Telework Agreements, Spatial Autonomy and Decent Work in the Hospitality Workforce

Digital transformation in hospitality has centred on guest-facing and operational technology, and most of its jobs cannot be done away from the premises. This paper examines how collective agreements on telework treat such a workforce, as a decent-work question in the sense of Sustainable Development Goal 8. The evidence is 216 French firm-level telework agreements, 108 in hospitality and 108 controls matched on signature year, of which 179 contain an operative rule. Hospitality and control agreements share one eligibility template. In both, about four in five exclude the operational core by named staff categories or a task-compatibility test (78.3 and 81.6 per cent), and almost none compensates excluded staff (0 of 92 and 2 of 87). The template is place-blind, so its reach depends on the workforce it governs. In 49.5 per cent of hospitality agreements and 23.0 per cent of controls, fewer than one-third of employees in the signing entity’s sector hold teleworkable jobs. In Germany in 2025, hospitality had the lowest home-office share of fifteen activities, below the feasibility of remote work in the sector. The institutional finding is the shared template without counterparts; effects on recruitment, retention and labour sustainability are implications to be tested.