 |
 |
Solidarity and representation in hospitality workplaces Session at the Fourth Global Conference on Economic Geography 2015 at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom 19-23 August The hospitality sector is a dynamic, fast-growing and rapidly transforming sector of the global economy. It also constitutes the workplace for more than 250 million workers around the world. Hospitality work is visible and invisible, low-paid and generously remunerated, a place to launch an international career and a place to get stuck – depending on who you are, who employs you and how your work is regulated. Short- and long-term migrants and students are among the groups drawn to hospitality work, creating a fluid workforce with contrasting time horizons and competing identities (McDowell et al. 2007). The sector is also under competitive pressures which have led to new forms of outsourcing and labour flexibility. Hence, it comes as little surprise that establishing solidarity and representation in hospitality workplaces have proved notoriously difficult. In those cases where trade unions have been successful, this has enabled a re-regulation of hospitality work and improved working conditions (e.g. Cobble 1990; Gray 2004). Recent contributions in labour geography have continued to reflect on union strategies and their limitations in hotels and hospitality workplaces (e.g. Wills et al. 2010; Jordhus-Lier and Underthun 2014). Still, our thinking around possibilities is linked to concrete cases of organising. Arguably, it would benefit both the academic and the political project to bring in new theoretical explorations and case studies that can strengthen an overall understanding of how hospitality workers can be better represented in their working lives. In this session, we encourage contributions that critically reflect on experiences and potentials relating to the following themes: - hospitality workers’ responses to employer-initiated fragmentation of workplaces, contracts and bargaining systems - ways of incorporating workers’ own strategies for flexibility into collective forms of organising - efforts to bridge competing time horizons, loyalties and workplace identities in hospitality workplaces Papers should be sent to [log in to unmask] by 1 April 2015. References Cobble, D. S. (1990). Rethinking troubled relations between women and unions: Craft unionism and female activism. Feminist Studies, 519-548. Gray, M. (2004). The social construction of the service sector: institutional structures and labour market outcomes. Geoforum, 35(1), 23-34. Jordhus-Lier, D., & Underthun, A. (Eds.). (2014). A Hospitable World?: Organising Work and Workers in Hotels and Tourist Resorts. Routledge. McDowell, L., Batnitzky, A., & Dyer, S. (2007). Division, segmentation, and interpellation: the embodied labors of migrant workers in a Greater London hotel. Economic Geography, 83(1), 1-25. Wills, J., Datta, K., Evans, Y., Herbert, J., May, J., & McIlwaine, C. (2010). Global cities at work. New Migrant Divisions of Labour. London: Pluto.