How do hotels juggle hours across Europe? Collective Bargaining and Internal Flexibility in European Hospitality: Comparative Evidence from Estonia, Greece, and Spain (2000‑2025)

Abstract

Across Europe’s hospitality sector, a high reliance on internal flexibility (variable hours, irregular shifts, annualised working time, and on-call arrangements) enables employers to match labour input to volatile patterns of demand based on seasonality. They also generate unpredictable working lives for employees. For many hospitality workers, boundaries between work and private time are increasingly blurred; income depends on fluctuating hours; and days are structured around fragmented or last-minute schedules (Ioannou, 2023). The result is a form of precariousness that is not only contractual but profoundly temporal, a central analytical component of this report: workers experience uncertainty not whether they will have work, but when and at what rhythm work will occur. The report delves into how this fluctuating temporality is regulated, shedding light on managerial control over working time.

Hotels, restaurants, and tourist services operate under intense temporal volatility: demand fluctuates seasonally, weekly, and even hourly (Gómez-Martín et al., 2016). Employers, therefore, rely heavily on internal flexibility mechanisms reference-period systems for redistributing time across months (Pacelli et al., 2008). These practices allow firms to maximise labour utilisation without expanding the workforce, but they also erode workers’ control over their time, destabilise incomes, and complicate life planning. Hospitality thus functions as a “stress test” for labour market institutions: when collective agreements regulate flexibility (by limiting split shifts, requiring advance notice, or compensating unsocial hours), precarity (Bourdieu, 1998) can be mitigated. Conversely, when protections are absent or weakened, precarious temporal conditions become embedded in everyday work (Weil, 2014).

This report is part of BARTIME, a two-year project on non-standard working time in industrial relations, co-funded by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (Project No. 101126498). In the context of the BARTIME project, this study investigates how legislative and collective bargaining institutions either curb or facilitate the reliance on time-related internal flexibility in the hospitality sector in three European countries: Estonia, Greece and Spain, ultimately mapping how these dynamics are codified in collective bargaining agreements (CBA).