Tourism employment paradoxes, 1946–2095: a perspective article

This paper addresses employment in the global tourism industry, searching for evidence for change since 1946 and then casting a speculative gaze forward to 2095. Unlike most facets of the tourism industry, there is a studied argument of limited changes to its employment conditions over the past 75 years. Indeed, Baum and Mooney (2019), casting back to 1933, argue that many of the conditions that underpinned work in the hospitality industry at the time remain identifiable in today’s industry environment. These are apparent in the early work of Whyte’s (1948, 1949) analysis of US restaurant workers and Chivers’ (1973) study of chefs in the United Kingdom. Authors such as Smeral (2004), Baum (2018), and Ioannides and Zampoukos (2018) highlight industry workplace characteristics that, inter alia, include precarity, low pay, poor working conditions and intersectional disadvantage seen in jobs of often low quality for women and migrants (Mooney et al., 2017; Robinson et al., 2019). If this ‘no change’ status is indeed a fair depiction of the industry, there appear few grounds to anticipate any significant changes in the future.