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The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant impacts on Jamaica's tourism industry. In an industry already exposed to a multiplicity of challenges ranging from climatic change to globalization, the imposition of the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in both pace and magnitude. Accommodation workers in the tourism industry are particularly vulnerable to these impacts given the travel restrictions and visitor skepticism which prompted the closure of many hotels. Such vulnerability may be compounded by intersections of gender, age, education, and skill set. A recent study by the International Labour Organization (ILO) (2020) indicates that the accommodation sector in Jamaica is dominated by female workers who are likely to be pushed into precarious employment circumstances. This chapter utilized a concurrent triangulation mixed methods approach to explore the experiences and socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 on accommodation workers in Negril, Jamaica, and the strategies deployed to navigate challenging circumstances. The main findings indicated that while most persons were able to retain their jobs, the impacts were tremendous as experienced through decreased workdays and work hours with women being disproportionately affected in comparison to men. These impacts also had significant implications for food and financial security forcing a lot of individuals to rely on limited savings or to budget by prioritizing these needs which were among the coping methods identified. Of great importance within the coping methods was the leveraging of social capital, particularly through family networks which resulted in remittances and other resources to mitigate the impacts posed by the pandemic.

The paper aims at assessing the role of the different stages of the employment process in gauging workers' willingness to upskill themselves at the end of a seasonal employment contract by investing in further training.

The paper analyses data from a dedicated survey administered to a sample of seasonal employees. Through a regression analysis it explores the different stages of the employment process (job search, selection on the job activities), making a distinction between monetary and nonmonetary components of the investment in training.

Results show that all stages matter, but they do not have the same importance. Ex-ante motivations and work experience, notably the level of perceived workload and organizational commitment, are the main factors affecting workers' willingness to acquire industry-specific skills through training.

So far, the literature has extensively dealt with the poor levels of training in seasonal employers, but it did not analyse worker’s willingness to invest in training over the different stages of the worker experience. This paper fills this gap by separately testing the relative importance of such stages and identifying the most important phases of the employment process.

This paper aims to undertake an ideal-typical analysis of the implications of overtourism on employment at the level of the destination.

The paper offers a theoretical analysis that uses as a starting point a traditional labour market model to explore the employment implications of a labour demand shock as a result of overtourism at a destination level. Although a theoretical exploration, examples are provided offering empirical support for the theoretical propositions.

Overtourism may lower nominal and real wages, further deepen divisions in an already divided labour market (particularly between local and migrant workers), increase productivity without its benefits accruing to the worker and result in deterioration of working conditions. The study also sets tourism employment within a broader politico-economic framework of neoliberalism.

This study offers scope for further empirical testing of hypothesized relationships. It also provides a platform to adopt and adapt the theoretical propositions to suit different contexts.

This study uses overtourism as an ideal-type, combined with an analysis of the labour market to theorise the impacts of a labour demand shock.

过度旅游以及旅游工作者的就业结果: 对劳动力市场的影响

就过度旅游对当地就业的影响进行理想类型分析。

以传统劳动力市场模型为出发点, 对因过度旅游引起的劳动力需求冲击进而给当地就业带来的影响进行理论探索与分析。虽为理论探索, 本文也提供实证案例以支持有关理论观点。

过度旅游可能会降低名义和实际工资, 造成本已分割的劳动力市场的进一步分割（特别是在当地和外地劳动者之间）, 提高生产力但并不惠及其劳动者, 并导致工作环境恶化。本研究将旅游就业置于广义新自由主义政治经济框架下进行讨论。

将过度旅游作为一种理想类型, 并与劳动力市场分析相结合, 以理论化劳动力需求冲击所带来的影响。

为进一步实证测试假设关系提供机会。为不同背景下采纳和适应有关理论观点提供平台。

El exceso de turismo y las repercusiones en el empleo turístico: Impactos en los mercados laborales

Realizar un análisis típico-ideal sobre cómo la masificación turística de los destinos influye sobre el empleo.

Un análisis teórico que utiliza como punto de partida el modelo de mercado laboral tradicional para explorar las implicaciones que la masificación de los destinos turísticos tiene sobre la demanda de trabajo. La investigación proporciona ejemplos que respaldan empíricamente las proposiciones teóricas.

Los excesos turísticos tienden a reducir los salarios nominales y reales, a profundizar aún más las divisiones de un mercado laboral ya dividido (en particular entre los trabajadores locales y los migrantes), a aumentar la productividad sin que sus beneficios repercutan en el trabajador y a provocar un deterioro de las condiciones de trabajo. El estudio también sitúa el empleo en el sector del turismo dentro del marco político-económico, más amplio, del neoliberalismo.

Utiliza la masificación turística, como “ideal-típico”, junto con un análisis del mercado laboral turístico para teorizar sobre los impactos en la demanda laboral.

Ofrece la posibilidad de realizar más investigaciones empíricas a partir de las relaciones hipotéticas postuladas. Proporciona una plataforma para adoptar y adaptar las proposiciones teóricas para que se adecúen a diferentes contextos.

This paper aims to address the immediate effects of the COVID-19 crisis in the Portuguese tourism and hospitality industry by examining whether some specific characteristics make people more vulnerable or more immune to unemployment.

Using an extensive micro-level data set of personal and job-related attributes containing all unemployed individuals in the Portuguese tourism and hospitality industry, a logit model with 56,142 observations is estimated to assess how each characteristic contributed to the unemployment odds during the COVID-19 crisis (until the end-July 2020), relatively to the pre-COVID period.

The most vulnerable workers to COVID-19 unemployment seem to be older, less educated, less qualified, women and residents in regions with a higher concentration of people and tourism activity. Moreover, the COVID-19 crisis is generating a new type of unemployment by also affecting those who were never unemployed before, with more stable jobs and more motivated at work, while reducing voluntary disruptions.

Public effort should be made not only to increase workforce education but especially to reinforce job-specific skills. The COVID-19 crisis has broken traditional protective measures against unemployment and separated workers from their desired occupations, which justifies new and exceptional job preservation measures. Policy recommendations are given aiming at strengthening worker resilience and industry competitiveness in the most affected sub-sectors and regions.

This study extends the current understanding of worker vulnerability to economic downturns. Herein, this paper used a three-level approach (combining socio-demographic, work-related and regional factors), capturing the immediate effects of the COVID-19 crisis and focussing on the tourism and hospitality industry (the hardest-hit sector worldwide).

The availability of an adequate pool of suitable labour is a key location factor for the labour‐intensive hotel and restaurant business. Yet, in spite of high unemployment (unemployment rate: 17,3%) and schemes to import foreign seasonal workers, the sector still encounters considerable difficulties in filling job vacancies. Of the many approaches towards elucidating the mystery of high levels of unemployment concurrent with a perceived scarcity of workers, key contributions are the high seasonal fluctuations in demand and the mismatch theory. The phenomenon of seasonal unemployment may be understood as a special aspect of demand scarcity. The seasonal dependence of tourism demand generates variations which in turn cause personnel to be fired at a grand scale at the end of a season. The mismatch theory goes a long way towards explaining a large part of the problems encountered in filling job openings while sectoral unemployment remains high. Key elements of the structural imbalance are qualifications and age, availability in terms of geography and time, and earnings expectations (including working conditions and career options). Further facts are also that the inflow of foreign workers keeps wages and working conditions down and drives austrian workers into unemployment or in other sectors. Overall, it appears that the future supply of an adequate number of qualified labour is a growing problem, because the need for operations to position themselves in the quality segment will raise the labour and qualification threshold.

Historically, sex, tourism, and the labor market have long been inextricably linked, but media concerns about sex as the main purpose of tourism, and its effects on the host group and its sex workers, date from the mid-1990s, in the wake of the spread of HIV, the collapse of communism, the rise of the Internet, and the increasing influence of NGOs concerned with women's and children's welfare. This chapter argues that in order to understand fully the relationship between tourism, sex, and the labor market, we need to adopt a broader perspective and look at the various intersections between the three factors, and how they blend into and influence each other. It conceptualizes the three domains of tourism, sex, and work as intersecting circles and analyzes the forms of activity typical of each. “Sex tourism,” as popularly defined, is the space where all three overlap, but there are significant areas of sexual activity associated with tourism that are not commercial, and yet that generate significant and increasing business activity in some destinations. There is also a tendency for partners in commercial sex to define their relationships in terms of other sectors, as “love” or “romance.” The chapter concludes that with economic development, there is a tendency for roles in the sex industry to become increasingly professionalized and differentiated, and that as the industry is unlikely to disappear, regulation should focus on the empowerment and welfare of sex workers rather than abolition and suppression.

The purpose of this study is to explore and compare the perceptions of workers in the tourism industry in Thailand in foreign-owned and locally owned firms to provide an underrepresented perspective in the debate over whether international trade and tourism primarily exploits workers or provides valuable opportunities.

A matched-pairs comparative analysis was used.

Workers at foreign-owned companies showed slightly, although statistically insignificant, more positive attitudes toward tourism as a means of creating opportunities for themselves. Workers in foreign-owned companies showed a statistically significant more positive attitude toward the impact of tourism on the country. It appears the vast majority of the workers interviewed did not feel exploited, but empowered by opportunities to engage in employment in the tourism industry.

The use of self-reported measures has been acknowledged to be problematic and the size and composition of the sample limit the ability to generalize the findings to a broader population.

Understanding the perspectives of the workers in an industry can be useful in policy development and implementing corporate social responsibility programs. The results suggest workers would support programs which encourage increases in tourism and foreign investment in the industry. Social implications reflect the perceptions of an under-represented segment of society.

The intention is to help bring into the debate the perspectives of individuals who are most directly affected by these activities.

Amid the multitude of economic effects emanating from impositions of COVID-19, workers in the tourism sector are potentially experiencing significant psychosocial impacts. These effects are compounded by the uncertainty of pathways for positive change and the precariousness of adjustments to life and livelihoods. Their attitudes to the newly imposed circumstances are possibly conditioned by a sense of hope which may have implications for their adaptations in the face of sudden or slow change. In this chapter, we argue that one’s sense of hope represents an important component of psychosocial well-being and may even be visualized as a necessary component of adaptation. Hope is conceptualized as a cognitive process that entails thinking and planning in order to achieve proposed goals (Snyder, Irving, & Anderson, 1991; Snyder, Lopez, Shorey, Rand, & Feldman, 2003) and can be operationalized into three core components: goals, pathways, and agency. Based on in-depth interviews and a questionnaire survey administered to former accommodation workers in the Negril tourism industry, this chapter examines expressions of hope(lessness) existing among workers displaced by COVID-19. It potentially provides nuanced understandings of hope as a necessary raw material for adaptation initiatives and explores ways in which a sense of hope could be harnessed in the face of disasters and despair.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the incorporation, prioritization and depth of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives in tourism industry restart policies of Canadian provinces and territories. This study investigates how the detailing of EDI in policies determine the priority in emancipating tourism workers from the inequities exacerbated during the pandemic. Such investigation enables a better understanding of the complexities, tendencies and rationale of involving EDI in the tourism industry’s recovery.

The research investigated the presence and prioritization of equity, diversity, and inclusion using systematic text analytics of 38 publicly available restart plans and statements from 52 government and non-government agencies. Using web-based software Voyant Tools to assist in text analytics, a hybrid deductive-inductive coding approach was conducted.

Key outcomes from the analysis revealed scarce to no full and dedicated content on EDI as a holistic initiative necessary for tourism industry relaunch. This lack of EDI content was a result of the greater impetus to prioritize economic generation and limited data due to practical and ideological issues. Results also suggested the tokenizing of EDI in some policies.

Difficulties in data used for research include the lack and availability of restart policies specifically for tourism; most policies were generalized and referred to economic recovery as a whole. Studies of tourism-specific EDI issues were also limited.

The research is revelatory for investigating EDI prioritizations in restart policies even among well-developed and worker-diverse tourism industries such as in Canada, where inequities and injustices to women, Black, Indigenous, gender-diverse, and newcomer tourism workers among others have been withstanding.