Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
female (and often with a local ethnic component), the tourism labour market is
characterised by ethnic and gender divisions, with relatively poor employment conditions
existing relative to other sectors (T.Baum 1993). For example, in the Australian context,
the Industry Commission (1995:21) characterised the tourism workforce and its working
conditions as follows:
• it is, on average, young
• it is characterised by female, part-time employment
• it has more casual and part-time work than other industries, but the majority of hours
are nevertheless worked by full-time employees
• it is poorly unionised
• it is relatively low-skilled work
• the hours of work are sometimes considered unsociable
• the pay is relatively low
• it is a mobile workforce with high turnover rates
• the workforce has low levels of formal educational qualifications.
Tourism employment has particular characteristics stemming from the spatial and
temporal fixity of tourism consumption and production (Shaw and Williams 1994).
Tourism services have to be experienced
in situ,
and (in most senses) they are not
spatially transferable and cannot be deferred (Urry 1987). This implies that the tourism
labour force has to be assembled
in situ
at the point of consumption and, moreover, that it
is available at particular time periods. The nature of demand is such that a labour force is
required with sufficient flexibility to meet daily, weekly and seasonal fluctuations. The
extent to which these conditions generate migration flows, rather than reliance on local
labour, is contingent on a number of factors, both intrinsic to the tourism development
and to the locality. Two prime considerations are the scale of demand and the speed of
tourism development, the latter affecting the extent to which labour may be transferred
from other sectors of the local economy/society. In addition, the degree of enclavism or
spatial polarisation is important, with the dependency on migration likely to be positively
correlated with this. Over time the spatial form of tourism consumption and production is
in constant flux. In addition, local demographic, social and economic structures will
condition the availability of local labour and the requirement for in-migration.
Comparative wage differentials, levels of education and training, working conditions and
job status in tourism and other sectors all influence the availability of workers, as does
the overall level of unemployment. For example, the availability of better paid and higher
status jobs in other sectors has conditioned the requirement for immigrant labour in the
Swiss tourist industry (King 1995). Finally, the degree of temporal polarisation is also
significant, for the demands for in-migration are likely to be greatest in large-scale,
single-peaked season destinations. All else being equal, the lack of alternative jobs
outside of the peak time period will mean either seasonal unemployment in the local
labour market or reliance on seasonal labour migrants (King 1995).
Tourism labour migration is also highly segmented (A.M.Williams and Hall 2002).
King (1995) identified a hierarchy of labour migrants in respect of tourism. In the first
rank are skilled managerial posts, typically found in the upper enclaves of major
international hotels and local branches of leading airlines. It can be hypothesised that
there will be greater reliance on immigrants to fill such posts in less developed economies
