SBS Blog > Hospitality workforce: a meaningful pathway? by Tom Baum

Hospitality workforce: a meaningful pathway?

By Tom Baum - Posted on 28 July 2023

Professor Tom Baum recently authored a new evidence paper on the subject of workforce and the hospitality sector. Here, he discusses the background to the issues and what the way forward might be.

The recent publication of the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan for England, somewhat ironically, appears to have heralded a return to government-sponsored sector labour market planning which was commonplace across the economy in pre-Thatcherite Britain and elsewhere. Across many sectors, Industrial Training Boards built plans through research that focused on forecasting demand for skills and identifying the consequences of these for government agencies, employers and training providers.

I was involved, as lead researcher, in multiple iterations of this process for the hospitality and tourism industry in the Republic of Ireland, with consequences for the products and services offered in the private sector, facilities planning (in colleges), allocation of training numbers by skills area and the flow of funding from national government and the European Social Fund. The NHS, of course, operates within the public sector, where government can exercise significant levers of change. Attempting a similar approach with respect to private sector employment is more problematic in today’s neo-liberal economic climate.

The hospitality industry here in Scotland and across the UK is dominated by micro/SME enterprises alongside major national and international brand operators. The industry and - in particular - its workforce faced very well documented challenges during the pandemic in terms of business closures, job losses and the health impact on frontline workers.

Globally, media coverage of hospitality workers and their tribulations increased massively. Post-pandemic, the industry has faced on-going skills shortages and the immediate and entrenched or structural causes of this jobs crisis has reawakened government interest in the future of hospitality work, at a UK and devolved nation basis as well as internationally. Our research conclusions were that, while the pandemic amplified issues relating to hospitality employment to the extent that they became headline news, essentially little changed for a workforce faced with insecurity; high labour turnover; a dependence on youth, women, minorities and migrants; low pay; challenging working conditions; and extensive abuse and harassment.

Scoping the future workforce needs of the hospitality industry has become the focus of discussion in many countries, including Australia, Malaysia and here at a UK and devolved national level. Workforce planning for hospitality, as noted above, is nothing new but is a process that has had only marginal impact on addressing the structural or institutionalised causes of the issues noted above, indeed a series of reports in Australia and Scotland over a ten-year period identified the same challenges and recommended identical solutions without breaking what appears to be a series of wicked problems locked into a vicious circle. There is a need for new thinking, new ways to look at what all stakeholders recognise as a series of ‘problems’ but for which no evident ‘solutions’ can be found.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, the focus of the hospitality industry and its partners in government, across the Global North, has been on the recruitment and retention crisis. Industry representative bodies such as UKHospitality were early on the mark in this regard, aspiring to ‘fix the crisis’ in 2022 with recommendations that included more of the same (challenging misconceptions about hospitality work – what misconceptions?) but also recognising newer challenges such as changing work aspirations among those entering the workforce for the first time and highlighting availability and cost of housing as a major barrier to those faced with taking up low-paid hospitality work, especially in rural areas.

In the post-pandemic search for answers, I have been involved with a number of initiatives designed to address work and working conditions in hospitality. Prominent among this is the on-going Hospitality Inquiry of Scotland’s Fair Work Convention, to which I am Academic Advisor, and includes employer, organisational and, most importantly, worker voices in its deliberations. The Inquiry will report next year. I have also acted as International Advisor to Austrade’s Tourism Employment Summit in their search for answers applicable in an Australian context. I also contributed to similar discussions initiated by Malaysia’s Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture.

At Strathclyde, we have also engaged in a series of research studies alongside our counterparts across a number of countries in Europe as well as Australia and New Zealand, linked together by a newly formed Global Hospitality Research Alliance (GHRA).

The most recent contribution to this on-going and somewhat tortured debate has seen the publication of the ReWAGE evidence paper, Work, Wages and Employment in the UK’s Hospitality sector, supported by the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust.

ReWAGE is an independent expert advisory group modelled on SAGE that is co-chaired by the Universities of Warwick and Leeds. It analyses the latest work and employment research to advise the government on addressing the challenges facing the UK’s productivity and prosperity, such as Covid-19, the cost-of-living crisis and labour shortages.

As Convenor of the working group, I worked closely with a fantastic group of colleagues from academic institutions across the UK (including Dr Emma Congreve from the Fraser of Allander Institute and Professor Dennis Nickson from my own Department of Work, Employment and Organisation in SBS) together with contributions from UKHospitality and Unite Hospitality. The paper highlights both the current state of the ‘known knowns’ about hospitality employment and addresses new angles, such as levels of in-work poverty in the hospitality workforce and the extent to which workers in the industry depend on state benefits to supplement their limited wage income.

Targeted at governments (and associated agencies) in the UK, the evidence paper puts forward a series of recommendations designed to influence policy and argues the case for a joined up policy framework to address structural and operational issues in hospitality work and employment to the benefit of business, communities and the workforce that cover, for example, aspects of employment law (such as contracts and tipping), education and training, housing and transport, access to financial services, state benefits and migration and the right to work.

The ReWage Hospitality Evidence Paper conclusions were presented to officials from a range of London-based government departments recently and received a positive hearing. It will also form the basis of a presentation that we will be giving to the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Business Resilience later in the year in their consideration of staffing issues in the hospitality industry.

It remains to be seen whether a meaningful pathway to real change to the hospitality work and employment environment can be found through this or any of the other parallel initiatives. Can/will governments take the lead in driving clear and joined up policy and encouraging consideration of hospitality industry and its workforce needs in the key areas noted above that impact on the sector’s ecosystem in what might be seen as a return to interventionist practice, commonplace in the 1970s and 1980s? For a sector such as hospitality, this might be essential if meaningful change is to take place.