Low-Wage Work in Denmark

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5 Restructuring Meets Flexicurity: Housekeeping Work in Danish Hotels Tor Eriksson and Jingkun Li Danish hotels do not differ much from hotels in other parts of the world. Big hotels and hotels in the major cities are typically operated by international chains, whereas other Danish hotels are considerably smaller and scattered around the country. Customers include business travelers and tourists. Approximately half of overnight stays in Danish hotels are by foreigners. The tendency toward larger units and chains in particular is a fairly recent phenomenon in Denmark as well as in the rest of Scandinavia. There are two main reasons for this late entry into the market: the international chains have predominantly been interested in the capital areas only, and they also prefer so-called management contracts, a contract form that is largely unknown in Scandinavia. Hotels, restaurants, and the tourism industry make up the thirdlargest one-digit industry in the Danish economy in terms of sales. As a proportion of total employment, the industry’s share is about 16 percent, of which hotels account for one-fourth. During the last five years, the industry turnover has grown on average 2.6 percent per year, which is in line with the average growth rate of the economy. The first years of the new millennium were difficult for the hotel industry worldwide. The international economic downturn and the decline in international tourism as a consequence of the SARS outbreak , the war in Iraq, and international terrorism had a clearly adverse impact on the global hotel industry, including the Danish hotel sector. The negative consequences were particularly significant in the Copenhagen area. Since 2004, however, there has been a turn, and growth has picked up quite rapidly.1 What has been said so far could have been said about hotels in many other European countries. Denmark is somewhat different, however—at least different enough to warrant a study of its hotels sector. Wages are higher than in most other countries, particularly 186 for unskilled labor, which makes up a considerable portion of the sector’s employment. As we will see later, hotel employees are in general satisfied with their jobs despite the work being as strenuous and the work pace as high as elsewhere. In contrast to the United States, the hotel industry in Denmark does not stand out as a sector with significantly higher labor turnover than average (see Bernhardt, Dresser, and Hatton 2003). How can that be? In this chapter, we aim at providing some answers to this question. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY Although a fairly large literature exploiting detailed microdata analyses of low income, low pay, and poverty has built up in Denmark in the recent decade, studies focusing on specific sectors are thin on the ground. Moreover, analyses of specific occupations are nonexistent, probably owing to the lack of reliable detailed data at the occupation level. For the purpose of the present chapter, where the focus is on housekeepers within the hotel industry, especially room attendants, this implies that there is no earlier evidence on which to build. Of course, we also face the problem of a dearth of adequate data sources. As a consequence, at times we have to use data that describes the hotel industry while recognizing that these may not paint an entirely accurate picture of developments in housekeeping. The absence of microdata is partly compensated for by the use of information collected through the project’s case studies. The case studies detailed in this chapter include eight hotels from the capital area and a number of provincial cities (see table 5.1). All eight hotels have more than fifty bedrooms. Two are members of multinational hotel chains that have operations in all five European countries included in the low-wage project, and two belong to a Nordic hotel chain.2 As in the other countries studied, we wanted to contrast four hotels in the capital area (Copenhagen) with hotels in a number of provincial cities—Aalborg, Aarhus, and Kolding. The country-specific contrast chosen for this study is between inhouse and outsourced housekeeping. This was motivated by the fact that outsourcing has been quite common in Danish hotels and by our interest in examining differences in job quality according to contract type. As can be seen from table 5.1, three of the case hotels had outsourced their housekeeping at the time of our interviews. The interviews at the case hotels were typically organized as folRestructuring Meets Flexicurity 187 [3.17.128.129...