‘There’s not much you can do’: Remote and warehouse jobs contribute to worker shortage in Omaha

OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) - For the past two years, the worker shortage seems like it’s been a never-ending topic.

“I already had a cook called in for tomorrow night. It’s just I’m not extremely hopeful it will get better,” Kevin Culjat, Owner of Rocco’s Pizza said.

From hospitality to restaurants employers have been struggling to fill jobs and keep their businesses running.

“Still, there’s just no staff out there to be found from fronting people to cooks to hostesses to bussers it’s just extremely hard to find staff.”

A new report in Business Insider takes a look at where all those people have gone.

They point to warehouse gigs as part of the shift and said places like Amazon are sucking up workers from other sectors.

Culjat said he’s running into another problem people want to work remotely.

“People nowadays want to stay at home, work from home, stay on their computers, and do a lot of other things.”

At the Magnolia Hotel, the owner Tim Darby says he and his staff have had to work a little bit of every job to attend to guests.

“In our industry, you can’t work from home you have to be at the property you got to be cleaning the rooms and driving the guests, and serving meals,” Darby said. “It was a big change.”

Another reason why people are leaving jobs is because of the pay. Business Insider says warehouse jobs pay workers an average of $21 an hour and up.

Darby says he wants to do anything he can to retain and gain more employees.

“We’re going to make sure we pay market and above for our associates,” Darby said.

For Culjat, he said it’s going to be a long haul.

“There’s not much you can do, you have applications that show up and applications that you send out to companies, there’s just not people who want to work in the service industry,” Culjat said.

Copyright 2022 WOWT. All rights reserved.