Adrian Cummins, Chief Executive of The Restaurants Association of Ireland (RAI), sounded pretty pumped up today about the news that almost 500 new catering jobs have been created in the restaurant sector of the hospitality industry. Is his elation justified? Find out what we reckon after the ramp.

That means loads of new chef jobs, right?

Well, maybe. A closer look at the job figures reveals that of the almost 500 new restaurant jobs 150 were created by McDonalds, 70 by Eddie Rockets, leaving 270 jobs which were created elsewhere in the restaurant business. Now that we know McDonalds and Eddie Rockets are, as far as employment figures are concerned, considered part of the restaurant sector it does set the mind to wondering how many of those remaining 270, newly created, restaurant jobs are within businesses which most of us would consider “restaurants” and therefore likely to offer jobs to chefs.

Roughly how many new chefs jobs will this create?

We’ll dispense with any pretense of scientific data analysis and just take a wild swing at these newly created catering jobs. According to the original piece, filed by the Press Association, roughly half the jobs created belong to a pair of well known burger franchises. Let’s suppose for the remainder of the catering jobs created a lesser percentage of 30% are within the fast food sector, that breaks down to 189 new jobs. Let’s be generous and suppose 40% of those jobs are chef jobs; that gives you a total of 76 new chef jobs.

While any number of new jobs being created is welcome news, what hasn’t been made clear is whether we have a net increase in catering jobs, or not. The lack of puff pieces in the press addressing this question suggests these figures are, as yet, not known or perhaps are known but nothing to boast about.

However Adrian Cummins of the RAI wasn’t only pumped over todays good news he also seemed pretty sure who to thank for it too, i.e. the RAI who campaigned for the abolition of the Joint Labour Committees (JLC) Employment Regulation Order. “The major factor in the last two months for job creation is the abolishing of the Joint Labour Committees (JLC) Employment Regulation Order (ERO). Any attempts to re-establish these anti-business, anti-employer and anti-job creation mechanisms will grind the recovery to the hospitality sector” said Mr. Cummins.

I certainly don’t blame Adrian Cummins for seizing on this bit of good news, and claiming a chunk of credit in the process, but I think we’d need to see this trend continued over a longer period of time before jumping to conclusions as to cause. We’d also need to ascertain whether these new jobs form part of a trend of overall jobs growth, within the catering sector, or whether they’re simply a bump which might just as easily be attributed to seasonality. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Photo by carianoff