Harassment, no holidays and low pay: Readers share their hospitality work horror stories

EARLIER THIS WEEK, TheJournal.ie ran an investigative piece which looked at the hospitality industry and the apparent abuses within it in the west of the country.

While the piece referred, mainly, to cases which occurred in the Mayo and Galway, we have received a large number of emails from people who are currently working in the sector nationwide.

Tales of widespread abuse which featured in this week’s piece were echoed in the emails we received by those working in the industry.

Here we publish some of the complaints of workers. Name changes have been marked with an asterisk.

Sinéad, 20, Chef

This epidemic is rife in the whole of Ireland. I’m currently 20 and I’ve been in the hospitality sector for about three years as a chef. I’ve never been employed in a place that doesn’t breach employee rights. The first hotel I worked in would pay you for 39 hours a week, so if you worked over that amount of time the rest would go into lieu. Sounds fine, but when you worked 12-hour days, two hours were taken off you for a ‘break’ you never got.

Then you decide to take some of those lieu hours for a holiday. The hotel in question would book you off for seven days. That’s seven days taken out of your holiday time but you would only be paid for a week’s work which was five days of eight-hours. However they deduct 56 hours in total.

Also being a woman chef in a predominantly male kitchen there were a few incidents with sexual harassment which were sorted very quickly, however this was not the first offence of the individual. Fast forward to my current employment. You work 13-hours a day and don’t get any breaks whatsoever but you are still being deducted an hour from your salary plus the condition of not being paid Sunday rates.

I barely get to eat food because it’s so busy. The holiday situation is ridiculous in our contract; you either take them or lose them.

A change needs to be made but a lot of people in this sector are too afraid to speak out in fear of losing their jobs or getting their hours cut to the point of the job not actually being worth the petrol it takes to get there.

Rachel, 19, Waiting Staff

I’ve worked in the hospitality sector for about three-and-a-half years now on and off. I’m a student so it was the easiest way to make money. I’ve found that wherever I go, I suffered abuses. I  worked in a café for those first two years and for the first year or so, we didn’t get breaks if it was busy.

We were understaffed so on busy days like Saturdays or Sundays, we’d work from 9-5 and not get a break. What was worse was that our pay would be deducted for the breaks that we didn’t get. Also if the till was ever under, we had to supplement it with our tips.

I’ve also worked for recruitment companies who send “cater waiters” to places that need extra staff for a particularly big event. Before Christmas, I worked a 12 hour shift in a well-known Dublin hotel and was given one 20 minute break in that period. I was deducted 30 mins pay for that break. The worst thing is that they feel they can do it to you because you don’t actually work for the company, you’re just there for a day or two at the most. It’s happened to me countless times but you put up with it because you need money.

Abuse is rife throughout the sector and I’m glad that someone is taking a stand on it.

Stock photo Shutterstock / wavebreakmedia Shutterstock / wavebreakmedia / wavebreakmedia

Amalia, 28, Waiting Staff*

Sometime in the past, I was living in Ireland on a student visa and I worked in a pub as a waiting staff for a couple of years. My student visa allowed me to work part-time during school term and full-time during school holidays.

The manager was a terrible person to work with. He shouted at you for no reason, would not provide payslips, weekly wages were always delayed and strangely enough, it was only the non-Irish staff wages that were usually delayed. They would put me to work alone on a busy day to serve all the tables, around 25/30 and yet complain why I could not be “faster”.

I was supposed to be on a €9.35 an hour, but checking some of my wages, they would pay me only the minimum at times. There was no previous agreement of any kind and when I asked the owner, he said it was probably for taxes and no payslips to prove it.
At the time, we would share tips among all the staff, but we had no control over/access to it and from time to time, management and barmen would take money from our tip box without telling anyone and we would only see some of this money maybe every six weeks or more.

I always had a good relationship with the owner and all the other staff, but I can’t forget how unfair they were to me and other non-EU workers.

Maciek, 32, Night Porter

I’m 32 years old and Polish and I work in hospitality for 10 years. During that time, I did Honours Degree in Ireland. In hospitality, I was working in various roles from reception through bar, restaurant and conference and banqueting. During that time, as you might suspect, I came across many situations that I could describe as bullying or slave work conditions. I’ll give you short brief from the ones I remember:

As a Night Receptionist I was enforced to sell alcohol after normal serving hours to, look out: Non-residents of the hotel (often drunk and aggressive), in the same place I was expected to be receptionist, porter, cleaner, cook and security. All of them at the same time! Working on my own in a hotel with over 100 bedrooms (up to 200 people in the house). For seven years working in the same place I got no pay rise.

I am unemployed at the moment because I got to the stage where I am on anti-depressive medication and I see no motivation to work since I am being treated as slave. I am seriously considering to stay on social welfare office for a very long time since my work (and I am very good at my work) is totally underappreciated. Not to mention that I am disrespected  for my work in almost every single hospitality employment I had, often being told that if I won’t obey,  I will lose hours.

Diarmuid, mid 20s, Other employment

I have just read your interesting article this morning on the above topic and felt I should share my experience and overall view as a previous employee of the hospitality industry in Ireland. I have a qualification in Hotel and Catering Management (BA Hons degree) from Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, along with an M.Sc in Tourism Management, which may help in the credibility of my experience and opinion.

To keep things as short as possible, I just want to explain my reason for not working in the hospitality industry today, despite having studied it for 4/5 years in college. When I graduated from GMIT with my honours degree, I started working as a Duty Manager in a hotel  and when I worked out my wage per hour (€17,000 pa) based on the number of hours I worked on average per week, I was being paid well below the minimum wage per-hour that the rest of my colleagues were being paid who had no qualifications at all. This certainly did not encourage me to look forward to a long and rewarding career in the industry, after studying hard for four years to get my degree, and push for an honours degree.

I feel the hospitality industry organisations and associations have not supported the industry’s employees in the same way as other industry employees have been supported and represented by their leader organisations. I believe an investigation into the ability of the industry to retain its employees once they have qualified from college would reveal very disappointing findings and that industry comparable leadership supports for its employees  would be very poor, hence the large number of people leaving the industry relatively soon after graduation from college.

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