Hospitality Industry

More than 70% of workers in the sector are not covered by collective agreements or Bargaining Councils. This means that most workers in the industry are protected only by the sectoral determination for the sector which is the minimum wage and work conditions laid down by the minister of labour in order to protect workers in industries that are seen as particularly vulnerable to exploitation and where there is a very low level of representation by organised unions.

Employers in the hospitality industry are exploiting and underpaying their employees because there is no clear minimum wage for workers and no bargaining council. Given the nature of the sector, workers are caught up in a confusion of flexibility, casualisation, outsourcing, scheduling, short term contracts and temporary employment status.

Many casual employees are being underpaid, abused and ill-treated by employers. This industry is a labour-intensive industry and working conditions are pressurised with long and irregular hours, low wages and a lack of job security. It is increasingly characterised by informalisation where those within permanent employment work side by side, often in the same jobs, with people who have far less secure conditions of employment.

A large and increasing number of workers in the sector are labour broker workers, or outsourced workers, which is a further form of informalisation and vulnerability as workers no longer work at the companies that employ them. The place they work has no responsibility, social or personal, for them and they can lose their employment from one day to the next with no recourse.

The Private Sector Workers Trade Union’s focus in this sector is to address these challenges so that we can successfully organise and represent workers at a time when workers doing the same jobs seem to fall into so many different categories of employment, when jobs seem to be interchangeable, when wages and benefits are constantly being challenged.

We have deployed our resources to explore deeper into the challenges of organising workers in hospitality. The latter is to assist with the concrete formalisation on how we are to deal with the changing conditions of work by coming up with tools and strategies to address the new shape of the workplace and improve our holistic organising strategy.