“Italian Hospitality Workers’ Re-Conceptualisations, Positioning & Discourses in Post-Brexit and Post-Pandemic London”

In 2023, the UK media started denouncing the ‘hospitality crisis’ (The Economist 2022) caused by staff shortages (Foster 2023), and the cost-of-living crisis consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit. Such a crisis worsened hospitality workers’ already fragile well-being (Chen & Wang 2023; Kotera et al. 2021) and increased mental health issues (Gardner 2022). In particular, the shortage of staff - caused by Great Resignation (Klotz 2021) during the pandemic and the impossibility for new immigrants to work in the UK after Brexit - redefined the dynamics present in hospitality workplaces. The present contribution will present a novel understanding and conceptualisation of the hospitality crisis, by addressing the (lack of) valorisation of migrant workforce and their differentiated skills (e.g., linguistic, communication, and cultural skills), while observing how Italian hospitality workers socially position themselves within the hosting society and within a professional market that has deeply changed after 2020. Through Narrative Analysis (De Fina 2015) and Discourse Analysis (Handford & Gee 2013), the chapter aims to offer insights about Italian hospitality workers’ current conceptualisation of their professional value and reflects on the contrasting opinions of those involved in this sector. The data here presented were collected within the 2022 project “Migrant food, languages, and identities in the dawn of the post-Brexit and COVID-19 era”, funded by Research England through University of Westminster (London), where participants, Italian and Greek hospitality workers, discussed their working conditions and highlight issues caused by Brexit and by the Covid-19 pandemic. The chapter will draw upon extracted narratives from the audio video recordings of the six dinners wherein participants explore their migratory trajectories and their professional life to discuss how exclusion, lack of representation and the feeling of being ignored have had an impact on migrant workers’ mental health and well-being in the workplace.