Toward improved employment relations practices of casual employees in the New South Wales registered clubs industry

Abstract This research investigated the effects of casual work arrangements on employee job satisfaction and commitment in a segment of the hospitality sector in Australia. The authors surveyed a total of 454 casual employees: they interviewed 42 employees in a sample of clubs within the top two hundred registered clubs in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, and 384 employees returned questionnaires from a sample of different clubs. For the interviews, the authors selected eighteen clubs using nonproportionate stratified sampling, the strata being small, medium, and large. The team conducted systematic random sampling of the clubs within each stratum. Using nonprobability accidental sampling, they then selected individual interviewees at the clubs. For the questionnaire survey, the sampling procedure was identical, but the team selected eighteen different clubs. Questionnaires were administered to all two thousand employees at these eighteen clubs. Because of a low response rate to the survey, the authors questioned an accidental sample of twenty casual employees, who admitted to not responding, in order to see whether their responses differed from those of the participants. The responses were very similar. Key findings suggest that casual employees experience varying levels of commitment and satisfaction according to their perceptions of work context factors such as training, promotion, work scheduling, management practices, and social integration. The authors encourage employers in highly casualized enterprises to involve and empower their casual employees, provide continuous feedback as well as behaviorally based formal performance appraisals, address the issue of training opportunities and program content for casual workers, and consider ways of developing their career paths.