to let people serve themselves? It just doesn’t seem right mentally.”
“
in some ways. Everything we’ve been doing for the last year and half is out the door in 10 days.”
This reversal is traumatic
      This change has him excited on some levels — he has a number of weddings booked for those two months, and now the bride and groom can invite more people to those ceremonies — but there is some apprehension as well, especially when it comes to the daunting task of staffing up for larger volumes of business.
In no way is this remotely one of those proverbial good problems to have, he told BusinessWest, add- ing that businesses across the hospitality sector have been struggling mightily to not just hire people, but keep them for any length of time amid immense competition for good help.
“I’ve heard that there’s one restaurant that’s pay- ing people $1,000 if they stay for three months,” he noted, adding that many others have resorted to sign-on bonuses and other types of incentives to get people in the door.
He hasn’t taken that step yet (he’s thinking about it), but he is increasing hourly wages, a step he believes will help but certainly not solve what has been a persistent problem made worse, in his opin- ion and that of many others, by generous unemploy-
ment benefits and an overall relaxing of rules requir- ing those out of work to look for employment. Mean- while, he’s not sure how these soaring labor costs will impact his ability to do business.
“This labor shortage is going to radically increase our labor costs,” he explained. “We were ready for
a minimum wage of $15, and we were planning
on that in our pricing. But $15 is not good enough post-COVID.”
As for people who are employed, the governor’s decision to move up the timetable for fully reopen- ing the state is, as noted, bringing fresh emphasis to a problem many employers were looking to deal with later, rather than sooner.
That problem is simply deciding who comes back, when, and under what circumstances. Wise told BusinessWest several weeks ago that many employers were struggling with this issue because employees had grown accustomed to working from home and many of them would prefer to keep on doing so, even as their managers would prefer they return.
Reopening
Continued on page 13
PETER ROSSKOTHEN
       FEATURE
MAY 26, 2021 11
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