I couldn’t get fired right now no matter what I say,” says Luke Murray, a professional guide with Desert Adventures, when asked how secure he feels in his current job. Murray began working as a driver for the company in April 2021 and says that in his two years there, he’s seen a lot of his coworkers leave.
“When I started, the majority of my coworkers had been here 10 or more years, were in their 40s and 50s, and were very plugged into the community around the Black Canyon. That’s something I really enjoyed, the breadth of knowledge and experience that I wasn’t going to get elsewhere,” Murray says. He estimates half to three-quarters of those employees have left since he started.
The labor landscape across the country has changed considerably since the emergence of COVID, and the service industries are among the most visibly altered. As the largest city in a state that’s heavily dependent on these industries, Las Vegas saw a shocking loss of jobs at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the reopening of businesses and seismic shifts in the labor market, what does work in this hospitality-driven city look like today — and what might it look like in the future?
“Nevada had the highest unemployment rate in the country, for any state and any month since 1976,” when records first started being consistently collected, says David Schmidt, chief economist for the Research & Analysis Bureau at the Nevada Department of Employment, Training, and Rehabilitation. “The national unemployment rate was about 30 percent during the Great Depression, and our April 2020 unemployment rate was 30.4 percent. In the Las Vegas area, it was 33 percent or 34 percent,” he says.
But as mandatory closures of nonessential businesses were lifted, and as travel picked back up, the staffing pendulum swung back with force. Many businesses that were forced to close or scale back operations during 2020 and 2021 are now hiring workers at an extraordinary rate, trying to scale back up to accommodate their previous volume of business. “We lost twice as many jobs in April 2020 as we did during the Great Recession, and we’re digesting that in half the time,” Schmidt says.
The accommodation and food services (AFS) industry as a whole across Nevada has about 25,000 fewer jobs than pre-pandemic times, with the bulk of the loss being in casinos, Schmidt says. Meanwhile, food services employment rates specifically are at 111.8 percent compared to pre-pandemic times. “They actually have higher rates of employment since pre-April 2020,” he says.
And yet the “separation” rate (the rate at which employees leave or are forced out of a job, for any reason) for AFS employees has been higher post-March 2021 than in the years leading up to the pandemic lockdowns, at an average rate of 2.8 percent more separations per quarter. So, while businesses are hiring service workers at rates that sometimes surpass pre-COVID era rates, they’re also losing workers more rapidly. Why are these employees leaving? The main reasons — including low pay, shifting values, and unpleasant work environments — point to a broad shift in the way Las Vegans feel about service work.
IN INTERVIEWS, SEVERAL sources cited low pay as a main reason for leaving a service job. However, according to a Pew Research Center survey of workers who quit their jobs in 2021, they were equally as likely to leave a position because of the lack of opportunities for advancement.
Murray noted that both were reasons that some of his long-haul coworkers had left Desert Adventures.
“The warehouse manager had been there for 10 years and left within a year of me starting there because he wasn’t happy with his ability to progress professionally. He felt stagnant,” Murray says. “We also had the same receptionist for 10 years who was very good at her job, and she left for all the same reasons: dysfunction, low pay, not being listened to about what was causing these issues.”
Much like restaurant servers, Desert Adventures guides and drivers’ primary income isn’t what their employers pay them, but the tips they receive from customers. When the demographics of those customers change, so too might the tips.
“When I was hired, I was told about international guests and businesspeople throwing around money,” Murray says. As fewer people traveled internationally, and employers organized fewer group events, he says, that changed. “Post-pandemic, my average customer was in their 50s and 60s, living on a pension, usually government workers. I can’t tell you how many parole officers I had. So, guides went from $25 an hour with tips to $13 an hour and getting stiffed on tips. It became not enough.”
Usually, a worker who leaves a service industry job is moving into another service industry job: 55.7 percent of the time, on average, between April 2021 and January 2022, according to Census data. The subsequent top industries are retail, administrative support, and transportation and warehousing. Service workers who were laid off as the result of COVID closures may have had time to reconsider their professional goals and options.
“It was that shock of the pandemic that opened up the gates, and people began to think, ‘You know, I’m good at customer service, I could work at the hospital, or the front desk at who knows?’ They found their skills were transferable,” says Robert Rippee, executive director of Black Fire Innovation at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Local service industry worker Lisa Walker says she noticed this shift in her peers after the pandemic.
“People feel their time is more precious now,” she says. “They think, ‘I’m worth more than working as a cashier at a gas station.’” She thinks this explains why more workers now are “quiet quitting,” doing the bare minimum in their current position while putting their effort into finding another job.
I met Walker at the Cocolini gelato stand inside Excalibur Hotel & Casino, next to a promotional photography booth for male revue Thunder from Down Under. Walker began working at Cocolini in mid-May, not long after moving back to Las Vegas from Arizona. She also works as a hostess at Lola’s, a Cajun restaurant in Summerlin.
“My car got totaled, and I had some other traumas. So, I was forced into this,” she says, referring to the part-time service industry jobs that she’s working while she applies for architecture school.
“I’m not playing around. I know how much time I have left — or, I can guess,” Walker says. “I know what I’m worth.”
The third reason workers gave, in the Pew survey, for leaving their jobs in 2021 was that they felt disrespected at work. A whopping 57 percent of respondents cited this reason, and local service workers have, indeed, noticed a trend in how customers treat them since 2020.
“People split in two ways now: either they went crazy and they hate people, or they love people and they tip a lot more,” Walker says. “You can tell who’s been traumatized by the pandemic.”
For Andrew, a server at the upscale vegan restaurant Crossroads Kitchen (who asked that we only use his first name), the attitude of customers was a decisive factor in leaving his position as a manager at a casual steakhouse chain for his current role.
“If someone had an issue, I would be called over to help. But people would not even give me the opportunity to hear the problem. They’d yell and be nasty as soon as I approached the table,” he says. “I want to support my people, but I’m not in that leadership role taking bullets for my team anymore. I couldn’t, for my own mental health.”
Andrew moved from Kentucky to manage a new Las Vegas location for the steakhouse chain and was tasked with hiring 250 workers in 11 weeks. Given that they had more than 6,000 applications come through, there was “no shortage” of interest, he says. The biggest hurdle was in finding quality applicants who remained until opening day.
“People wouldn’t show up for their interview, or they were not qualified or fit for the service industry,” Andrew says. During the pandemic, he explains, people who had service experience but were unsatisfied with the industry used the opportunity to find different work. “We would also lose people along the way, because they found something else, or they couldn’t wait until opening day to begin making tips,” he says.
BEYOND PAY, OPPORTUNITIES for advancement, and respect, there are many other reasons why someone might leave a job in the AFS industry, or any industry.
“People are a complex web of individual circumstances,” Schmidt says, listing other potential considerations: retirement, staying home to provide childcare or elder care, or finding another position with additional benefits, such as remote work.
Almost half of the respondents to the Pew survey said childcare was a reason for leaving their job, a factor that disproportionately affects working mothers. A study of unemployment demographics conducted by The Washington Post found that the number of mothers with children under the age of 13 who left the workforce and remained unemployed between February 2020 and September 2021 was twice that of fathers.
The demographics of AFS workers also shifted across age brackets, according to Schmidt.
“There has been some increase in employment at the age extremes,” he says. In 2017, nine percent of AFS workers were between 14 and 21 years old, and 21 percent were 55 or older. In 2022, those rates were 12 percent and 24 percent, respectively. Some of this shift might be attributable to workers aging into the highest age bracket, Schmidt says, but some of it might also be due to workers seeking more sustainable, higher-paying, and/or more personally satisfying positions after the pandemic.
“If I am in an industry where workers have more power, and I’m a mid-career professional, I might be looking at what other options I have in terms of customer service. Or I might be looking for better pay in different types of careers,” Schmidt says.
EMPLOYERS, OF COURSE, are also looking for new ways to increase their profits and sustainability. Black Fire Innovation, a collaboration between the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Caesars Entertainment, serves companies in the hospitality, gaming, and entertainment industries by providing opportunities to work with academics on technologies that could positively change the way they operate, including when it comes to the labor force. Rippee notes that because of the pandemic, employers are starting to reconsider what and who is necessary to keep a business running.
“Since many organizations came to a stop, many of what they had considered to be fixed costs became variable,” Rippee says. For example, he says, ghost kitchens, food delivery, and the use of QR codes instead of printed menus are all business models that employers and customers adopted during the pandemic, but which have since stuck around because of their convenience and reduced overhead cost to the business owners.
“You’re also seeing great implementation of robots in service,” Rippee says, which is partially because of the “labor squeeze” business owners are currently experiencing. Robots are a sustainable solution for specific tasks, he says, giving the example of Mint Indian Bistro, where they are used to deliver naan to the tables. They’re terrible, however, at “abstract thinking ” and the human-to-human interactions that often determine the quality of a customer’s overall experience, so they would ideally be used to open opportunities for employees to provide even better service to their clients.
“If (the servers) can spend more time explaining the menu or doing something special for your birthday, and therefore better understand the customer and upsell, then the robot that delivers the naan to the table is actually helping that human — not replacing humans, but assisting humans,” Rippee says.
In hospitality, artificial intelligence may be used to provide services that aren’t currently available to customers at all.
“A typical nice hotel in San Francisco might have a high percentage of international guests,” Rippee says. “What if a guest’s language is Korean? How do you help that guest have the maximum enjoyment of their stay without language capability? AI can help solve that.”
While Rippee’s perspective on the incorporation of technology into the AFS industry paints an optimistic future of advanced hospitality, the current reality in some industries that have already begun to tap into AI capabilities — such as the screenwriters of Hollywood — is that human workers perceive their jobs to be at risk. Whether employers decide to wield these and any future technologies to the benefit of their employees, rather than their replacement, is an ethical question that is being answered differently across industries every day.
WHILE STAFFING IN the service and hospitality industries may not be facing further major upheavals anytime soon, employers can anticipate that workers’ newfound attitudes and priorities will last as they seek more sustainable wages and better working conditions. Hourly workers in Nevada saw a bump in the minimum wage this past July, up to $11.25 an hour, and voters approved a constitutional amendment to raise it again in July 2024, up to $12 an hour. Baristas at the Lake Mead and McDaniel Starbucks location in North Las Vegas also won union representation in July, in an effort to secure better working conditions, fair wages, and consistent schedules. While Starbucks has run a counter-campaign to dismantle these unions, they have not been able to prevent employees from successfully unionizing in 330 stores across the country, more than any company in the 21st century. While the Great Resignation might be slowing down, the momentum of workers’ rights movements is still going strong, which may influence how employers and employees view their relationship in the future, even in industries outside of accommodation and food services.
“It takes a lot of individual pieces lining up to get back to what the ‘new normal’ is in the post-pandemic world,” Schmidt says. Understanding that everyone is juggling these pieces, while envisioning a more sustainable future for workers in all industries, could make the transition into this new world a little easier.