Paris (AFP)

Unexpected effect of the health crisis, the hotel and catering industry will have to upgrade its professions and offer real careers to young people because after a year of forced inactivity, employees who subscribe to thankless, poorly paid or exhausting tasks will not necessarily return.

"This crisis is the time to think about what we have done well, what we have not done well: there are a certain number of jobs in hotels and restaurants which are painful. We need better. recognize and upgrade people "through pay and" much more versatile "positions, recently said the boss of hotel giant Accor, Sébastien Bazin.

"I risk losing a quarter of the people who work in my hotels: maybe they will not come back to work", he continued, because these "people have learned to spend precious time with their families".

Eight out of ten professionals in the hotel and catering industry anticipate "slowed down activity", at least halved in 2021 compared to the pre-Covid-19, while one in three is worried about the return of its employees, according to a study by Akto for employers in the sector.

The crisis has "accentuated the recruitment difficulties already noted previously in the branch" and related to working conditions seen as difficult: staggered hours, work weekends and evenings, explains the study.

If half of establishments intend to maintain their workforce in 2021, the other half envisage losses "amounted to more than 110,000" people, but the "phenomenon is difficult to measure".

Among the employees to have left the sector, Géraldine Faijean: ex-director of the Parisian restaurant Le Break, she took a position of executive assistant in a small automobile company in Allauch near Marseille, with "a salary divided by two" , she says.

"But I have accommodation and given the price of Parisian rents it comes down to the same".

- "Always standing, it's very hard" -

"As a solo mom with two children, even big ones, it was starting to get very complicated. And I'm going to be 50: physically, still standing is very hard."

If she misses "the Parisian effervescence", she appreciates her new quality of life and is trained in oenology to soon work in a wine estate.

For Michel Morauw, head of the American hotel group Hyatt in France, "it will be difficult to find teams for hotels: it's a job that is both fascinating and very demanding. For that, we have to change the way we work. recruit".

Hyatt launched the RiseHY program in 2019, interrupted by the Covid-19 last year: in partnership with the association Les Determinés, 40 young people dropping out of school will be trained from June, for 10 months, and will then integrate the group hotels.

"The industry is also going to have to recruit people of all ages, inexperienced but who are aligned with our raison d'être: to love people, to listen, to be welcoming," says Mr. Morauw. which anticipates, in the coming months, strong competition in recruitment.

"It will be necessary to offer very dynamic careers": there is no longer any question of remaining "confined throughout your career" to diving or room service, he says.

He himself was trained at the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne before entering as an intern at the Hyatt Regency in Washington in 1984.

"The younger generation wants things to move quickly: we have to adapt to that too," he said.

Bartender and manager of the restaurant Chez Claude, in the 1st arrondissement of the capital, Salah Haddouche, 29, also judges that "these are jobs that must be upgraded, which are important for sociability, for people".

"When things are not going well, it must be said. In Paris, certain tourist businesses which have an ideal location do a bit of nonsense. The boss must not forget that without his employees, he is nothing", concludes -he.

© 2021 AFP