There was an interesting report on Sky News tonight examining the issue of low pay in the hotel sector. An undercover reporter was sent to work in the Jury’s Doyle Inn in Southampton where he was paid £1.80 per room cleaned and with 6 hours work per day was earning far less than the minimum wage which is £5.05 per hour. In order to earn the minimum wage staff would have to have cleaned 17 rooms, which was impossible to undertake in 6 hours.

Most of the staff were from Eastern Europe and had poor English and no awareness of their rights, the reporter established that many staff were not being paid the minimum wage.
In a statement in response to the report, Jury’s Doyle Hotel group passed the buck to the subcontractor who hired the hotel Staff, Foremost Logistics Services. Foremost Logistic Services apologised for a communications difficulty and paid the wages of the ’employee’ in full. Jury’s Doyle Group said that they would expect their contractor to meet
their obligations.
For many years there have been exposés on the issue of low pay in the UK including Polly Toynbee’s excellent study, Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain (2003) . It is interesting to see an Irish company fingered this time. The last year has seen action in Ireland on the issue of low pay of migrant workers but mainly in the building industry which is heavily unionised. I wonder what the Irish hotel sector will have to say in response to this report and when we will see reporters going undercover in Irish hotels? And I wonder if unions will desist using Jury’s Hotels for meetings and conferences here until the situation in the UK for all staff working in their hotels is rectified.