With big words and big plans, restaurateur Jürgen Gosch opened his new fine restaurant “Jünne” on Sylt shortly before New Year’s Eve. But the restaurant didn’t last long: it was closed again after just three months and is only open to groups of 80 to 100 people. The reason: “I don’t have enough staff at the moment,” Gosch told the “Hamburger Abendblatt”.
Acute staff shortages are a problem that almost every industry in Germany seems to be struggling with. In everyday life, this causes chaos in many places, especially at the airports in summer. There is also a shortage of workers on Sylt, the island of the rich and beautiful. This is particularly noticeable in gastronomy. Some cafés and bars have therefore already introduced additional days off.
While elsewhere the shortage of skilled workers is often due to the effects of the corona pandemic, the problem on Sylt lies elsewhere. The North Sea island is very popular with celebrities and millionaires and lives to a large extent from tourism. But if you want to live and work on Sylt as a normal earner, you can hardly afford it. This makes companies on the island unattractive as employers.
“Not only is the island location making our search more difficult, but there is also an extreme lack of housing, high living costs and the fact that the specialists we are looking for are few and far between,” explain the operators of Café Lund, who now keep their café closed two days a week.
Edeka also has great difficulties finding staff for the same reasons. “Without housing, it’s practically hopeless,” said supermarket operator Jörg Meyer of the “Hamburger Abendblatt”. The company even built 50 apartments itself.
The problems existed before the pandemic, but have now worsened. Because while many tourists come to Sylt to relax or use the nine-euro ticket for a trip by train, people who live and work there have to finance their everyday life.
Many of the apartments are only rented out to tourists as holiday homes, the few available accommodations can hardly be paid for islanders (25 euros per square meter) – and commuting is very expensive due to the island location.
“There are no longer Sylt residents in many places. It’s a catastrophe,” says Markus Gieppner, chairman of the islanders’ faction in the Sylt municipal council. And Jürgen Gosch also demands: “We urgently need apartments. We used to have two or three people in one apartment. That’s over. Everyone wants to live individually and there’s no other way. This means you need more living space. And if you don’t everyone has problems here on Sylt.”
Sources: “Hamburger Abendblatt” / “Hamburger Abendblatt” / Café Lund on Facebook / “T-Online”
