Examination of the concept of internal labour markets in UK hotels

This article describes the results of a survey of a sample of UK hotels to gather data on various attributes of the internal labour markets, eg promotion criteria, pay differentials and the ‘openness’ of the internal labour market. The results are used to test the hypothesis that hotels exhibit strong and weak internal labour markets with an increasing level of bureaucracy perhaps being indicative of a stronger internal labour market. Overall the findings would appear to show that formal employee organization within the hotel industry is lacking and that the hotel industry is strongly dependent on the external labour market