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Employers’ demands for cheap and flexible labour which can multi‐task, make decisions and act responsibly are being met by an increasing supply of students to the part‐time labour market who are having to work due to financial necessity during term‐time. This article details the results of a survey and focus group study conducted at Manchester Metropolitan University in February 1999 addressing the nature of this employment relationship. Students’ employment provides them with advantages other than money – valuable work experience, the opportunity to meet people and to take on responsibility. Employers benefit from an easily recruited workforce of intelligent, articulate young people who are numerically and functionally flexible, conscientious, accepting relatively low pay, and who are easy to control. Potential conflict is indicated as students do articulate dislikes about their work and employment conditions, yet they feel unable to challenge their employers about them.

This paper examines employee relations management in a non‐union sector, showing how employers in the hotel industry remain relatively free to manage in an arbitrary and determined fashion, in spite of an increasingly wide net of statutory employee rights. These management practices are effected in the way the workforce is structured, and in the differential treatment of workers in the same organisation. Notably “peripheral” unskilled workers, which are in the majority, are subjected to a more “hard” form of human resource management and are made more vulnerable from lack of eligibility to employment protection rights. Employers are not constrained from dismissing workers and fail to comply with many minimum legal requirements or observe the law in spirit. “Determined opportunism” represents an extreme instance of a “retaining control/cost‐control” style of management.

Outlines the main trends in the structure and nature of hospitality employment in the 1980s and draws comparisons with those of the 1970s. Highlights the implications of these trends for future employment. Foresees the growth in jobs continuing into the 1990s against a changing labour force picture, while questioning whether rising job numbers represent a real increase in employment or more jobs for fewer hours.

Companile has a unique management set‐up in its hotels: each is run by a managing couple who are developed from within the company and these “hands‐on” managers are expected to be totally responsible for running their unit. The aim is to explain the operational nature of the personnel function at corporate and unit level within this management context, by examining the respective personnel roles of the recruitment and training executive and the managing couple and thereby assess the contribution of the personnel function to the effective management of Campanile budget‐priced hotels.

The radical revision of the wages council system in the mid‐1980s in the claimed interests of increasing labour market flexibility was a controversial measure. Against this background, a study of minimum wages and conditions and other related matters was undertaken in the hotel industry in 1989 in the North West region and among the major national companies. Findings from this study about remuneration and employment practice in regard to young workers and adults are discussed in the context of labour market developments of the 1980s in the hotel industry. Such developments include trends in employment, minimum pay and earnings. Some future issues in relation to minimum wage‐fixing are also mentioned.

For much of their history, wages councils have functioned in conditions in which public policy, as expressed in legislation, has favoured the development of voluntary collective bargaining. Since 1979 there has been a marked change of emphasis. The effect of the legislative framework and other factors on the development of voluntary collective bargaining is discussed. Some recent research findings on wage regulation in hotels are presented and the future prospects for collective bargaining in the hotel industry are considered.

Increasing numbers of full‐time students at school, college and university are combining study with work in marginal, flexible, low‐ paid, part‐time service jobs. The employment relationship is highly informal and the contract may simply be the product of coincidence, because the idea that employers follow a particular strategy with regard to the employment of labour, simplifies the complexities and vagaries of the labour market. Although this phenomenon is bringing more young males into the part‐time labour force, young females remain disadvantaged in regard to the substantive terms of the effort/reward exchange. These factors necessitate a rethink and revision of the main theories of labour force analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the basis of the Low Pay Commission's (LPC) presumption of the “distinctiveness” of young workers aged 16 and 17 in the absence of any systematic and objective basis for determining “fair pay”. In the context of labour market theories and the issues they raise in relation to skill, training and pay, the paper questions the presumption that young workers are distinctive with reference to contemporary notions of skill and training requirements.

Using a sub‐sample of hospitality businesses in North Wales, the paper presents selected evidence from semi‐structured interviews about firms’ pay and employment practices that included a systematic method to enable managers to provide some objectively justifiable measures of job content and perceptions of personal attributes in relation to the pay of 16‐ and 17‐year‐old workers compared with their older counterparts.

Employers’ informal and pragmatic employment and pay practices both reflect and reinforce the LPC's presumption of distinctiveness for a predominantly student labour force. This indicative and exploratory method of quantifying jobs and personal attributes in relation to pay appears to have some validity, although the sorts of skills that are associated with young workers’ jobs may not be fully recognised or valued, reinforcing inequality and discrimination in some cases.

In raising awareness of potential inequality of treatment and discrimination in the context of age discrimination legislation, the paper will be of interest to researchers in employment relations, human resource management, equality and diversity management, minimum wages and the hospitality industry.