Permanently marginalized? Securing living hours among part-time workers in hotels and restaurants in Northern Europe

Abstract

This paper offers a comparative perspective on the wage and working conditions of marginal part-time workers (less than 15 hours per week) in the Danish, Irish and Norwegian hotel and restaurant sector. Each of the three countries belongs to distinct industrial relations models with different sectoral traditions of multi-employer bargaining, political intervention and union strength. We focus on social partner initiatives, over time, covering trade unions, employers and national governments’ unilateral, bipartite or tripartite measures to secure ‘living hours’ for workers with contracts of few hours. Analytically, we seek inspiration from the work on industrial relations regimes by Visser (2009) and combine it with the concept of living hours. We find that social partners have introduced a series of initiatives to secure living hours, notably to protect and increase hourly wages and secure guaranteed weekly working hours. However, while securing minimum wages and income through either bipartite, tripartite or unilateral measures seem relatively successful in all three countries, the attempts to guarantee minimum weekly working hours and thus secure living hours prove more difficult and mainly has had an impact in Denmark.