HOSPITALITY LABOUR FORCE

Hospitality Labour Force

Hospitality Labour Force

Introduction

When reading about tourism and hospitality industry in books, journal articles, industry reports or the popular media we persistently encounter messages on how it is one of the largest economic activities employing millions of people worldwide. Throughout the globe, policy-makers in various localities enthusiastically embrace tourism and hospitality activities, touting these as the panacea for the widespread malaise accompanying industrial restructuring and decline. Concurrently, in many communities, especially those in peripheral regions, the tourism and hospitality industry emerges as one of limited, if not the sole, options for engineering economic growth and diversification (Phau, 2000, 102-113). While many observers show enormous optimism in the industry's job creation potential, others question the wisdom of investing heavily in such activities since jobs are commonly seasonal, part-time, low skilled and highly feminized, with limited opportunities for promotions or pay rises.

Given the long-standing debates concerning the quality of tourism and hospitality-related labour, it is unsurprising that researchers representing various fields periodically examine the characteristics of the industry's workers and their employment conditions. The findings of what are mainly case studies with an Anglo centric bent 'substantially drawn from hotels and restaurants to the possible neglect of major areas of employment such as transport'. A partial explanation for this bias is that much of this research, which has a human resource management perspective, has historically emanated from business schools, especially hotel management programmes. From a practical standpoint, hospitality jobs constitute a proxy for the broader tourism economy since these clearly categorized within any country's industrial classification system, as opposed to jobs, which spread over several other sub sectors where only a small proportion of workers in each may actually have anything to do directly relate to tourism. Although social scientists, including geographers, have only sporadically been involved in tourism labour research they also focus almost exclusively on the hospitality sub sector given that in most destinations, this is the most visible component of the tourism economy. Terry's recent article (2009) on Filipino cruise ship workers constitutes a rare exception from this norm (Toms, 2004, 291-317). Despite the infrequent research forays into the world of tourism and hospitality workers there remains a lot we still do not understand about their geographies.

The shortage of studies relating to the spatial aspects of tourism and hospitality labour is puzzling considering the burst of geographers' overall curiosity towards the broad tourism system over the last two decades. Particularly puzzling is the silence confronting us in examining the writings exploring the inter-linkages of economic geography with tourism, including the hospitality sub sector. Despite the proliferation, of publications since the late 1990s in which geographers flesh out tourism's ties to economic geography, the labour dimension, a central theme in economic geography, underplayed. In their comprehensive review of the 'geographies of tourism' Hall and Page (2009) only briefly mention geographers' contributions toward 'better understanding of the regional and spatial dimensions of tourism labour markets and their policy and planning implications' (Sundaram, 1998, 527-531), yet there is not ...