Towards a New Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 316

Increasingly, employees in the hotel industry, in the UK and worldwide,
recruit a significant proportion of their workforce through (often unlicensed)
agencies, in which migrant workers and women in particular are susceptible
to abuse and exploitation (Sheikh, 2009; Zampoukos & Ioannides, 2010; see
Chapter 7). Whilst there are advantages to this for both employers and work-
ers alike, enabling the former to reduce costs during periods of low demand
and giving workers greater flexibility to adapt their schedule around their
lifestyle (Lai et al. , 2008), such agencies have also been accused of facilitating
the circumvention of the statutory responsibilities of hotel employers towards
employees (e.g. pensions, sick pay). It also renders the ability of the workforce
to bargain collectively increasingly difficult. However, it should also be
stressed that these characteristics overwhelmingly apply to the 20% of the
global tourism and hospitality workforce located within TTCs and not neces-
sarily the remainder, most of whom work in SMEs of fewer than 250 work-
ers, and often far less (ILO, 2010: 8). That is not to say of course that the
exploitation of workers and poor working conditions are not prevalent
amongst SMEs (see Harrison, 2001a: 33).
What these illustrations suggest is, to some extent, the reduced significance
of geographic boundaries in the constitution of contemporary alignments of
inequality and occurrences of exploitation in certain quarters of the tourism
and hospitality industries. Increasingly, the adjustment to global competitive-
ness has exerted downward pressure on wages in the advanced capitalist coun-
tries, thus leading to a situation where job insecurity and increasing levels of
income disparity have also become more prevalent in the advanced capitalist
countries (UNDP, 1999: 36-39). In the city of Los Angeles, for example, a
combination of state budget cuts during the 1980s and industrial restructuring
(particularly the closure of aerospace plants and the shift of many labour-
intensive manufacturing industries across the border into Mexico), has under-
pinned the emergence of a low-wage service economy in which a disproportionate
number of Mexican immigrants are employed (Davis, 1993: 45-47).
Whilst immigrant workers have traditionally been attracted to work in
the hospitality and catering sectors in major world cities, such as London,
Paris and New York (Harris, 1996: 35), the uptake of migrant workers in tour-
ism and hospitality has not only increased on the back of intensified global
market integration and new waves of cross-border migration (permanent and
itinerant) since the mid-1990s, but the composition of such flows and indeed
the tourism/hospitality workforce, has become increasingly diverse (Joppe,
2012; Stalker, 2000). Tourism is increasingly 'central to the character of the
world city', which now of course include new centres of global capital accu-
mulation outside the traditional capitalist heartlands of Europe and North
America (for example, Dubai), whilst migrant workers, of which there are an
estimated 105 million worldwide (ILO, 2010: 36), are the lifeblood of such
globalised hubs of hospitality work (Llewlyn Davies et al. , 1996, cited in
Church & Frost, 2004: 210).