Pizza Express is facing a rebellion from employees after announcing a cut to hours for hundreds of waiting staff before 5pm – handing their duties over to restaurant managers.
The changes, poised to be implemented this week, will mean a reduction in pay for as many as 400 hourly paid waiting staff in up to 90 of the group’s 360 restaurants while salaried managers will have an added workload for no extra pay.
Currently managers also do not take a share of the service charge paid by customers so workers questioned what would happen to those payments when no waiters were on duty.
The Unite union, which represents some of Pizza Express’s 10,000 workers, said waiting staff in affected restaurants could lose up to five hours work a day – a cut of £260 a week for those at least 23, and on minimum wage and working five days a week.
One member of staff, a working mother to whom daytime shifts were important, told the Guardian she was losing two-thirds of her hours – or about 12 hours a week, which is equivalent to £125 a week in minimum wage – plus up to £150 of tips.
She said the changes created an “impossible situation” for workers. “It will ruin my life as my income will fall dramatically.”
Another worker said they could lose up to 18 hours – equivalent to £193 a week – plus at least £30 in tips.
A further worker said they expected to lose up to nine hours of work a week – that would be a pay cut of almost £94 a week at the legal minimum wage for those over 23 – before including lost tips which could be a further £30.
In a post on the internal staff messaging system, Slice, seen by the Guardian, one manager wrote: “Nobody asked the managers if we wanted to take the extra job load as we already have so much to do, and now they want us to do more with not even asking us if we are OK with it.”
“This is not fair, not just for the waiters but also for us managers.”
Another member of staff posted: “Once I was proud to work in Pizza Express: the company seemed a large family. This is not a reality any more.”
Pizza Express told staff in official messages seen by the Guardian that the changes to “minimum staffing” rules were intended to “ensure we hit budget”.
“We are resetting how we use our labour system to ensure we always have the right people, in the right place at the right time to hit our budget,” the company said.
Bryan Simpson, the lead organiser at Unite’s hospitality division, said the Pizza Express chief executive, Paula MacKenzie, had been forced to call an emergency meeting with managers on Wednesday as a result of the “backlash from all levels of the workforce” after an announcement of the changes last Friday.
“To impose a labour management system which may see thousands of waiters lose hundreds of hours without proper consultation is a moral outrage,” he said.
“The impact this will have on the most financially insecure part-time workers who need these lunchtime hours to fit around school and childcare is catastrophic.”
A Pizza Express spokesperson said: “Customer habits are always changing, and we have to adapt to that. As part of this we’re tweaking our operational system, so we always have the right number of team members in our restaurants to serve the number of customers dining.
“Across less than a quarter of our restaurants, we are tweaking the shift patterns of a very small number of our team-members on the early-week daytime shift. We will work with our team members to find other shifts, pick up hours at nearby restaurants or for those with fixed patterns, honour their current hours if they’re unable to change these.
“Alongside offering the very best dining experience for our loyal customers, our key focus is ensuring we’re doing right by our nearly 10,000 strong team.”
The latest row over pay at Pizza Express, which is controlled by its bondholders, comes a year after waiting staff won back a bigger slice of their tips after a change that handed more to kitchen staff.
The restaurant workers were forced to take action after their share of tips and service charges paid on credit and debit cards was cut from 70% to 50% in 2021 at a time when pay was already under pressure from social distancing measures that limited the number of diners.
