Essay on Hotel Industry
The article by Lai, Soltani, & Baum (2008) accurately discloses the modern trend of temporary and flexible job relationships in the hotel industry regarding the diverse impact on the state of labour market and its participants – employers, agents, and the workforce. All the categories involved are said to have personal interests and expectations in such type of business relationships, which finds a reflection in the economic progress of the country, influences employment regulations, and helps to satisfy the demand of the workforce.
Three main profiles are discussed in the article. The first one is a hotel manager who would rather contract employment agencies rather than outsource. This lets the manager obtain control over the workforce in terms of the enterprise, set the salary rate, get consultation, and choose from the wide selection of partner agencies on a non-contract basis. Partner agencies are the labour suppliers working on an agreed commission and managing salary payments to the personnel recruited by the hotel. Recruited staff includes mostly females of Eastern European origin who apply for the positions of room attendants in housekeeping departments on the full-time basis. These people usually do not search for a permanent job because of personal preferences or lack of skills in the given type of job.
The concept of flexibility appears to be beneficial to all parties involved due to the broadening of possibilities and simplification of common procedures in the job market. The advantages for the client hotel are accurate accounting, constant supply of employees, higher flexibility in the competitive environment, and provision of all types of work contracts available. Workers are being employed, and sometimes this employment appears to be continuous even though the job is supposed to be temporary or part-time. Agents, in turn, earn profits on providing more flexible workforce to the flexible firms.
The overall trend seems to have quite positive effect and witnesses about the development of new business forms and solutions in the markets where the high turnover and obvious uncertainty rates are dominant. On the other hand, the trust to the employer diminishes, the quality of personnel skills does not enhance, and the typical representatives of the labour market lack job security. Let us observe this from another point of view.
According to my vision, the given process must have had certain background, which allowed or even forced the participants of the job relationships to act in a similar way. One can easily name several other industries and spheres, where stability in the human resources aspect is virtually impossible. Let us take an example of a call center. A position of a customer service representative, CSR, does not usually suppose career growth opportunities or even increase in salary for the personnel, that’s why the peculiarities of the industry are based on the quick turnover of the employees who are mainly students. The same processes can be observed in IT and consulting, which are the leading business spheres in terms of popularity and demand nowadays. They are managed in-house, outsourced, and contracted, and sometimes within the same organization.
Let us turn back to the hotel industry. The given industry seems to follow the emerging global trend of hiring people for a set of non-continuous activities, namely a project or a campaign. Such type of hiring is feasible because nowadays part-time job, subcontracting, and self-employment are the permitted forms of job contracts. Taking this into account, the employers, which are the hotel managers in the given case, can minimize their costs and avoid paperwork associated with the legal hiring of an employee. Besides, they are willing to pay for the high quality staff. And demand always creates supply, so the necessity in the employment agencies for the hotel industry becomes obvious.
Finally, the workers basically appear to be the less lucky party regarding the ignorance of the hotel management to promote the flexible personnel, rise the salary, or provide a sufficient training. However, I personally don’t consider them to be the victims of the trend because, otherwise, they would most probably be just unemployed. A person with good qualifications and skills will not probably apply for a position in the housekeeping department. Most of the respondents in the survey (Lai, Soltani, & Baum, 2008) replied that they did not have chance to get a full-time job or their work experience was too generalized. This again proves that not all people in the society are equal but all of them are supposed to be good in something.
Concluding the aforementioned, I would like to say that the contemporary business conditions of the hotel industry are really favourable due to the high range of opportunities they allow for each participant in the market.
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