Mobility, migration and hospitality employment: Voices of Central and Eastern European women

Abstract

This article reports the findings of an arts-based participatory action research project on the experiences of Central and Eastern European female migrants working in the hospitality sector in the United Kingdom. It critically explores the participants’ negotiations of their multiple, intersecting mobilities and immobilities,and reveals how their employment in hospitality both encourages and restricts these mobilities. The article is situated within the unfolding hopeful tourism scholarship perspective, and argues that its inclusive and participatory approach provides considerable insight into these migrant workers’ complex and often under-appreciated trajectories. The article concludes that the arts-based participatory methodology deployed in this research uniquely allows these highly mobile and at the same time immobilized hospitality workers to self-represent themselves and to maintain ownership of their stories.

Assessing hospitality industry employee perceptions of performance appraisals

“…Contrary to this present study's findings, organizational loyalty appears to be low throughout the hospitality industry as the temporary nature of jobs in the hospitality industry allow workers to change jobs frequently. It seems many hospitality employees and managers consider hospitality employment temporary while searching for employment in other industry sectors (Rydzik, Pritchard, Morgan, & Sedgley, 2012). This present findings would be consistent with the previous statement in regard to the employee sample because 55.5% of the employee sample had been employed by their current employer for five years or less.…”

Return labour migration: an exploratory study of Polish migrant workers from the UK hospitality industry

“…Although hospitality employment has for long been an established research avenue within social science disciplines, the scope of its analysis has been sporadic, while the scale of investigation limited (Zampoukos & Ioannides, 2011). In particular, the issue of migrant labour in hospitality has not yet received sufficient attention which explains a rather fragmented nature of research outputs on this subject matter as a result (Datta et al, 2007;Rydzik et al, 2012). The issue of the migrant workforce in the hospitality sector has primarily been studied from the 'western perspective' where the post-2004 EU labour migration has been of primary interest (Janta & Ladkin, 2009).…”

Work(ing) dynamics of migrant networking among Poles employed in hospitality and food production

“…Encounters with individuals, who could make work rewarding or tense, were mentioned by interviewees as beneficial in terms of accessing various resources, making new contacts, learning or even as a means of finding new work opportunities. Hotels, restaurants and bars became ‘places of in‐between‐ness’ (Rydzik et al. , 2012) facilitating the flow of information between its mobile occupants – migrants and customers.…”