Service Industry Workers, Quit, at Record Rate.<br />According to a report by NPR, workers have <br />been leaving jobs in restaurants, bars <br />and hotels at the highest rate in decades.<br />So far this year, each month around 5% of the service industry workforce have decided to quit.<br />In May alone, this accounted for roughly 706,000 people.<br />There are a staggering 1.2 million jobs open in the industry.<br />According to NPR, low wages are <br />the most common reason people <br />cite for leaving food service work.<br />Other reasons revolve around the industry's high-stress culture.<br />Exhausting work, <br />unreliable hours, <br />no benefits and <br />many rude customers, have all been <br />contributing factors. .<br />The pandemic saw many low-wage workers at stores and restaurants forced to enforce mask-wearing mandates, exposing them to harassment and physical attacks.<br />To help fill the void left by the exodus of workers, average hourly pay for nonmanagers at restaurants and bars topped $15.<br />According to Jeannette Wicks-Lim, a labor economist <br />at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, service industry jobs have been "plagued with low wages <br />for an extraordinary long period of time.".<br />She says that despite the increase in wages, workers are just barely making up lost ground.<br />As a result of the worker shortage, <br />many food establishments find themselves <br />reducing hours, operating with skeleton crews <br />and desperate to fill vacant positions.
