An assessment of decent work in Lombok's hospitality sector: monthly wage compliance versus hourly exploitation

Purpose This paper conceptualises “phantom compliance,” a structural form of labour exploitation where tourism employers technically adhere to monthly minimum wage laws while systematically violating legal hourly wage standards through uncompensated excessive working hours. It aims to expose how reliance on monthly metrics creates an illusion of decent work progress in expanding tourism frontiers. Design/methodology/approach This cross-sectional mixed-methods study of 60 hospitality workers in Lombok, Indonesia, is designed for exploratory, illustrative inference rather than population-level generalisation. Quantitatively, it adapts Bhorat et al.’s methodology to construct a Decent Work Compliance Index aligned with SDG targets 8.5 and 8.8, analysed through six OLS models. Qualitatively, semi-structured interviews capture the lived experiences, structural pressures, and normalisation of this hourly exploitation. Findings 85.0% of workers earn below the legal hourly minimum wage, and no worker achieves full compliance, with 78% facing moderate-to-severe violations. Phantom compliance in the strict sense, near-adequate monthly pay eroded by excessive hours, affects roughly one in five workers (20.3%); the remaining majority combine hourly violation with a monthly wage already clearly below the minimum. Monthly wage is among the strongest correlates of exploitation intensity in this exploratory framework, and internal migrants bear the heaviest burden of hidden, uncompensated overtime. Research limitations/implications While the study provides deep, localised insights into a booming tourism frontier (Lombok), the sample size (n = 60) limits broad macroeconomic generalisations. Future research should replicate this hourly-focused methodology across larger, diversified geographical areas and other tourism sub-sectors. Practical implications The study demonstrates that compliance checks based on monthly minimum wages, and monitoring that reports average earnings rather than compliance with legal hourly floors, can produce a false appearance of progress towards SDG 8. It argues that policy-makers and international bodies must shift to hourly wage monitoring to protect vulnerable workers, particularly internal migrants, from systemic wage theft. Originality/value This paper introduces “phantom compliance” to tourism labour literature, bridging Becker's allocation-of-time theory with Bhorat's compliance framework, and provides a pioneering tool (the Decent Work Compliance Index) to dissect the “hourly wage trap” in developing economies. For tourism managers, it identifies two low-cost, actionable levers – formalising workplace food provision and flagging internal migrant status — that improve decent work outcomes without wage increases alone.