DISCUSS THE VIEW THAT ALL HOSPITALITY AND TOURISM

WORKERS

SHOULD

RECEIVE

EQUAL

ACCESS

TO

H.R.

POLICIES AND PRACTICES

1. Introduction:
Human resource is the key to success for hospitality industry. It requires greater
attention and focus to manage the human capital and ensure they should have the
satisfaction with their employment in all aspects. This essay discusses the equal
rights and access to HR policies and practices of workers in hospitality and tourism
sector. The essay further identifies and discusses the short comings in current HR
practices, few examples of showing the equal access to HR policies and finally
conclude the topic.
2. Discussion:
It has been argued by several authors and researchers that human resource is a
backbone of the hospitality industry. Although the industry is quite a bit different in
nature than other industries but it human resource policies and practices are similar
to other industries up to some extent. According to the research published by World
Travel and Tourism Council, the hotel and tourism industry has employed about 230
million workers till date or it counts about 8.7% of the jobs worldwide. (WTTC, 2006;
Nikson, 2007]. The marginal workers such as young workers, young women workers,
students, casual employees etc. are highly regarded and reliant in the industry as
per the facts published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in the year
2001 (Nikson, 2007).
An interesting fact was presented by Hemingway in 2004, a researcher who
have expertise on human rights. According to the author, if searching over google
about the term human rights in hospitality and tourism sector, then the google
scholar turns up with no more than five results. It is evident that issues of human
resource management has been ignored by the industry completely over past years
(Babu and Vinitha, 2007). Several researches conducted in the past identified that
hospitality and tourism industry have faced significant employee attrition due to the

non-performance of human resource management. Job dissatisfaction, inappropriate

compensation structure, lack of training and recognition were few reasons of such a
higher attrition in the industry. It clearly shows that the industry lacks in providing
equal access to HR policies and practices with workers. The industry needs to
reduce the segregation and inequality as the industry employees a mix of unskilled,
skilled, part time and full time employees. It is essential for the industry to provide
equal access to HR policies and practices to these employees at all level and should
have efficient human resource management in place.
Wickens (2002) described the relationship between workers, customers and
employers in the hospitality sector.

The author explained that the tourism and

hospitality industry is run based on the master-servant relationship and an unbiased

observation is required to assess the criticality of this relationship. Considering such
relationship it is extremely important to have efficient human resource management
in place (Babu and Vinitha, 2007). The industry claims to provide better quality of
services to the customers and at the same point of time it compromises on the
human rights of its employees. With this fact, employees are highly demotivated
with such segregation since they do have their own desire to grow however industry
lacks in providing inequitable practices and eventually leads to the dissatisfied
employee and high attrition rate.
According to Spiess and Waring (2005), there is a heterogeneous relationship
between workers and employers in the hospitality and tourism sector. The
organizations in the industry have implemented contradictory routes to economic
benefits to employees based on the market they are operating in. for example low
cost carriers have altogether different and dissimilar approach to human resource
management than full service carriers in the airline industry (Eaton, 2001; Spiess
and Waring, 2005). Similar findings are obtained in hotels as well ranging from first
class luxury hotels which provide high quality 24 hour services to the more simple
relive of bed and breakfast to small fast food restaurants serving only the food.
Consequently the jobs offered by these organization to employee who cooperate
with the customers and deliver the exceptional experience have different approach
to human resource rights and practices in the industry as against those who dont.
One of the significant difference is selection and training. In continuation of these

findings, Storey (1987) also observed a very first and highly stable efforts to
differentiate the dissimilarity moves of hospitality and tourism sector towards the
human resource practices. Such moves are confined by the soft human resource
development and hard human resource development. The hard and soft human
resource development practices indicates the differentiating behaviour associated
to the human resource practices in the organization and as a result it varies by the
different level of employees. It is continuously debatable that whether the
organizations in the hospitality and tourism sector requires best fit or best practice.
Under the soft version of human resource development, the organizations are
supposed to take case of its resources cherish. Consequently the care of employees
as person and their related needs are the considered at top priority. In contrast the
hard version of human resource development delivers constant tensions to catalyse
the quantitative business strategy of managing the resources (tutor2u.net).
In order to deliver excellent job satisfaction to the employees, it is required
by the HR department to evaluate the workforce and implement the correct HR
strategy so that all the resources have equal rights to access the HR policies and
practices. Few points are listed below which needs to be considered while preparing
appropriate HR policies and ensure equal access to the employees:

Offering low salary unless skill shortage in the market for example chefs
Imbalance of work life such as long shift hours and work time not suitable for

the family
Significant employee attrition
Gender discrimination, sexual assault, sexual abuse of female staff, is the

most important accusation aligned with the tourism industry

Lack of skill unification
Hitches in employment and withholding of employees and
Wandering Employment

The operational circumstances in the hospitality sector is uneven in terms of chain

of command especially for those who are employed at junior level in the
organization. It is essential that there should not be any discrimination and
employees at level from junior to top management should be treated equally in
terms of HR practices and policies. In addition to this the organization should define
the workforce rights regarding the work and provide them with the limitation of

edge to their working while preparing the HR policies and practices. It is extremely
important for every organization to defend such human rights for their employees.
Nowadays tourism and hospitality sector appoints people from the same
geographical location and hence the local people are offered with low salaries to
meet their seasonal demand. These seasonal workers are highly sought during the
peak season and get decent pay as compared to off season employment. In such a
way these seasonal workers are disregarded by the hotels internal staff in terms of
engagement and salaries. All these workers should be treated equally as like other
working permanent staff and should offered equal access to HR policies. In order to
keep a hold on these workers, the hotel can send these workers for training and
development program during the off season and develop the resources during the
peak season (Claudio, 1992).
Another major issue in the industry is work shift timings. According to the
guidelines and issued by the hotel employee regulation of 1972 to 2002, there is a
definite system set associated to period of work as listed below:

Minimum sick leave with pay is regulated

1 rest-day per week minimum should be allowed
Daily working hours maximum should be 8 hours and if in split shifts should

not exceed 13 hours with not more than 2 interruptions.

Minimum compensation for overtime work payment of 1.5 hour for every 1

hour of work
Female employees are allowed maternity salaried leave from their hotel

equalling to a minimum of 6 half weekly salaries.

Maximum weekly working hours are 48 including overtime. Overtime should
not exceed more than 9 hours weekly.

These rules and regulations should be practiced by the industry and

implemented for every single worker (www.mlsi.gov.cy, 2012). Considering the
above state of mind, the salaries are comparably low in the industry for these
workers. For example a highly skilled supervisor and a semi-skilled supervisor
working in a same restaurant and performing the same task should be offered same
salary irrespective of their qualification.

3. Conclusion:
Hospitality and tourism industry needs to have an efficient approach to design the
HR practices and policies and implement them in the interest of employees and
workers. Summarizing all the arguments, it can be concluded that tourism and
hospitality industry is considered to be a low wage provider, low status low respect
and prejudiced job. It requires greater attention to the sector to develop policies
which makes the employees happy in terms of their job satisfaction, respect and
status without compromising on the king-servant bond. Essentially this is a tough
job for human resource managers although it requires unbiased to way to develop
and implement such policies. It has been precisely stated that every happy worker
of any organization leads to high profitability, good reputation and satisfied
customer which in turns deliver market success to that particular company. In order
to achieve the eventual business goal, it required to have equal access to all
employees to human resources policies and practices.
References:

Babu. P. G. And

Varghese V., (2007) Human Rights in Tourism:

Conceptualization and Stakeholder Perspectives (online) accessed at URL

<http://ejbo.jyu.fi/pdf/ejbo_vol12_no2_pages_40-48.pdf> [sited on 28th feb
2012]

World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) (2006) Travel and Tourism
Climbing New Heights: The 2006 Travel and Tourism Economic Research, at
http://www.wttc.org/2006TSA/pdf/Executive%20Summary%202006.pdf
(accessed 1 July 2006).

Claudio, S.E. (1992) Unequal exchanges: International tourism and

overseas employment, Community Development Journal, Vol.27 No.4,
pp.402-410

Department

of

labour

relations

(2012)

(online)

[assessed

at

URL<http://www.mlsi.gov.cy/mlsi/dlr/dlr.nsf/dmlworkingcon_en/dmlworkingc
on_en?OpenDocument> [viewed on 1st march 2012]

Tutor2u.net (2012)

HRM - Hard v Soft HRM (online), Sited at URL

<http://tutor2u.net/business/people/hrm_hard_soft.asp> [accessed on: 28 th

feb 2012]

Nikson. D., (2007) Human resource management for the hospitality and
tourism industry, Chapter1 : Human resource management and the
tourism and hospitality industry: An introduction (online),

accessed at

URL< http://arlt-lectures.de/nickson1.pdf> [sited on: 28 th feb 2012]