Abstract
In its sustainable tourism agenda for 2030, the UN World Tourism Organization has embraced three United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. One of these, specifically SDG 8, highlights the need to pursue decent work and growth. Nevertheless, despite the growing recognition of this target and although there is a growing number of writings lamenting the precarity characterizing many tourism-related jobs, the topic of tourism-related work continues to receive sparse attention in the considerable volume of academic literature on tourism and sustainability. This paper attempts to redress this neglect. First, by providing a review of extant studies on tourism labor, we seek to explain why this research lacuna continues to exist. We then examine organizational and technological aspects of tourism governance, which hinder attempts to establish decent work and improve dignity in the tourism industry worldwide. By acknowledging the volatile and liminal status of tourism work and future labor market prospects, we arrive at the following question: what should sustainable tourism work look like? This leads us to suggest that the development of a human-centered research agenda, which focuses on workers’ agency and resources, offers a promising research avenue for expanding on the tourism and sustainability research agenda.
Highlights
In its sustainable tourism agenda for 2030, the UN World Tourism Organization has embraced three United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
By acknowledging the volatile and liminal status of tourism work and future labor market prospects, we arrive at the following question: what should sustainable tourism work look like? This leads us to suggest that the development of a human-centered research agenda, which focuses on workers’ agency and resources, offers a promising research avenue for expanding on the tourism and sustainability research agenda
Sustainability 2021, 13, 851 tout tourism as a means of generating economic growth and jobs while overlooking the conundrum arising from the fact that a particular locality may lack a labor force large and diverse enough to fill all created positions or that the conditions for many workers in the sector are substandard given the high degree of precarity characterizing many such jobs [6]
Summary
The recently published UN policy brief COVID-19 and Transforming Tourism [1] paints a dire picture of the pandemic’s negative impacts on tourism worldwide. Sustainability 2021, 13, 851 tout tourism as a means of generating economic growth and jobs while overlooking the conundrum arising from the fact that a particular locality may lack a labor force large and diverse enough to fill all created positions or that the conditions for many workers in the sector are substandard given the high degree of precarity characterizing many such jobs [6]. Their ambition was to suggest that matters relating to employment and the labor force must occupy the center-stage of discussion on sustainability They pessimistically concluded that despite the widespread understanding that working conditions in the tourism sector are overwhelmingly poor, both the tourism industry and academics persistently fail to address ways to improve the situation (see [15]). By casting light on the broader socio-spatial context of tourism labor and job crafting, we contribute to existing discussions of individual agency, motives and choices, which help better position tourism workers in the overall sustainability debate [15,19]
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