Trade Union Effectiveness in the UK Hospitality Sector: A Case Study Approach

This study investigates how union representation, management attitude, union membership, collective bargaining, and technological revolution affect trade union effectiveness in the UK hospitality industry. It specifically explores how internal organisational factors and trade union factors impact the effectiveness of trade unions in the UK hospitality sector, as well as how improvement in such effectiveness can benefit employers and employees in this sector. An analysis of seven case studies of hotels in the UK was conducted, which included a total of 71 interviews with employees and hotel managers, seven meeting observations, and an analysis of documents from each hotel. All these data were analysed thematically using NVivo 12. Key findings revealed that two hotels were strongly unionised while the rest were weakly unionised. The unionised hotels had strong union representation, bargaining power and an adequate and growing union membership. The weakly unionised hotels had weak bargaining power and declining membership. Workers from weakly unionised hotels began to turn to management efficiency to seek resolutions for their concerns. Conversely, workers from strongly unionised hotels sought union representation to resolve their issues with the management. The study contributes a proposed conceptual framework of trade union effectiveness applied to the seven case organisations.