German Laundries Struggle Due to Lack of Staff

More that a year and a half after the beginning of the pandemic, the 3rd Corona wave is still causing several disruptions in all regions of the globe. As PTC’s global umbrella organization, CINET has created a open-platform in which national associations, individual companies, suppliers and PTC professionals share their experiences and their view on the after-Corona future.

It seems that the COVID pandemic in Germany influenced the labour market, in such extend in which the Industrial Textile Services laundries struggle to cater the customers’ needs with a limited staff.  The German laundries focused on hospitality sector suffer the most in this respect: during the last 18 month ca. 10-20% of the employees left laundries to move to other industries (retail, for instance) or simply moved back to their home countries. As a consequence, the laundries face big problems in delivering the services in time. HoReCa itself has enormous challenges, especially in the housekeeping departments. Couple of hotels can’t open their restaurants, can’t open their bars, or they can do it only partially and they can’t sell the rooms because they don’t have enough staff to clean the rooms.

It was reported that laundries are now in the difficult position of negotiating with the clients for increasing the fees (up until 10%), because laundries have to pay 10% more to their employees than before.