Lokala partsrelationer och funktionell flexibilitet:

en fallstudie inom hotellbranschen under covid- 19-pandemin, våren 2020

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 led to a drastic drop in occupancy rates and extensive staff cuts in the hotel and restaurant industry. Companies were reorganised and the functional flexibility increased – employees were expected to be multi-skilled generalists, not specialists. This article studies how this happened in one of Sweden’s major hotel chains focusing on local workplace labour relations. Based on qualitative empirical material and a discussion of labour relations, negotiations and power resource theory, two power strategies are identified, one crisis-driven and one opportunistic. The crisis-driven power strategy and a severely weakened trade union organisation opened the way for the opportunistic strategy and a previously planned strengthening of the functional flexibility. The article contributes to the discussion on local workplace relations during a crisis, be it a pandemic, recession or economic crisis. It highlights how a company used the power asymmetry in the institutional conditions of the Swedish model's bargaining orientation and strengthened its position in relation to increasingly weak power resources of the trade union, to push through its ambitions for increased functional flexibility during the covid-19-crisis.