Our ambitious 3.5-year Horizon Europe project is organised into nine interconnecting work packages, each dedicated to investigating specific challenges in today’s transforming tourism and hospitality industry.
The FUTOURWORK work packages will deliver critical research and tools that take us towards our overall goal of creating a fairer, more inclusive sector, built on improved worker representation and wellbeing.
Here, we outline the purpose of all nine work packages and the outputs they are responsible for – from a groundbreaking benchmarking platform for employee wellbeing, to accessible legal manuals to support employers and workers alike.
Work Package 1: The Project’s Theoretical Framework
Lead Partner: Dalarna University
Work Package 1 (WP1) sets a strong conceptual foundation for the project. It explores key theories and ideas related to platform work, tourism and hospitality, trade unions, wellbeing, and algorithmic management – all through a gendered and intersectional lens.
This Work Package Will:
- Produce a shared conceptual map outlining the theoretical areas we’ll explore together.
- Complete a literature review of existing research and policy materials relevant to tourism and hospitality workers and platform work.
- Publish an academic article highlighting the purpose and potential outcomes of the project.
- Create an evolving reference database of key literature, for use by partners during the project and future researchers looking at tourism and hospitality worker wellbeing.
Work Package 2: Understanding Tourism & Hospitality Workers’ Wellbeing
Lead Partner: Babeș-Bolyai University
How do tourism and hospitality workers experience wellbeing – especially those in precarious or platform-based roles? Work Package 2 (WP2) sets out to answer that question by co-creating a robust new way to measure wellbeing, shaped by the lived experiences of workers across our six partner countries: Portugal, Greece, the UK, Sweden, Romania, and Bulgaria.
This Work Package Will:
- Develop a new survey tool to explore the meaning of wellbeing from the perspectives of diverse digital and non-digital worker voices as well as employers.
- Create a Wellbeing Index that highlights patterns, challenges, and disparities – all framed through an intersectional lens.
- Build an interactive benchmarking platform allowing tourism and hospitality organisations to assess their workers’ wellbeing and compare with others in the industry.
Work Package 3: The Digitisation of Tourism & Hospitality Work
Lead Partner: American College of Greece – Research Centre
Digital platforms are transforming the tourism and hospitality sector – but what does that mean for the people doing the work? Work Package 3 (WP3) will explore the growing digitisation of industry jobs and how this shift impacts worker wellbeing, unionisation, and rights – especially for those already facing inequality.
This Work Package Will:
- Map the platforms and digital systems shaping tourism and hospitality work in the six partner countries.
- Produce an online interactive map listing representative organisations for workers.
- Investigate how unions are adapting to digitalisation in the sector, exploring the challenges and creative strategies emerging across Europe.
- Create a Code of Conduct for digital platforms with practical, rights-based guidelines on how tourism and hospitality platforms can support decent work and union involvement.
- Explore the experiences of marginalised workers through storytelling and produce a documentary film bringing together worker stories and expert voices.
Work Package 4: Social Dialogue and Worker Wellbeing in Tourism and Hospitality
Lead Partner: CoLABOR
Social dialogue – the formal and informal ways workers and employers negotiate and shape working conditions – plays a vital role in the tourism and hospitality sector. Work Package 4 (WP4) investigates how these systems work across six European countries, and how they can better support worker wellbeing in the face of digitalisation, inequality, and precarious work.
This Work Package Will:
- Map tourism and hospitality employer organisations to understand how they engage in social dialogue.
- Uncover barriers to participation in collective bargaining processes and how national policies can change that.
- Examine how algorithmic management affects bargaining power, representation and rights.
- Analyse agreements and social pacts to reveal what’s currently being done to support better working conditions, and where there’s room to improve.
- Propose strategies to engage stakeholders and strengthen the role of social dialogue in promoting gender equality and intersectional wellbeing.
Work Package 5: Understanding the Distributional Costs of Social Dialogue
Lead Partner: Babeș-Bolyai University
Social dialogue is key to improving working conditions – but it isn’t free. Work Package 5 (WP5) explores the distributional costs of social dialogue in the tourism and hospitality sector: in other words, who bears the burden when workers try to organise for better rights?
This work package focuses on both traditional workers and those on platforms, and asks critical questions: What legal or practical obstacles do they face? How do these barriers affect unionisation efforts? And how can the sector do better – for both workers and businesses?
This Work Package Will:
- Identify legal and structural barriers that hold back social dialogue efforts.
- Explore how the rise of platform work is reshaping worker organisation and the impact on traditional unions.
- Assess whether current social dialogue mechanisms are working and how much they cost in time and resources.
- Compare employer-led wellbeing initiatives and whether they support or undermine trade union efforts.
- Link social dialogue to economic competitiveness, looking at how fair working conditions might reduce turnover, vacancies and instability in the sector.
Work Package 6: Legal Aspects of Wellbeing for Tourism and Hospitality Workers
Lead Partner: University of Westminster
Tourism and hospitality workers often face unfair conditions – but what legal protections do they really have? And how can they actually use the law to defend their rights?
Work Package 6 (WP6) explores how accessible the law is, what gaps exist in legal protections, and how to empower workers to take action when their rights are at risk. Rather than focusing only on lawyers or experts, this WP puts the spotlight on workers themselves, making legal knowledge practical, participatory, and easier to access.
This Work Package Will:
- Identify the most pressing legal concerns through interviews with workers and unions.
- Explore how power and discrimination play out in workplaces and where the law fails to address workers’ full realities – especially for migrant, platform, and precarious workers.
- Create country-specific digital legal manuals explaining workers’ rights, social dialogue structures, and legal support. These will be translated into useful migrant languages.
- Build a public legal database covering key legislation, legal cases, tools to understand the law, and information on relevant unions and support organisations.
Work Package 7: Multi-Stakeholder Learning Dialogues
Lead Partner: University of Westminster
Improving the tourism and hospitality industry starts with honest, inclusive conversations. Work Package 7 (WP7) is all about dialogue, bringing together people who don’t always sit at the same table: trade unions, employers, platform workers, firms in the platform economy, and more.
Through roundtables, in-person events and an ongoing online Observatory, WP7 creates spaces where diverse voices can be heard, ideas exchanged, and common goals explored – especially around tough but vital topics like gender equality, digitalisation, worker wellbeing and non-standard forms of work.
This Work Package Will:
- Facilitate dialogue between stakeholders to help people understand one another’s challenges and co-create new approaches to fairer work.
- Share and test the project findings through events bringing together stakeholders.
- Recommend a new kind of labour platform that promotes gender equality and worker wellbeing, drawing on FUTOURWORK’s Code of Conduct.
- Launch an observatory hosted on the project website as an online hub for the project’s tools and resources and to keep conversations going.
Work Package 8 – Dissemination, Exploitation and Communication
Lead Partner: Equality in Tourism
Work Package 8 (WP8) ensures FUTOURWORK’s findings, messages and tools reach the right audiences and live on beyond the project’s lifetime. Dissemination will make our research available to key stakeholders, while the communication strategy will enhance visibility and public engagement. Exploitation efforts will build on these activities to make sure the project has lasting impact, promoting the real-world application of our tools and resources in future policy and industry practice.
Work Package 9 – Project Management and Consortium Coordination
Lead Partner: University of Westminster
Behind every successful research project is strong coordination – and that’s exactly what Work Package 9 (WP9) is here to deliver. WP9 ensures that all parts of FUTOURWORK run smoothly, on time, and in line with our funding agreement with the European Commission. This work package handles the practical backbone of the project, including financial oversight, quality control, ethical compliance, data management, and internal communication across the diverse international team.
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