Restaurants Can’t Keep Building Growth Plans Around an Endless Labor Pool
By John Dorer, CEO of EB3.Work
Restaurants had a strong hiring month in August. Eating and drinking places added nearly 60,000 jobs, the industry’s biggest monthly increase since January 2023.
That sounds encouraging, and it is.
But it sits alongside another number that should concern restaurant operators much more over the long run. The U.S. labor force has shrunk by roughly 700,000 workers so far in 2026, according to Indeed Hiring Lab. If that continues through the end of the year, it would be only the fifth annual decline since 1948 and just the second outside a recession.
The industry may be adding jobs, but that does not mean there are suddenly more people available to fill them. In fact, restaurants could find themselves competing harder for a worker pool that continues to shrink.
Labor Shortages Eventually Become Operating Decisions
When a restaurant is short-handed, the effects spread pretty quickly. Someone picks up extra prep work, a manager gets pulled away from running the business, and before long the staffing problem is affecting hours, service or how much business the restaurant can realistically handle.
If that keeps happening, it eventually affects more than the schedule. Staffing starts influencing how many hours a restaurant can stay open, how much business it can take on and whether expansion still makes sense.
Over time, staffing shortages start shaping business decisions in ways that are easy to underestimate. An operator may trim the menu because the kitchen cannot support it, push back a new opening because the management bench is too thin, or pass on additional business simply because the team is already stretched. Those choices eventually show up in revenue and growth, which is why a shrinking labor pool matters even in a month when restaurant employment happens to rise.
Stop Assuming The Next Worker Is Out There Somewhere
For years, restaurants could approach staffing with the assumption that another group of applicants would eventually come along.
Restaurants can keep posting jobs, raising wages and trying new recruiting tactics, but there is a limit to what those efforts can accomplish if the labor pool itself keeps shrinking. Indeed’s analysis points to an aging workforce and fewer foreign-born workers participating in the labor market, a meaningful shift when foreign-born workers account for about 19% of the U.S. labor force.
Operators cannot reverse those demographic trends, but they can build staffing plans that are realistic about the environment they are hiring into.
Design Operation Around People You Can Keep
As hiring gets harder, holding onto dependable people matters more. For most restaurants, that does not mean launching some elaborate retention program. It starts with looking closely at the parts of the job that make good employees stay or decide it is time to leave.
It may mean giving people enough notice to plan around their schedules. It may mean taking onboarding seriously instead of hoping a new employee picks everything up during a Saturday rush. It can also mean showing somebody what the next job looks like before another restaurant does.
Entry-level jobs also become easier to keep filled when employees can see somewhere to go from the moment they get in the door. Someone who starts washing dishes may want the chance to move into prep, while a good cashier could eventually take on more responsibility.
Giving people that room to grow helps restaurants hold onto experience instead of constantly bringing in someone new and starting the training process all over again.
Know Which Vacancies Actually Hurt
Some openings are manageable. Others become recurring trouble spots that stay open longer, turn over faster, or keep pulling managers into the same staffing scramble. Operators should know which jobs fall into that second category and plan around them differently.
Look at the job that keeps causing overtime or pulling a manager away from management. Look at the role that always seems to be vacant just before the busiest season. 
Those are the positions that deserve a longer-term pipeline.
For some restaurants, local schools and workforce organizations can help create that pipeline too. In other markets, the best answer may be developing more people internally instead of waiting for experienced candidates to appear.
And sometimes domestic recruiting still is not enough.
Lawful Immigration Can Fill Part Of The Gap
This is where employment-based immigration belongs in the conversation.
The EB-3 visa, for example, is not something restaurants should use instead of hiring locally. In most cases, the process specifically requires the employer to first establish that qualified U.S. workers are not available for the permanent position.
The EB-3 Other Workers category can apply to nonseasonal jobs requiring less than two years of training or experience. For restaurants with certain permanent back-of-house or support positions that remain difficult to fill, that can provide another source of workers.
EB-3 takes time, so it makes the most sense for positions a restaurant already knows are difficult to keep filled. If the same role has been causing problems for years, it is better to plan for that need well in advance than wait until the next opening appears.
Plan Around the Labor Market You Actually Have
Restaurants are used to planning around food costs, traffic and occupancy. Labor supply deserves the same attention.
The August hiring bump is encouraging, but it does not
change the bigger picture. If the national labor force keeps shrinking, restaurants are going to be competing harder for a smaller pool of workers.
The better goal is to stop ending up in the same hiring scramble every few months. Keep more of the people you already have, and when an opening does come up, don’t be relying on one source of workers to fill it.
About the author: John Dorer is CEO of EB3.Work, a workforce solutions company that helps U.S. employers address labor shortages through lawful and compliant staffing strategies.
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