LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY, WORK FLEXIBILITY, AND INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION IN HOTELS

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There has been a longstanding concern to understand the UK productivity gap, that is, why its economic performance lags behind that of many leading international competitors. Initially, an undue focus on manufacturing at the expense of the service sector limited the ability of researchers to address this question. Although this has been partly rectified by recent research on services, some sectors continue to be neglected including hotels, even though they account for significant shares of UK jobs and output. This project focuses specifically on labour productivity, and aims to analyse the extent to which this is determined by flexible work practices within hotels, and the employment of migrant workers, both of which are important and contentious areas of policy and business practice in the UK. We also examine the extent to which there is a relationship between work flexibility and the employment of migrants, and how the interaction between these influences firm performance. Much of the existing research on productivity has been constrained by the limitations of secondary data. This has been problematic given that researchers increasingly emphasise that the key to the productivity gap is to be found not in sectoral averages, but in 'heterogeneity' or the variance between establishments. While recent research on hotels has focused more on individual establishments, their findings have still been limited by data constraints: a lack of data at the departmental level within hotels; reliance on annual or, at best, monthly data that fail to capture seasonality, weekday/weekend and other temporal variations; and reliance on perceptions of performance rather than actual measurements of inputs and outputs. Even where more objective data are available, these often tend to be for financial measures of outputs, rather than physical outcomes (rooms let and serviced, meals served etc) which is a critical weakness in an industry characterised by strong, and potentially distorting, pricing practices. This project benefits from privileged access to a unique data base for three large companies, with some 80 hotels, which provide data not just at the hotel level, or even at departmental level, but at individual employee level. Data is recorded on an hourly basis for different types of labour inputs (part time, contracted, seasonal etc) over a continuous five year period. Outputs are measured in both physical and financial terms, while the availability of data for 2007-12 also allows analysis of how firms have responded to a changing operating environment through the current economic crisis.In addition to its academic contribution, the project will contribute to policies and practices seeking to enhance hotel performance, by identifying key intervention points in relation to work flexibility and migrant employment, in a sector with a poor and uneven productivity record. This will be maximized by working closely with the companies included in the data set, while also engaging with industry-wide bodies throughout the research. The research is timely because of the insights it will provide into some of the key determinants of productivity in an important sector at a time when prolonged economic crisis has highlighted issues relating to UK economic competitiveness. It is also timely because it will be able to provide exceptionally detailed analyses of migrant employment and flexibility, and the relationships between these at a highly disaggregated scale, and to model how these are related to labour productivity. These issues have been prominent in a range of policy discourses covering migration, supply side policies, and industrial relations in the UK.