Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) are public institutions at the national, regional, or international level that provide financing to promote economic development. Whether these funds support public or private sector projects, they come with a set of safeguards to ensure the funds advance development goals. These safeguards typically include requirements to ensure workers’ rights and protect against serious abuses.
Accountable development finance ensures good jobs, decent work, and development impact.
Share of Hotel Investments Across DFIs Since 2000
>$6bn
DFI Hotel Investments (USD)
113
Countries
382
DFI Hotel Investments
Hotel workers often struggle to access their fundamental rights as defined by the International Labour Organization, including the freedom of association, collective bargaining, and a safe and healthy workplace. Strong unions with collective bargaining agreements are key to creating good jobs, decent work, and development impact.
Hotel workers face enormous challenges in forming independent unions, especially in countries without strong labour law and protections for workers. Hotel employers often interfere in union elections, retaliate against union leaders, and refuse to negotiate with unions.
Hotel workers often organize into trade unions. However, even when hotel workers are unionized, hotel employers regularly refuse to bargain collectively and often violate collective bargaining agreements and sectoral agreements where they exist.
Hotel workers face low wages and precarious work. Where collective bargaining agreements are not in place, hotel workers are frequently not paid legally required minimum wages or overtime wages, and are often not paid on time.
Gender-based violence and harassment are endemic to the hotel industry, where most employees work in close proximity to guests. Complaints of gender-based violence and harassment are often ignored, left unresolved, or met with reprisal.
Hotel workers face high rates of pain and injury from lifting or repetitive strain, exposure to chemicals, cuts and burns, slips and falls, exposure to heat or cold, electrical hazards and more. Hotel employers, particularly in developing countries, often fail to implement adequate health and safety measures.
Workers’ fundamental rights are enshrined in the ILO Conventions. These rights are reinforced through the DFI labour safeguards. Based on successful models such as labour peace agreements, the Early Engagement Labour Framework Agreement is designed to complement DFI labour safeguards to further ensure workers’ access to rights in DFI-financed hotels.
