RESTAURANT owners are not rejoicing yet over the easing of Covid-19 restrictions, which means that they are now allowed to open around the clock.

They told The Malaysian Insight that they were unable to open for business 24 hours due to a lack of manpower.

Malaysian Muslim Restaurant Owners Association (Presma) president Jawahar Ali Taib Khan said members could not take advantage of the longer business hours they were now allowed.

“Most restaurants cannot not afford to operate even until midnight as there is a shortage of workers,” he said.

Jawahar added there was no point staying open all day if a restaurant cannot provide good service.

“We want to give quality service to the customers so it is not worth it.

“Most important for us are the quality of the food and cleanliness of the premises and if those can’t be achieved, we shouldn’t operate 24 hours,” he said.

He said that with the lifting of restrictions on April 1, only about 10% of Presma members would be operating 24 hours.

Presma has more than 9,500 restaurants on its membership roll. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, it had more than 11,000.

“About 15% of our members have shut down their restaurants due to lack of manpower and business,” he said.

He added that most restaurants had only half the workers they required.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob said restaurants would be allowed to open 24 hours as the country prepared to transition to the endemic stage of Covid-19 on April 1.

Malaysian Indian Restaurant Owners Association (Primas) president J. Suresh also said his members were not ready to open around the clock.

“One outlet needs at least 35 workers to operate 24 hours but currently each outlet only has about 12 workers,” he said.

Suresh said some might change their business hours during Ramadan and open only at 6pm.

He said even though the government has allowed rehiring foreign workers, the situation has been remained stagnant.

“When we have meetings with the authorities, they always say ‘can’ to everything but when we go to the Immigration Department, everything is put on hold.

“If foreign workers are not allowed back into the country soon, more restaurants will have to shut down,” he said.

Primas has lost about 500 of its 2,000 members due to closures since the pandemic.

Malaysian F&B Operators Alliance co-founder Joshua Liew also said manpower shortage was the biggest problem.

“Due to this, many outlets are unable to operate their business as per usual.

“They are struggling just to open normal hour,” he said.

Liew said the the government could allow refugees to work as a short-term solution.

Last month, Human Resource minister M. Saravanan said the ministry has received 111,807 applications for foreign workers.

He said the applications were for workers in the manufacturing sector (77,848), plantation (13,119), service (10,611), construction (8,530) and agriculture (1,699). – March 31, 2022.