Last month the Fair Work Convention published the findings from its 2-year Inquiry into Fair Work in the Hospitality Sector. Fair work is work that offers everyone an effective voice, opportunity, security, fulfilment and respect. It balances the rights and responsibilities of employers and workers. It generates benefits for individuals, businesses and society.
Black History Month exists due to the long-standing lack of mainstream information of the experiences and contributions of Black people in society. The legacies of slavery and colonialism have, over centuries, steered society to this imbalanced situation. Alongside the lack of Black history, sits the racism and disadvantage that Black people face within communities and within their workplaces. Addressing these inequalities speaks to the very heart of the Fair Work Convention’s role and remit.
So, during #BHM2024, it is timely to look at the #FairWorkHospitalityInquiry findings, through the lens of race equality.
But before that, it is worth looking at the broader findings from the Inquiry to frame the environment within which hospitality workers operate. As you would expect, the Inquiry used a range of information sources, including the commissioning of specific research, both qualitative and quantitative, where we identified knowledge gaps. Whilst it is difficult in a short blog to reduce the outputs to meaningful baseline information, there are some compelling standouts that can be shared here.
Even before we consider racism, the hospitality sector has layers of structural inequality. It is labour intensive, with higher proportion of labour costs. Excepting some exemplary employers, it has the highest prevalence of zero hours contracts. It suffered heavily from the COVID19 pandemic and many post-COVID challenges remain, including difficulties with attracting workers to fill vacancies. Even pre-COVID, many hospitality business models often ran with tight margins, most compounded by seasonality and rurality challenges. Unsociable working hours are the norm, and this presents challenges for those with families or caring responsibilities. There is a lack of trade union presence, no more than 10% of businesses recognise trade union, most of them within larger organisations. Consequently, there is a lack of effective voice, and we know that effective voice has been shown to be a central pillar of fair work across all employment sectors.
Against this backdrop, the Hospitality Inquiry confirmed that there is an over-representation of Black and migrant communities within the sector. The qualitative study at the outset of the Inquiry highlighted issues of racism, bullying and discrimination. This comes with language and integration barriers leaving migrant workers isolated and more vulnerable to exploitation. The 2022 Be Inclusive Hospitality report found that more than a third of all respondents reported having experienced or witnessed racism in their place of work. The racism ranged from direct overt racism to the more subtle institutional racism evidenced by clear and sustained unfavourable outcomes.
Overlay all of this with the intersectional experiences of women – case studies flagged up specific instance where Black women were subjected to sexism – and it is not hard to see the need for targeted anti-racist interventions that look to remove barriers to fair work.
The Inquiry process and outputs are hugely positive. They demonstrate a recognition of the issues and a willingness of worker and employer groups to improve the hospitality sector image and experience. But critically we need decision makes to accept and implement all of the Inquiry Group’s 12 recommendations, none of which can be said to be particularly costly or resource intensive.
Importantly the interventions embedded within the recommendations cannot be passive about race matters because passiveness serves to propagate the status quo. For this reason, it is important to be mindful to take an anti-racist approach to the implementation of recommendations. Work can never be fair if it leaves behind any particular group of workers.