Is the Covid labor crunch here to stay?
Since opening the bakery and café 17 years ago, the Elluls — a husband-and-wife team — never experienced difficulty in hiring staff. “Whenever I advertised for a new dishwasher, I could get 30 résumés in the first day,” Shula tells Mishpacha. “But it recently took me four months to find a dishwasher. I can’t find bakers or cooks. People don’t want to work. I put ads everywhere, including HR companies, but nothing works.”
During the peak of Covid, she and her husband lived from savings and didn’t take a salary in order to keep most of their workers in place. But with custom back to normal, workload certainly isn’t.
“I work for two people,” she says. “My husband works for three people, and we work 10 or 12 hours a day. We have no other choice. If the dishwasher doesn’t show up, we do the dishes. If the cleaning people don’t show up, we clean the floor. This is what we do. We didn’t do it before.”
And Shula is clear about the source of her problems: It’s the federal government.
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