The Regulation of Employment Relations in Hospitality and Catering: Material Realities, Subjective Experiences, and Ideologies

This project examines the conditions prevailing in the hospitality and catering sectors in Greece and the UK, the institutions, and more broadly how the labour process is structured. It investigates young workers’ views, understandings, ideas, and beliefs aiming to identify and interpret the ideologies and discourses that accompany the new and precarious forms of employment. By means of qualitative methods and in-depth interviews, it analyses the perceptions of the workers about their work, their rights within it, expectations from it and beyond it, and the place of work in their everyday life.

With its focus situated at the intersection between working conditions and subjective experience, this research enquires about the extent to which a process of internalization of market values and neo-liberal worldviews is at work and whether and how such values and worldviews are modified and adapted in the context of their appropriation.

As part of the broader ‘Work on Demand’ project, it contributes to the understanding of how the labour constitution of the hospitality and catering industry is constructed comparatively through combinations of laws and rules, customs and prevailing norms, practices and actions, and the rethinking of the place and force of labour law in concrete social and economic contexts.