For two and a half years, the upstairs room at Luc’s Brasserie, a French restaurant in the City of London, has sat idle, closed off through the ups and downs of the pandemic. Next month, it will finally reopen with freshly painted walls, new décor and a calendar filling up with reservations.
But something crucial is missing: the staff.
Darrin Jacobs, the owner of Luc’s, needs to hire three more people to serve the diners, and he’s been looking for months. Four or five times a day he checks jobs websites, trying to get to the best candidates quickly. But he’s struggling to compete in Britain’s red-hot labor market.
When faced with an unexpected opening or sudden busyness, “you used to be able to react overnight and just go out there and hire someone, it was instant,” Mr. Jacobs said. “We’ve been looking since June to get staff for September and we still haven’t got it.”
This inability to find people to hire has spread across the economy, in virtually all industries, and the solution chosen by many employers — higher pay — is embedding inflationary pressures deeper into an economy where prices are soaring. Last week Britons learned the annual rate of inflation reached 10.1 percent in July, the fastest pace since 1982, as energy prices rose and businesses passed higher costs — for supplies but also labor — onto their customers.
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