LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY, WORK FLEXIBILITY, AND INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION IN HOTELS

长期以来，人们一直担心理解英国的生产率差距，即为什么英国的经济表现落后于许多领先的国际竞争对手。最初，过度关注制造业而忽视服务业，限制了研究人员解决这一问题的能力。尽管最近对服务业的研究在一定程度上纠正了这一点，但包括酒店业在内的一些行业继续被忽视，尽管它们在英国就业和产出中占据了相当大的份额。该项目特别关注劳动生产率，旨在分析酒店内灵活的工作方式和移民工人就业在多大程度上决定了劳动生产率，这两个领域在英国的政策和商业实践中都是重要且有争议的领域。我们还考察了工作灵活性和移民就业之间的关系程度，以及这些之间的互动如何影响公司业绩。现有的许多关于生产率的研究都受到了二级数据的限制。这是有问题的，因为研究人员越来越强调，生产率差距的关键不是在部门平均水平，而是在“异质性”或机构之间的差异。虽然最近对酒店的研究更多地侧重于个别机构，但他们的研究结果仍然受到数据限制的限制：酒店内部缺乏部门一级的数据；依赖年度或至多每月的数据，无法捕捉季节性、工作日/周末和其他时间变化；依赖对业绩的看法，而不是对投入和产出的实际衡量。即使在可以获得更客观数据的地方，这些数据往往也往往是对产出的财务衡量，而不是实际结果(出租和服务的房间、上好的饭菜等)，这是一个以强劲且可能扭曲的定价做法为特征的行业的一个严重弱点。该项目得益于拥有约80家酒店的三家大公司拥有唯一数据库的特权访问权限，这三家公司不仅提供酒店级别的数据，甚至提供部门级别的数据，而且提供个人员工级别的数据。在连续五年期间，按小时记录不同类型的劳动力投入(兼职、合同制、季节性等)的数据。产出是从物质和财务两方面衡量的，而2007-12年的数据也可以分析公司如何在当前的经济危机中应对不断变化的经营环境。除了学术贡献外，该项目还将通过确定与工作灵活性和移民就业有关的关键干预点，在一个生产率记录不佳和参差不齐的部门，促进旨在提高酒店业绩的政策和做法。通过与数据集中包括的公司密切合作，同时在整个研究过程中与全行业机构接触，将最大限度地提高这一点。这项研究是及时的，因为它将为一个重要行业的生产率的一些关键决定因素提供洞察力，而目前旷日持久的经济危机突显了与英国经济竞争力相关的问题。它也是及时的，因为它将能够在高度分类的范围内提供对移徙就业和灵活性的异常详细的分析，以及这些之间的关系，并模拟这些与劳动生产率的关系。这些问题在英国一系列涉及移民、供给侧政策和劳资关系的政策论述中一直是突出的。

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.