Deregulation and institutional conversion in the Greek hotel industry: an employment relations model in transition

• Date: 01 March 2020
• Author: Dave Lyddon,Orestis Papadopoulos
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12282

Deregulation and institutional conversion in

the Greek hotel industry: an employment

relations model in transition

Orestis Papadopoulos*and Dave Lyddon

ABSTRACT

Before the debt crisis of 2010 forced Greece into almost permanent austerity, its hotel

workers enjoyed wages and conditions (through a sector collective agreement) similar

to those in other economic sectors. This was against the international trend where low

wages and poor conditions were standard. Sweeping deregulation by Greek govern-

ments has brought much of the hotel industry into line with other countries. The sec-

tor agreement, now covering a much smaller proportion of the workforce, survived

but has experienced ‘institutional conversion’, delivering a much poorer outcome. De-

spite buoyant tourism, institutional deregulation and derogation have delivered the

employers’major objective of matching the workforce to the fluctuating demand

for labour.

1 INTRODUCTION

I have been working in hotels since 2017. The working conditions are extremely intense and exploitative.

I am getting very stressed. I am also working long hours because we are short of staff, but no overtime is

paid. My salary is very low, and no career prospects are on the horizon (27-year-old male, seasonal re-

ceptionist, non-union 5-star hotel, Santorini).

Before the eruption of the crisis in 2010, hours were fully compensated according to the sector agree-

ment. I used to have a stable working pattern without much fluctuation. My salary could reach

€1500 per month which was almost double than the then minimum wage rate (53-year-old female,

full-time permanent cleaner, unionised 5-star hotel, Athens).

The first quote expresses the current experience of hotel workers in Greece (as re-

ported, for example, in TV Focus on People, 2017) and reflects the image of hotel

work found by most studies internationally. This literature suggests that hotels in

both high-end and medium-level product markets traditionally rely on low-skilled

and casualised workers, who face poor and unpleasant working conditions, insecurity

and low pay (Baum, 2019; Bernhardt et al., 2003; Lucas, 2004; Wood, 1997). Work

intensification, limited job control, high work demands, and employee stress are in-

creasingly reported due to the prevalent cost-cutting strategies adopted by hotels,

❒Orestis Papadopoulos, Manchester Metropolitan University and Dave Lyddon, Keele University.

Correspondence: Dr. Orestis Papadopoulos, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University.

Email: o.papadopoulos@mmu.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 51:1–2, 92–109

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

exacerbated by weak union presence, lack of multi-employer agreements and viola-

tions of labour rights (Baum, 2006; Brown and Crossman, 2000; Casado-Díaz and Si-

mon, 2016; Vanselow et al., 2010; Warhurst et al., 2008). Work organisation has not

changed much in recent years, with automation and investment in skills being limited,

especially in certain occupations (such as cleaning) (Zampoukos and Ioannides, 2011,

32). Flexible work arrangements –such as temporary, part-time, agency and

outsourcing/subcontracting –are on the rise, substituting for permanent full-time

staff and responding to the ‘naturally’fluctuating occupancy rates of the industry

(ILO, 2010; Lai et al., 2008; Warhurst et al., 2008). Seasonality and informality are

also prominent features, especially in summer destinations that employ (mainly fe-

male, migrant or young) workers for only half of the year or less (Adam-Smith

et al., 2003; Robinson et al., 2019). As a result, many tend not to stay in the industry,

but female, migrant and young workers provide continuous pools of labour resources,

reducing hotel employers’interest in developing skills and providing training to avoid

high labour turnover (Appelbaum, 2010, 199).

The second quote challenges the argument that the hotel industry is always low-

paid, acknowledging the long-standing role in Greece of a multi-employer sector col-

lective agreement in determining workers’terms and conditions and improving job

quality. Following Dunlop (1958, 94), while the technical and market contexts of

an industry (such as hotels) may be similar internationally, the ‘power context’and

the ‘status of the actors’–‘workers and their organizations, managerial hierarchies,

and governmental agencies’–vary significantly. Working conditions and wage levels

in hospitality are not particularly good in most countries because the weak and infre-

quent union presence makes the enforcement of any collective agreements difficult

(Appelbaum, 2010, 199). Even in France and the Netherlands, with legally binding

multi-employer agreements, working conditions in hotels are not superior to the

USA or the UK which lack multi-employer agreements (Vanselow et al., 2010).

Such findings, along with others referred to below (for example, Cañada, 2018;

Godino and Molina, 2019; Jaehrling and Méhaut, 2012), illustrate the limited role

of external regulation across much of Europe in improving the job quality and earn-

ings of hotel workers. Consequently, research on hotel work has paid little attention

to collective agreements, assuming their role to be limited or irrelevant. But, in

Greece, the tradition of sectoral regulation in the hotel industry was strong and con-

tinued even during the economic crisis (Koukiadaki and Grimshaw, 2016). Our main

research objective therefore is to establish whether and how the maintenance of the

sectoral agreement since the crisis has mitigated deregulation pressures in the national

labour market.In the process, we examine how, and to what extent, national dereg-

ulation has enabled hotel employers to circumvent sectoral regulation, and whether

the power context (particularly, workplace union presence) can still influence posi-

tively workers’terms and conditions. To do this, we not only analyse national labour

market reforms and the changing sectoral agreement, but also workers’experiences in

upper-market hotels in Athens and on several Greek islands; we assume that such

workplaces are more likely to follow sectoral regulation and avoid a race to the

bottom.

The article is structured in the following way. The next section situates the hotel in-

dustry within the Greek employment model before 2010, when the national austerity

programme started. The Greek tourist sector has grown absolutely and relatively

since then but has not escaped being sucked into the vortex of austerity. The forms

that this has taken are conceptualised by using the terms deregulation and derogation,

93Deregulation and institutional conversion

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd