ReWAGE Evidence Paper : Work, Wages and Employment in the UK's Hospitality Sector

Baum, Tom and Cardenas Rubio, Jeisson and Congreve, Emma (2023) ReWAGE Evidence Paper : Work, Wages and Employment in the UK's Hospitality Sector. University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.

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Abstract

Hospitality employment in the UK has long faced and continues to experience a range of issues, arguably ‘wicked’ and paradoxical in their manifestation. A series of investigations at national and regional level over the past 25 years, led by government agencies and industry bodies (most recently, that of UK Hospitality) have addressed these issues and proposed remedies/ pathways to resolution without discernible evidence of real progress or change. The challenge for this report is to identify new ways to address these problems that can be adopted by all stakeholders and offer a sustainable basis for change. This challenge represents the basis of the ‘problem statement’ which this paper seeks to address – what policies and practical measures can a coalition of key stakeholders take to effect real change to employment in the hospitality sector in order to ensure a prosperous future for the industry and its workforce? This evidence paper draws on a number of sources which can broadly be described as pre-pandemic, during-pandemic and post-pandemic. Much of the definitive data that can be used to establish trends relating to hospitality employment falls, inevitably, into the first category and runs up to early 2020, highlighting growth in sector employment, on-going vacancy levels and the early impact of Brexit on the availability of both seasonal and permanent workers from EU countries. Data from the core pandemic period is more fragmented and more difficult to use as the basis for definitive assessment of the longer-term impact of COVID-19 on hospitality work. The same is true of emergent post-pandemic data from which only limited inferences about fundamental changes to hospitality work and employment can, as yet, be drawn. In this report, we assess available published data pertaining to hospitality employment in the UK and the devolved nations. Further, we have extracted and analysed available data sources in order to focus on two specific dimensions of hospitality employment, the extent and nature of in-work poverty within the industry’s workforce and the nature and pattern of job vacancies in the pandemic and post-pandemic periods.

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