The 70-odd chiringuitos along the Costa Tropical are desperate to hire staff, frantically searching long before the summer arrived, but each summer the problem grows.
Francisco Trujillo, who is the Chairman of the Asociación de Empresarios de playas de la Costa Tropical, explains that they need trained staff and don’t have time to train somebody up from scratch.
So, what’s the problem? The answer is that there are several but we can start with long hours and poor wages. The chances are you will be working at least six days a week, from breakfast until probably midnight and your wage packet won’t reflect that sacrifice.
Secondly, if an applicant, who has already worked in the sector, comes to the coast in search of work, where is he or she going to live, with the ludicrously high rental prices over the summer period.
I had a chat with an espetero (the person who cooks sardines on bamboo skewers over hot coals). He works in one of the chiringuitos in Salobreña; a post he has occuppied for many years but is at the point of retiring.
His work is gruelling, slowly roasting himself next to the shimmering goals, on top of the heatwave temperatures that we all complain about. His task starts early, preparing the BBQ in an adapted rowing boat filled with sand. Sorting the sardines and cutting up the octopus tentacles before placing them both on the skewers.
It’s hell of a long day, starting around breakfast and keeping the fire going during lunch, banking it back between midday and dinner in the evening before putting it out afterwards and then putting everything away… and that’s more than likely seven days a week during summer.
Do you think that you will find a young adult that wants to work those hours from summer’s beginning to the end of the season? Do you think that person won’t turn up one day after recently going to bed after a night out? Yeah, you can bet that they won’t find an espetero to replace this veteran worker who will be retiring and returning to Morocco. You all know who he is, if you live in Salobreña.
As for workers behind the bar or serving the tables, there are locals who want to do it, especially university students who need to flesh out their study funds, but they will be more of a hinderance than a help if they have never worked as a waiter/barman before.
And it’s the pace, they virtually run from table to kitchen all shift long without a pause – it’s exhausting, especially when the customers sitting at the table are from the city of Granada and expect to be treated like royalty.
As for the kitchen, well that’s not so critical because there is always a housewife looking for a job and is used to cooking. You can’t compare cooking for two kids and a hubby with churning out 100 dishes in a space of five hours, of course. No need to go to a gym to lose weight because the heat in a kitchen during summer will have you shedding kilos every day.
Most chiringuitos operate all year round so they have a fixed staff of between 10 and 15 people, between the kitchen and serving personnel, so that’s not a problem, but you need to sometime double that number in the summer. If you’re lucky, you will have regulars that you can call upon but their circumstances change, and if they can land a job all year round elsewhere, they will take it and no longer be available. If you’re a big enough business, you can reserve accommodation for summer, extra staff, perhaps.
Almuñécar used to have a hostelry school but that folded so for most aspirants, its the Catch 22 situation of you needing experience to get the job, but you need a job to get the experience.
If you are a camarero, you will need to know how to attend to a table, lay a table correctly, debone a fish at the table in front of the person who is going to eat it, be able to recommend a wine and correctly serve a paella.
So let’s sum it up: long hours, virtually no free time, poor salaries compared to the workload, impossible to find accommodation if you find a job and if you do, it will soak up all of your salary. And finally, you can’t train somebody from scratch; how to juggle several plates of food in your hands at one go, how to take an order from a large table, know from which side you serve wine.
Editorial comment: my wife, who used to be a waitress in a hotel restaurant explained that the trick was to start with the eldest woman at the table and work clockwise from her when taking orders, that way you will remember who asked for what when the food comes out… and you can have four or five tables that you are responsible for. They used to offer her year-round employment but she preferred fijo descontinuo, because after ten months she would be burnt out and needed the two months rest.
(News: Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)
Keywords: Chiringuito Staff Shortages, Summer Job, Poor Salaries, Long Hours, Espetero
news, andalucia, granada, costa tropical, chiringuito staff shortages, summer job, poor salaries, long hours, espetero