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Chefs are in hot demand. “Chefs, chefs, chefs! Virtually impossible to find anyone,” lamented one Auckland restaurant owner recently. Australia is seeing a similar gap, with chefs ranked the eighth most in-demand occupation. Given this culinary skills shortage, we might expect such sought-after employees to be highly valued.

Apparently not. Our new report on chef wellbeing and working conditions shows chefs in Australia and New Zealand experience significant financial hardship and mental health issues, with many wishing to leave their jobs.

This has major implications for tourism, too, as jobs such as cheffing are “keystone occupations” in major destinations. When jobs can’t be filled, these places lose money.

Tourism revenue is booming, with visitors reportedly seeking more scenery, history and culture. The food chefs prepare in cafés and restaurants forms an integral part of the tourist experience. But despite the laws of supply and demand, the situation for chefs is unlikely to improve without radical changes to work practices.

Our study is the first quantitative survey to examine working conditions and mental health issues among chefs in both Australia and New Zealand. The survey was distributed through professional culinary associations, and final responses were captured as Australasia emerged from Covid restrictions.

The survey also followed up previous Australian studies, which indicated exploitation was an industry norm, with chefs experiencing burnout and wage theft.

‘Banter, bollockings and beatings’

The kitchen environment is well documented to be particularly harsh. As one British study titled “Banter, bollockings and beatings” made clear, an often macho culture can prevail, including bizarre induction rituals.

An Australian study published in 2022 showed chefs were significantly more likely than the general population to commit suicide. And even before the pandemic, the industry’s “toxic” workplace culture was blamed for mental health issues and high suicide rates among employees.

Most of our chef respondents were men, with an average age of 37. They had been chefs for 16 years on average. Of these, 42% originally came from outside Australia and New Zealand, underlining the profession’s high mobility.

The results reveal disturbing insights into chefs’ working conditions. It was surprising to find nearly half (44%) of our sample were in precarious employment, given the skills shortage.

Two-thirds (67%) of respondents worked more than 38 hours weekly, but a fifth of the chefs worked 52-61 hours. Of these, 6.33% worked 62 hours or more – well above New Zealand’s still commonplace 40-hour work week, and Australia’s legally prescribed 38 hours. Despite the fast-paced environment, a quarter did not get their legally entitled breaks.

Economic insecurity was very evident. Financial hardship was reported by almost one in five chefs (15-20%), and a quarter of respondents went without meals due to financial pressure. That those who feed others struggle to feed themselves seems a dark irony.

Two-thirds also reported working when sick, an average of nine days each a year. Post-Covid, this should concern health professionals, policymakers and the broader community.

Leaving the industry

The 2023 Umbrella Wellbeing report, which recorded New Zealanders’ perceptions of their workplaces and wellbeing, warns that long working hours and poor workplace cultures have adverse health outcomes, with New Zealand faring worse than Australia.

Nearly one in ten of the chefs surveyed suffered mental distress. Results showed high levels of physical and mental fatigue (“exhausted at work”, “emotionally drained”, “becoming disconnected”).

Respondents reported disrupted sleep and unhealthy lifestyles. Almost 15% of the sample consumed alcohol five or more days weekly, with 11.4% saying they had consumed hard drugs (LSD, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine or ecstasy) in the past year.

One in five hospitality professionals experiences depression according to charity The Burnt Chef Project. In a spoken-word performance for the project, poet and writer Joe Bellman describes “defeated faces and lifeless eyes” behind the kitchen door, where “breaking the human spirit is just company policy”.

The majority of respondents said they were likely (with 20% extremely likely) to look for a new employer during the next year. Many of these new jobs will be outside hospitality (which is classified within the overall tourism sector).

Another report commissioned last year by the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) found a third of hospitality and tourism workers had high intentions of completely quitting the industries. Reasons included low pay and conditions, stress and toxic work environments.

Mental health and healthy hospo

Maybe not surprisingly, our survey showed intention to quit a job declines with better management support. Failure to improve working conditions for chefs, however, will have lasting consequences for the industry.

The Better Work Action Plan, the first phase of New Zealand’s Tourism Industry Transformation Plan, was launched by MBIE in 2023 under the previous government. It followed extensive consultation with representatives from hospitality and tourism, Māori, unions, workers and government.

Its aim was to develop a sustainable tourism workforce by addressing longstanding issues of low pay and poor conditions across the sector.

The first step involved hospitality and tourism workers receiving government approval to negotiate an industry-wide fair pay agreement. However, the current coalition government immediately scrapped fair pay legislation.

The Australian government’s post-Covid tourism recovery strategy, THRIVE 2030, has committed to “promote employment standards” regarding compliance obligations and fair work. If effective, these would address the breaches evident in our study.

The hospitality industry relies on young people actively choosing a culinary career. But MBIE forecasts show students are less likely to seek hospitality jobs given these problems in the sector.

By chance, however, New Zealand’s new minister for mental health, Matt Doocey, is also tourism and hospitality minister. It is now up to him to make the connection between his portfolios, and work to reduce the heat in the nation’s commercial kitchens.

Shelagh K. Mooney is associate professor at the School of Hospitality & Tourism, Faculty of Culture and Society with Auckland University of Technology, Matthew Brenner is a lecturer at The Hotel School Australia at Southern Cross University, and Richard Robinson is professor of Service Work & Employment at Northumbria University in Newcastle.

The authors acknowledge the assistance of the AUT Hospitable Futures Research Fund.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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As the austral summer draws to a close, we are preparing to fly over the Southern Alps to survey glaciers. This annual flight supports the longest scientific study of Aotearoa New Zealand’s icescapes – and it shows that all of our glaciers have retreated since 1978.

This year’s survey comes on the heels of the warmest year on record globally and the second warmest for New Zealand, which produced extreme weather events and impacts that still cut deep for many local communities.

Despite strong El Niño conditions in the Pacific this season, which typically boost ice volume, we expect the recent heat grilling the glaciers will have had a grim effect.

The 46-year record of end-of-summer glacier images is incredibly valuable because it contains irrefutable visual evidence of climate change. We can see how glaciers are changing from year to year, with extremely hot years such as 2023 standing out clearly.

But our insights aren’t limited to images of glaciers taken from light aircraft. We can also learn from historic paintings of New Zealand’s mountain landscapes.

Portraits of past climate

Old paintings with glaciers are common for the European Alps, where many artists lived and visited. But similar offerings are relatively rare for our part of the world.

What’s remarkable for New Zealand is that some of these works of art were produced without the artist ever seeing the glaciers.

We recently scrutinised the artistic vistas painted by John Gully to see if they were true to the real landscapes. Gully based his works on field sketches by Julius Haast, one of the first scientists to formerly recognise widespread glaciation in New Zealand.

Gully’s paintings show features that can be linked to glacial landforms we can see today, including moraines (rocks deposited by a glacier, typically at its edges), outwash fans (sediment deposited by braided rivers fed by a melting glacier) and trimlines (lines that mark a glacier’s earlier, higher position in a valley).

Many of those features in the paintings have ice in direct contact with them, showing how accurately field scientists and artists depicted glaciers at the time.

Gully’s paintings were intended to convey the dramatic scale of a mysterious land located far away from industrialised 19th-century society. Serendipitously, for contemporary scientists, comparing these artworks with current photos vividly shows the magnitude of ice loss that has occurred since the mid-1800s.

The perspective we get from Gully’s paintings concurs with studies that place the timing of ice retreat as being already underway in the mid-1800s. Prior to this time, known commonly as the Little Ice Age, New Zealand experienced cooler temperatures between about 1450 and 1850.

Modelling ice volume loss using these Little Ice Age landforms provides a benchmark. It illustrates that recent changes have occurred in a geological instant and that the peak summer flows from glaciers that helped create the braided river systems so typical of the South Island landscape are in the past.

Accelerating pace of glacier retreat

Recent glacier changes are occurring ever more quickly. The long-term photographic record from the Southern Alps shows an acceleration of the pace at which snowlines rise due to climate warming.

For a glacier to exist, average summer temperatures must be cool enough for the summer snowline to remain below mountain tops so ice can accumulate. We now observe that ice is disappearing from mountains which held small amounts during the late 1970s. Glaciers there are going extinct.

Combining long-term snowline observations with direct field measurements of glacier mass balance and 3D models of ice volume change gives a good synopsis of how things have changed and a sense of things to come.

We estimate at least 13 trillion litres of water (in the form of ice) has been lost from the Southern Alps since 1978. This is equivalent to the basic water needs for all New Zealanders during that time.

The regions around the central Southern Alps that hold many small glaciers are experiencing accelerated ice loss. Some areas, like Southland and Otago, have small glaciers that are rapidly approaching an extinction horizon. And once they pass it, we are not likely to see them again.

The central North Island also hosts a number of small glaciers on Mt. Ruapehu that feed into the headwaters of the Waikato and Whanganui rivers. Glaciers there were originally mapped in the mid-20th century, and again in 1978, 1988 and 2016. A recent photographic capture of Mt Ruapehu reflects a dire situation, indicating glaciers are fast approaching extinction.

Environments and ethics

New Zealand’s diminishing glaciers and loss of ice across Earth are largely carrying on unabated. These changes are primarily caused by rising temperatures driven by human activities that produce greenhouse gas emissions.

The global increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide continues undiminished. This needs to change soon and rapidly to protect many of our glaciers.

We face particularly serious ethical questions with respect to Mt Ruapehu’s glaciers. They help sustain the Whanganui River Te Awa Tupua, which has been granted the rights of a living entity. The glaciers’ ongoing retreat – and possible extinction – highlights our collective responsibilities for doing simultaneous harm to the environment and people.

The authors acknowledge Rebekah Parsons-King at NIWA for her work on the Glacier Extinction Horizons video. We also thank Brian Anderson for his long-term leadership on the Brewster Glacier snowstakes programme, and Pascal Sirguey for his work calculating mass balance for Brewster Glacier.

Andrew Lorrey is principal scientist and programme leader of Southern Hemisphere climates and environments at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research; George Hook is a research associate (in process) at Canterbury Museum; Lauren Vargo is a research fellow at the ANtarctic Research Centre at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington; and Shaun Eaves is senior lecturer in physical geography, also at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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