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Restaurants are facing a recruitment crisis with a shortage of chefs, kitchen staff and waiters scuppering reopening plans. Owners blame COVID-19, Brexit and the furlough scheme, with some reporting that they are receiving no applications when they advertise positions.
James Chiavarini, who runs II Portico, one of London's oldest Italian restaurants, says that he has never known a tougher recruitment situation in more than 50 years in the business. He said: “When restaurants closed many workers left their flats to avoid paying rent and moved back home to Italy, Romania, Spain, etc. Many aren't bothering to come back as the summer season in the Mediterranean Sea starts soon and good, high-paying work can be found all over beach resorts. And there is no chance of finding a Briton to do this job.”
The problem has been exacerbated by all the restaurants reopening at the same time, meaning there has been a huge surge in demand for staff. Many restaurants also have new projects that they have developed during lockdown, for which they are looking to recruit.
Another issue is that chefs and other staff are looking to change careers because they are either fed up with low wages or want more security and are worried there will be further lockdowns and long periods without work. Furlough has had a strange impact too. People that haven't worked for the past nine months have adjusted to the lax lifestyle, and are demanding fewer hours and little night and weekend shifts. It's really challenging. Hospitality is all about nights and weekends. In a nutshell, it costs more for lesser talent who don't want to work as long or hard.
Some restaurants have decided to start apprenticeships or equivalent schemes to tackle the problem. Will Ellner, of Bancone, which has two restaurants in central London, said: “Despite initial panics about the lack of good staff, we've managed to pull some great people in now, front and back of house, ready for reopening on May 17. However, we've not managed to fill every role, so we've decided to create a kind of‘academy’, whereby we recruit people who have many but not all the skills we need and then train them up. It's an expensive way to do things but in truth I'm playing a long game where the idea is that people don't then leave-they are empowered to stay put.”
UK Hospitality, the trade group that represents the industry, says recruitment problems are particularly acute in London and the southeast of England. Kate Nicholls, chief executive of the group, said: “For hospitality to rebuild and play its full role in the economic recovery, additional support for jobs as well as long-term plans to facilitate enhanced training and apprenticeships are vital.”
[A] altering
[B] spoiling
[C] shelving
[D] abandoning
[A] most of the restaurant workers in London are not British
[B] British beach resorts attract most catering staff
[C] the British don't prefer foreign cuisines
[D] restaurants can't reopen during summer
[A] It poses more challenge to the talent.
[B] Its impact is hard to define explicitly.
[C] It makes people reluctant to work hard.
[D] It reminds workers to protect their rights.
[A] help to revive restaurants in the long run
[B] effectively reduce the loss of restaurant staff
[C] quickly fill the job vacancy in catering industry
[D] alleviate employment problems in parts of the UK
[A] Why do people refuse to go back to work after furlough?
[B] How will the apprenticeship scheme support restaurants?
[C] Where can a boss recruit suitable new employees?
[D] What crisis do the restaurants face after the pandemic?
A retired couple have become the world's first tenants of a fully 3D-printed house in a development that its backers believe will open up a world of choice in the shape and style of the homes of the future. Eliz e Lutz, 70, and Harrie Dekkers, 67, former shopkeepers from Amsterdam, received their digital key-an app allowing them to open the front door of their two-bedroom bungalow at the press of a button-yesterday.
In the past two years, properties partially constructed by 3D printing have been built in France and the US, and new projects are increasing rapidly around the world. “This is also the first one which is 100% permitted by the local authorities and which is inhabited by people who actually pay for living in this house,” said Bas Huysmans, the chief executive of the construction firm.
The 3D printing method involves a huge robotic arm with a nozzle that squirts out a specially formulated cement, said to have the texture of whipped cream. The cement is “printed” according to an architect's design, adding layer upon layer to create a wall to increase its strength. But while it is early days, the 3D printing method is seen by many in the construction industry as a way to cut costs and environmental damage by reducing the amount of cement used. In the Netherlands, it also provides an alternative at a time when there is a shortage of skilled bricklayers.
The new house consists of 24 concrete elements, which were printed layer by layer at a plant in Eindhoven before being transported by truck to the site and placed on a foundation. A roof and window frames were then fitted, and finishing touches applied. By the time the fifth of the homes is built-comprising three floors and three bedrooms-it is hoped that construction will be done wholly on-site and that various other installations will also be made using the printer, further, reducing costs.
“If you look at what time we actually needed to print this house, it was only 120 hours,” Huysmans said. “So all the elements, if we would have printed them in one go, it would have taken us less than five days, right, because the big benefit is that the printer does not need to eat, does not need to sleep, it doesn't need to rest. ”
“Did we earn money with this first house? No,” said Huysmans. “Do we expect to lose money on house number two, three, four and five? No. With 3D printing, you generate a huge creativity and a huge flexibility in design,” he added. “And of course, why did we do so much effort to print this‘rock’? Because this shows perfectly that you can make any shape you want to make.”
[A] larger than the other houses in the neighborhood
[B] completely built by 3D printing
[C] only controlled by a digital key
[D] the first attempt of 3D method
[A] make whipped cream
[B] print design drawings
[C] compound the cement
[D] eject building materials
[A] To improve 3D printing technology.
[B] To cut the number of concrete elements.
[C] To use more 3D printing in construction.
[D] To invent on-site 3D printing equipment.
[A] efficient
[B] low-cost
[C] eco-friendly
[D] safe
[A] gigantic
[B] movable
[C] profitable
[D] replicable
Germany is set to force companies to screen suppliers for environmental violations and human-rights abuses, such as illegal mining and child labor, in a move that some corporations say will be hard to enforce and could make them less competitive internationally. The bill is part of a broader movement in Europe to force corporations to ensure that European legal, environmental and rights standards are upheld by suppliers outside the bloc.
European governments are reacting to pressure from human-rights and environmental lobbyists, who have pressed them to do more to force companies to police their supply chains and weed out abuses in the manufacturing of products from batteries for electric cars and smartphones, to clothing from sporting-goods brands. “From today, it is clear that high standards apply not only to German workshops and German factories,” said Finance Minister Olaf Scholz. “We are protecting workers throughout the globe-spanning supply chains.”
Under the bill, adopted by the government Wednesday and which must now be approved by parliament, any company based in Germany with 3,000 employees or more has two years to set up compliance procedures to monitor and stop abuses within its supply chains. They must also create an alert system that would allow third parties and victims to safely report any abuse.
If passed, the law would affect up to 2,500 companies. Then, in 2024, its reach would expand to any company with 1,000 or more employees. Companies with annual revenue of more than €400 million ($484 million) that fail to meet the requirements could face fines of up to 2% of annual sales. Offenders could also be excluded from public tenders for up to three years.
“For some companies, this could mean economic ruin,” said Bertram Kawlath, head of a midsize supplier for the auto and textile industries. Though too small to be directly affected by the bill, Mr. Kawlath fears his company and other small and midsize firms could be saddled with additional costs to provide documentation to their big customers to prove they are playing by the rules.
Hiltrud Werner, a Volkswagen AG board member in charge of legal and compliance, said the initiative struck a good balance, with sanctions for violations without going so far as to create more opportunities for civil litigation against companies. “This is a world-wide tendency to make sure there are basic human-rights standards met by everybody who is doing business in a certain country,” she said.
German companies warned that legislation and additional bureaucracy would put them at a competitive disadvantage. “Any legislation should be multilateral and at the very least take place at the European level in order to effectively address the global challenges of the textile industry,” said Stefan Pursche, spokesman for Adidas AG.
[A] check possible illegal behaviors of the corporations
[B] unify EU standards on environment and human rights
[C] enhance the international competitiveness of enterprises
[D] require corporations to normalize their suppliers' behavior
[A] remove
[B] monitor
[C] examine
[D] decrease
[A] may involve more companies in the future
[B] will be approved by parliament in two years
[C] may increase the burden of small businesses
[D] will only punish large enterprises in Europe
[A] favorable
[B] opposed
[C] divided
[D] hesitant
[A] Abuses to Be Prosecuted in Germany
[B] Germany to Force Firms to Exert Pressure on Suppliers
[C] New Bill to Arouse Heated Discussion
[D] International Competitiveness to Be Damaged
A decade after scientists discovered that lab rats will rescue a fellow rat in distress, but not a rat they consider an outsider, new research from the University of California, Berkeley, pinpoints the brain regions that drive rats to prioritize their nearest and dearest in times of crisis. The findings suggest that altruism, whether in rodents or humans, is motivated by social bonding and familiarity rather than sympathy or guilt.
The lead author Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal launched the study in 2014 to identify the brain networks activated in rats in response to empathy, and whether they are mirrored in humans. The results suggest they are. Researchers found that all the rats they studied experienced empathy in response to another rat's signs of distress. However, to act on that empathy, the helper rat's neural reward circuitry had to be triggered, and that only occurred if the trapped rat was of the same type as the helper rat, or member of its ingroup.
For the study, more than 60 pairs of caged rats were monitored over the course of two weeks. Some of the pairs were of the same strain or genetic tribe while others were not. In each trial, one rat would be trapped inside a transparent cylinder while the other roamed free in a larger enclosure surrounding the cylinder. While unconstrained rats consistently signaled empathy in response to the plight of trapped rats, they only worked to free those that were part of their ingroup, in which case they would lean or butt their heads against the cage door to release the rat.
Indeed, in reviewing the results of multiple measures to understand the neural roots of that bias, the research team found that while all the rodents in the trials sensed their cage partner's distress, their brains' reward circuitry was only activated when they came to the rescue of a member of their ingroup. Moreover, humans and other mammals share virtually the same empathy and reward regions in the brain, implying that we may have similar biases toward our ingroup when it comes to helping others, Bartal noted.
“Overall, the findings suggest that empathy alone doesn't predict helping behavior, and that's really a crucial point,” she said. “So, if you want to motivate people to help others who are suffering, it may be that you have to increase their feeling of belonging and group membership, and work toward a common identity.”
“Encouragingly,” she added, “we find that this mechanism is very flexible and determined primarily by social experience. We will now try to understand how pro-social motivation shifts when rats become friends, and how that is reflected in their brain activity.”
[A] both humans and rats can be altruistic
[B] rats will rescue their fellows in trouble
[C] altruism is closely related to social factors
[D] rats may feel guilty for their trapped peers
[A] It drives rats to help their familiars.
[B] It is mainly experienced by humans.
[C] It triggers the neural reward circuitry.
[D] It relates with specific brain networks.
[A] released the signals of empathy
[B] escaped by butting the cage door
[C] roamed in a large cylindrical enclosure
[D] witnessed how their fellows got trapped
[A] empathy will not lead to the rescue action of rats
[B] partner's distress can activate the reward circuitry
[C] humans may prefer to help those of their own kind
[D] mammals are reluctant to rescue the biased groups
[A] reflects shifts in brain activity
[B] depends on social relations
[C] is variable among humans
[D] is usually unpredictable