“Tourism is a key sector in the Austrian economy which employers keep presenting as a success story. The number of overnight stays and customers keeps breaking records. In spite of all this, employees, who achieve these records under difficult conditions, are rewarded by pittance pay” said Rudolf Komaromy, leader of the Tourism section of the Vida service union. Currently, the tourism industry, which gathers catering and the hotel industry, employs 174,000 “workers” and 27,000 “employees.” To support his argument, Komaromy compared minimum wage for skilled cooks - €1,205 a month for 40 hours a week, and the level of minimum wage negotiated in industrial cleaning – €1,350. In Austria, where the farming industry is the only sector that pays less than tourism, “employers have been complaining, for years, of the lack of skilled workers and apprentices. Decent minimum wage allowing them to make a living would be a step toward improving working conditions and would help solve this problem” explained Alfred Gajdosik, negotiator for the GPA-djp private employees’ union. Hence unions’ high claims for sectoral minimum wage increase of around 20 percent – from €1,205 up to €1,450 a month before tax. As an answer, employers’ negotiators asked for a “cooling off phase,” postponing negotiations to April 12. They are rejecting this claim, which is “not viable from an economic point of view and would weaken the sector’s 70,000 hotels and restaurants.”
egotiated in industrial cleaning – €1,350. In Austria, where the farming industry is the only sector that pays less than tourism, “employers have been complaining, for years, of the lack of skilled workers and apprentices. Decent minimum wage allowing them to make a living would be a step toward improving working conditions and would help solve this problem” explained Alfred Gajdosik, negotiator for the GPA-djp private employees’ union. Hence unions’ high claims for sectoral minimum wage inc
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