When we go for drinks with friends, we don’t always think about the work that makes this possible. Often that’s the point. Hospitality workers are encouraged to make customers’ experiences smooth, with smiles and nods. But our good nights out can also be someone else’s thirteen-hour shift, their aching feet and lower backs, their time spent worrying about earning enough to rent. Working in hospitality can be dire — and yet the trade union movement has long found hospitality a tough nut to crack.

In 2022, a survey of hospitality workers in the UK found that 45 percent had low job satisfaction, particularly compared to before the pandemic. The main issues workers highlighted were insufficient pay rises (72 percent), lack of appreciation from their employers (53 percent), and decrease in tips (34 percent). A Unite survey of hospitality workers in Ireland from the year before found that more than half were paid below the living wage, a third were not afforded a proper break, half did not receive any share of the service charge, and more than a third had experienced or witnessed bullying or harassment at work.

Sexual harassment in hospitality is also rife: another Unite survey, published in 2018, found that 89 percent of workers had experienced one or more incidents of sexual harassment in their working life. Of those, 56.3 percent said they had been targeted by a member of the public, and 22.7 percent said they had been harassed by a manager.

‘The issues we’re talking about with the majority of workers are the types of contracts [like zero-hours contracts] and insecure employment practices used by employers,’ says Ian Hodson, president of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU). ‘Workers often find that employers are not reasonable when it comes to dealing with any complaints or grievances they might raise. Pay and conditions are two of the biggest issues, too.’

The BFAWU is one of the trade unions seeking to organise workers to fight back against these conditions. Recent victories in the sector include a massive 44 percent pay rise for staff at Cutlery Works in Sheffield in 2022, and the biggest pay rise in a decade for McDonald’s workers back in 2018.

Hodson’s words point to one of the challenges of organising hospitality workers, even when so many recognise the problems they face in the workplace: precarity and high staff turnover, which are not only conditions in need of change but are also barriers to organising. These barriers, he says, have a lot to do with the general demographic of hospitality workers, who are often younger than workers in sectors with higher union density. ‘Staff turnover is a major problem,’ says Hodson. ‘In a workplace or factory setting, you’d normally find that people are there for long periods of time; but in hospitality, there are a lot of youngsters who are doing it just to get through university [who don’t see it as a long-term job].’

The younger demographic of hospitality workers also poses a challenge because these workers are less likely to know about unions. Anthony Curley, of Unite Hospitality, puts this down to a ‘generational shift’. ‘Young people don’t necessarily know what trade unions are,’ he says.

The industries where trade unions have predominantly been active, historically, [such as heavy industry] are no longer there, or the membership is decreasing. The world of work [is] changing and young workers are entering a labour market which is more precarious, and where they’re not getting asked to actually join a union.

On top of that, Hodson says, employers in the hospitality sector are often highly uncooperative when it comes to unions. ‘A significant [number] of employers, especially in the big corporations, are prepared to get their managers to look out for trade union organising on site: they even pay money to businesses to train their staff on how to union-bust.’ He offers examples of workplaces where managers have responded to organising efforts by isolating staff from one another in different sections, preventing them from talking to each other on breaks, and even threatening them with disciplinary action. ‘It’s a huge issue,’ he says.

Much of this was the case before Covid, but the pandemic shone a new light on the myriad of problems hospitality workers face. ‘There was a huge coming to terms [at that time] with just how exploited hospitality workers are,’ says Bryan Simpson, lead organiser of Unite Hospitality, adding that many workers who had previously been apathetic and believed they simply had to ‘suck it up’ were galvanised.

Unite Hospitality had launched in 2017, motivated by, in Simpson’s words, ‘the absolute necessity to have a union that was specifically tailored for hospitality workers’, but it wasn’t until Covid that there was a ‘huge upsurge in membership’. While there are no published figures, Simpson estimates that numbers swelled from 6,000 pre-pandemic to 20,000 in October 2021.

Since then, the union’s focused campaigning on specific issues has achieved some key victories. The Fair Tips campaign has seen wins at restaurants like Pizza Express, and Miller and Carter, and contributed to the introduction of the tipping bill, which from next year will mandate that workers get 100 percent of their tips. The Get Me Home Safely campaign has ensured that safe transport home policies to protect against sexual harassment are a prerequisite for all new liquor licences, and they are being implemented in Glasgow, Sheffield, Newcastle, Edinburgh, East Dunbartonshire, North Ayrshire, Falkirk, and Dundee.

According to Emma Donnelly, equalities officer for Unite Hospitality, Get Me Home Safely in particular has been a ‘selling point’ for people joining Unite.

People who work in hospitality genuinely enjoy the work, and there are great teams and close relationships that come out of that work. So people can be hesitant to join a union when they see it as simply raising issues with your employer or management. However, as soon as we bring up things like Get Me Home Safely, which is about bringing up the standards of the industry as a whole, people are way more open to it.

With this approach in mind, the union’s hospitality charter, drafted on the basis of conversations with workers, has also made ten key demands for the sector — among them, a real living wage, guaranteed hours (which means an end to zero-hour contracts), paid breaks, paid transport home after 11 PM, zero harassment, and 100 percent tips to staff.

While envisaging an improved hospitality sector, though, organisers are under no illusions that there’s still a long way to go. Union density remains low, and, of course, in workplaces that do get organised, not every campaign wins. For example, it took workers at the 13th Note in Glasgow more than a year to file their first collective grievance due to staff turnover, and when the entire team finally went out on strike in July, workers were made redundant two hours before their scheduled meeting with their employer. ‘Everyone was furious,’ says Nick Troy, a chef and union representative at the venue and the chair of Unite Hospitality Glasgow. ‘There was a lot of anger.’

Troy is now leading efforts to buy the venue back as a worker cooperative, and says the experience was one that must be learned from. One of his takeaways is that it’s imperative in hospitality to develop a core team that can make sure organising efforts keep ticking over. ‘People always talk about manning your workplace, but in hospitality, your workplace is always in motion. So it’s about strategically establishing a core team over the course of a few months [that is] committed to making the workplace better.’

This is just one of the ways trade unionists are learning to adapt to those unique challenges hospitality poses. Simpson credits Unite Hospitality with successfully learning to organise online, apart from its other wins. ‘Because hospitality employers are often quite averse to unions, we had already learned we couldn’t go into venues all guns blazing and hold mass meetings, so we’d been working on Zoom and WhatsApp since 2017,’ he says. Unite also ran sessions on Facebook Live throughout the pandemic, and it uses Instagram and TikTok to connect with hospitality’s younger workforce. Training for new organisers was moved to Monday daytime, too, in acknowledgement of the fact that most hospitality workers work late in the evenings and over the weekends.

With the conditions of hospitality workers showing no signs of improving on their own, and the barriers to organising in hospitality venues still firmly in place, finding new routes into the sector will be vital in the coming months and years, and not just for the sake of hospitality workers. ‘We’re currently witnessing a wave of attacks on conditions in the workplace in a bid to up profits and productivity,’ Troy points out. ‘Hospitality is at the forefront of these attacks.’ He cites the recent strikes by university and Royal Mail workers against rising precarity as evidence that this applies to a broad swathe of the economy, and as an indication of what the labour movement could face if the conditions that are standard in hospitality also became normalised elsewhere.

‘It’s something that trade unions need to take stock of,’ he concludes. ‘If they don’t fight precarity on the frontline of hospitality, things are only going to get worse — for everyone.’