MCWH Books into the Hotel Services Sector
June 2009

Industry restructures, companies moving production offshore, retrenchment and redundancy, and working on an increasingly casualised basis all affect immigrant and refugee women and their participation in the Australian workforce.

These factors also impact on how MCWH plans and responds to the related needs of the immigrant and refugee women who use our services.

With this in mind MCWH recently engaged Associate Professor Santina Bertone and Dr Beata Leuner (both from Victoria University), to research where immigrant and refugee women were to be founded in a shifting workforce.

Their research found that immigrant and refugee women were moving into new employment sectors including the back-of-house departments in large hotels, environmental services departments of major hospitals, contract cleaning agencies, and mail sorting centres.

This research included consultation with management at the Langham, Sofitel and Grand Hyattt hotels and also at Crown Casino. The Royal Women's Hospital and Royal Children's Hospital were also consulted. Other research participants included the Communications Workers Union, the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union, VicHealth, the Victorian Multicultural Commission, the Ethnic Communities' Council of Victoria, and the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission. This research took place between November and December 2007.

MCWH has used this research to inform its move into the new sectors in which immigrant and refugee women find themselves as the workforce opportunities available to them shifts. In this context, in July this year MCWH will run its first program in the hotel industry at The Langham Hotel, Southgate Melbourne. The Langham's workforce includes 120 employees from immigrant and refugee background, eighty per cent of which are women. We are very much looking forward to conducting our Industry Visits Program at the Langham and bringing our health education sessions to the hotel services sector.

For a more detailed report on these visits and MCWH's programs moving into new sectors please see the June 2009 issue of 'Working Well' the MCWH newsletter.