It would be an oversight on this column’s part if, amid the recent reports of labour exploitation of third-country migrants in Cyprus’s hotel industry, the only voices we heard were those of the trade unions. Because at the conference titled “Promoting Fair Employment for Cyprus’s Migrant Workforce,” held in Nicosia on 30 July 2026 by Step Up Stop Slavery as part of the European HOST project, the speakers weren’t just Panayiotis Ioannidis of SEK and Neophytos Ttiminis of PEO. Also on the podium was Farah Shammas, general manager of the St Raphael Resort and Marina in Limassol.
“Sometimes we talk about hospitality in terms of rooms, restaurants, occupancy, revenue and profit,” Shammas said in her striking address, titled “Ethical Employment of Migrants in Hotels,” “but behind every clean room, every meal served, every guest we welcome, there’s a person.” She went on, sending a clear message to other employers in the sector, and to each of us: “Sometimes the most important thing we can give someone isn’t a promotion or a pay rise. It’s the feeling that they belong. If we want to talk about diversity, inclusion and respect, we have to actually live up to what we preach. What can we do to make hospitality stronger, more sustainable, more worthy of respect? Supporting hospitality means, at its core, supporting the people who work in it and the businesses that depend on it.
“Cyprus has a huge opportunity here, not just to establish itself as a world-class tourist destination, but to become a place where the people behind that hospitality feel just as respected and valued as the guests they welcome. There’s nothing shameful about washing dishes, cleaning rooms, working a kitchen, waiting tables or doing maintenance around a hotel. These are decent, essential jobs, even if it’s not what someone wants to be doing forever.
“And of course, for asylum seekers, employment options are limited for a period of time. It’s entirely possible these are people with qualifications, ambitions and dreams pulling them in a completely different direction. We owe it to them to support those ambitions. But while they’re doing this work, they deserve respect, fair treatment and dignity, because the work itself should never define a person’s worth.”
