Authors: Evangelia Kasimati, Panagiota Dionysopoulou, Panagiota Konstantinakou

Title: Delinquency regarding the undeclared work in tourism accommodation. The judicial framework for the employees’ protection and bodies supervising the compliance with the provisions of labour legislation in Greece. The case of Lakonia.

Abstract

One of the most significant pathogenies of the labour market of a state is the phenomenon of undeclared work in all the sectors of economic activities. Τourism cannot be excluded from tactics of undeclared labour, a phenomenon that has very serious impacts on workers, on the state itself and furthermore, on the enterprises themselves.

Greece presents augmented percentages of undeclared labour in comparison with the rest of the European Union’s countries. Governments, having understood the expanded dimensions that this issue has taken, have adopted a series of measures, in order to eliminate undeclared labour, with already positive results.

Due to the complexity of this phenomenon, it is difficult to quantify this, while the results from various methodological approaches, direct or indirect, are only estimations. For this reason a lot of studies have taken place.

The current paper examines this issue from another point of view, the one that has to do with the existence or not of the tourism workers’ willingness to turn to the judicial system, on their own initiative, in order to claim for their rights. The results of the quantitative and the qualitative survey that has taken place (survey in the files of the courts in the prefecture of Lakonia and interviews from hotel employees), have shown lack of willingness. As a result, the Greek government could adopt more effective and drastic measures with the purpose to encourage workers to appeal to the judicial system, as a modality to confine the phenomenon of undeclared work. This research is limited in the prefecture of Lakonia, a prefecture that reaps the benefits of the international and domestic tourism and of the new tourism investments on accommodation, which seem to increase as the years pass by. It is also a prefecture that undeclared work has the tendency to drop.

Keywords

Undeclared work, protection, tourist accommodation, Lakonia