The union movement must do everything to prevent the risk of a rift between declining organised sectors and workers in the ever growing service sector, urges Yana Petticrew.
According to Scottish Tourism Economic Impact Model (STEAM) data, Glasgow welcomed 3.91 million overnight visitors and 21.8 million day visitors in 2023, with a whopping £2.35 billion spent in the local economy (a 47.3%, 23.2% and 48.6% increase from 2022 respectively). Events such as the UCI Cycling World Championships are lauded as jewels in the city’s tourist-attracting crown, whilst causing vast disruptions to everyday Glaswegian life. Now Glasgow is set to host the Commonwealth Games for the second time in recent memory, and we are again being sold a narrative that these events are incredibly beneficial to our people and economy. Meanwhile the working class continues to experience skyrocketing rents and a lack of affordable housing, increasing fuel and food poverty, and precarious employment conditions in even the most ‘secure’ sectors.
The sharply rising precarity in Glasgow’s labour market is a corollary of increasing globalisation and the replacement of manufacturing jobs in the face of rapid deindustrialisation. Spaces once occupied by heavy industry and ancillary production are now littered with cafés, bars, pubs, restaurants and hotels. Understanding Glasgow reports that Distribution, Hotels and Food, the second largest industry in the city, comprises 22% of the economy. The industry is a varied mix of chain-owned, franchised, and independent small businesses. Its local characteristics depend on the economic sustainability of running businesses in different geographical areas. Organisations like Visit Glasgow proclaim that these businesses support over 37,000 ‘full-time’ jobs. But to generate profit, these businesses often use highly exploitative and archaic employment practices reminiscent of conditions that the trade union movement battled against in the early twentieth century.
While the sector continues to grow, and new businesses are opening at a rapidly rising rate, the material conditions of service workers are in freefall. The £2.35 billion spent on our economy in 2023 was not brought in merely through osmosis by hosting global events or visits to our cultural attractions. It was brought in through the labour of our service workers. Without hospitality workers providing their services, pints are not pulled, meals are not served, beds are not made. This labour, often undertaken by young and migrant workers, is characterised by low pay, job insecurity, poor psychosocial quality, and rampant harassment by both management and customers. The industry relies heavily on wage theft and the undermining of basic employment law to create an unstable, transient workforce that is churned through repetitive cycles of exhaustion and frustration — making it much easier to find another job than persevere and fight.
While often misunderstood as a part-time vocation taken up by parent-funded university students to subsidise a particular lifestyle during their studies, the hospitality sector is in fact comprised of workers from a wide variety of economic backgrounds and experiences. Yes, a small fraction may be economically comfortable, using it as a venture to obtain cultural capital and networking opportunities, but the vast majority are at the sharp end of the precarity, insecurity and in-work poverty. Hospitality workers are facing homelessness and displacement from the city, the inability to buy food, and deteriorating physical and mental health. They take extreme risks with their wellbeing in exchange for zero-hour contracts on NMW. Dismissive attitudes towards hospitality workers from management, owners, and even other trade unionists, fuels a pessimistic nihilism that this industry cannot and will not ever change, that our conditions will continue to decline as the service sector and gig economy expands, and that the sector will simply persist in its repetitive grinding down of ‘unskilled’ workers and will spit them out when they have served their purpose.
The Union Movement’s Next Generation
To survive through the next decade, the labour movement will have to seriously address the issues facing workers who find themselves stagnating in the hospitality sector. It must develop an industrial strategy to challenge the deplorable conditions we experience, and seek to build a militant union culture where one doesn’t currently exist. The industry exploits the lack of widespread sectorial unionisation and comes down hard on any attempts from workers to collectively improve their working environment. To downplay or outright ignore the plight of the hospitality worker at this moment is to abandon the next generation and leave them alienated from organised structures that will eventually collapse without them. In the face of an uncertain future and growing attacks from both the far right and centrist liberalism, the labour movement cannot risk such a rift between declining organised sectors and workers in the ever-growing precarious labour market. It certainly does not serve working class interests to perpetuate this divide through ignorance or defeatism.
As the industrial officer for Unite Hospitality’s Glasgow branch, I have lost count of how many times I’ve been told, ‘you will never organise hospitality.’ Hearing it from employers is to be expected, but to hear it from fellow workers and trade unionists is nothing short of heartbreaking. The gargantuan task facing us, aside from securing sectoral bargaining and improved working conditions, is helping workers realise they deserve better, and that they should be able to live meaningful lives while employed in hospitality. They deserve the ability to pay their rent without arrears or utilising an overdraft; to eat healthy food and to sleep regularly; to raise a family and engage with their local communities. The intolerable conditions of hospitality work are eroding members’ quality of life on a mass scale, and it is our responsibility as a branch and as a movement to raise the collective will of these workers to fight back.
Unite Hospitality Glasgow have gone from strength to strength over the past two years, placing predominantly young precarious workers at the forefront of industrial and political action in the city. Our organising approach analyses our capacity, sets realistic goals, and actively combats the growing trend of service model trade unionism. We’re not selling a redundancy policy to workers in the event of venue closure, which is often impossible to secure with small staff bases and transience preventing the two-year minimum service required. We instead aim to build concentrated cells of worker power that reject the expectation that workers will produce profits through ‘unproductive’ labour for little-to-nothing in return. Successful efforts to empower workers in the sector focus on collectivising, securing their recognition as an industrial force, and developing and strengthening the union culture that is crucial to sustaining power.
Solidarity Across and Beyond the Service Sector
Our members’ conditions correspond to the wider socio-economic, political, and environmental contexts that dictate every aspect of their lives. During the Storm Éowyn red weather warning in January 2025, the branch engaged with hundreds of Glasgow’s workers who were expected to travel and work despite a direct threat to their life. From the moment of the first announcement by the Met Weather Office, it was obvious that several employers would obstinately remain open, putting their staff at risk in an attempt to extort profit from front-line workers. Workers in multiple venues quickly organised around invoking §44 of the Employment Rights Act 1996, and refused to travel and work during the peak of the storm. A number of these campaigns have now escalated, and workers have lodged collective grievances seeking union recognition, the real living wage, and adherence to basic employment and health and safety laws so often not afforded to them. Storm Éowyn highlighted the utter disregard employers have for their employees’ safety and the crucial need to establish cells of worker power in venues before such life-threatening issues arise, to combat bosses’ indifference towards workers’ immediate safety, and to develop organised action against companies that would have you put your life on the line for poverty wages.
Our role as a branch is not only to support and empower workers to better their workplaces, but to provide them with the tools to organise with their peers across the sector, and fight for better conditions in their housing and communities. Through professionalising and politicising the branch, we are refusing to sink to employers’ levels of haphazardness that is displayed in how they treat their workers. Where they threaten workers with victimisation and union-busting tactics in a highly disorganised fashion, we meet them with militancy and concentrated efforts to effectively mobilise the power workers have built in their campaigns.
It is equally important, in the face of current political crises, that we continue to raise class consciousness among members as their civil liberties are infringed and they are increasingly swept up as pawns in the current drive to war and the aiding and abetting of genocide in Palestine. Alongside facing immediate bread-and butter issues, members are organising around humanitarian and political issues in their workplaces. After over a year of internal campaigning, unionised staff at the Glasgow Film Theatre enacted a service boycott of Coca-Cola products stocked in their fridges for the duration of the Film Festival. This action forms part of our larger ‘Serve Solidarity’ campaign, which aims to sever ties between Glasgow’s hospitality sector and Israeli apartheid, as well as heightening the cultural support of Palestine in our venues. These actions are incredibly small in comparison with what must be done to materially impact the ongoing genocide, but in taking these actions we re-establish the rebuilding of international solidarity as an important organising objective. In cutting our complicity with apartheid and genocide by refusing to sell BDS-listed products, hospitality workers are taking actions similar to many celebrated moments in labour movement history. Equivalent industrial escalation across every sector will put us on the right side of history.
In the wake of ever-mounting economic, political, and environmental crises, the problems within Glasgow’s hospitality sector are numerous and rising. We cannot afford to remain complacent about or indeed hospitable towards such issues. A highly organised service sector must be a priority for the labour movement. Support from the wider movement for Unite Hospitality’s efforts is critical for maintaining optimism among working class youth and ensuring that the blatant abuse perpetrated by employers and industry lobbyists ends sooner rather than later.
Yana Petticrew is the vice-chair and industrial office for Unite Hospitality Glasgow.
