Improving Tourism and Hospitality Worker Well-being Through Social Dialogue

Tourism and hospitality (T&H) make up over 10% of the European economy and 11.7% of employment.

Many of the 13 million employees in the EU are from marginalised groups: women (54%), migrants (16% ) and youth (30%) (ILO, 2022). However, staff turnover and vacancies are high, with 1.2 million job vacancies (11%) in the EU. Many T&H workers are in non-standard forms of work, including platform work.

This is detrimental for employees: a decent work deficit, lack of social protection, increased precarity and vulnerability, and increased in-work poverty (European Parliament 2021). Furthermore, algorithmic management impacts negatively on these workers.

Generally considered as self-employed, platform workers risk exploitation, forced labour, mistreatment, and sexual abuse.

Their precarity is increased due to legal, knowledge and financial obstacles they face in representation and social dialogue structures.

FUTOURWORK will investigate how all T&H workers can be included in social dialogue, and understand and tackle the challenges of the associated distributional costs.

While acknowledging a variety of social dialogue arrangements and processes, reflecting different historical, economic and sociopolitical backgrounds, this project researches the changes in the new world of work, examples of best practice and identifies common issues that can be tackled at a European level.Using an intersectional gender-sensitive approach FUTOURWORK will use quantitative and qualitative techniques including surveys, mapping, interviews, story -telling and multi-stakeholder learning dialogues.

FUTOURWORK will produce an index that can be used by industry to benchmark their workers well-being. Workers stories will be collected and a documentary produced to enhance public understanding.

We will develop an observatory to integrate the information produced and as a platform for dialogue for workers, legal and social dialogue organisations and employers.