Santiago Melian Gonzalez & Jack Burkand Jidmar
There is no doubt that tourism has the potential to create new jobs, but many say that these jobs are of low quality and unstable. Despite these criticisms, many government agencies see tourism as an effective way to create new jobs in their regions.
Job quality is a measure of how beneficial a job is to an employee. Job quality includes the physical, psychological, social and organisational aspects of the job, as well as the demands that the job places on employees and the processes that influence these elements. Psychological and physical health, as well as attitudes and job satisfaction are considered to be particularly important.
When analysing job quality, most studies take into account a wide range of factors, including personal autonomy, wages, job security, working conditions, qualification requirements, workplace relationships and work-life balance.
Seasonal and low-skilled labour
The tourism sector cannot be treated as a homogenous whole as it spans many different sectors of the economy, including accommodation, food and beverage, transport, entertainment and tourism. However, it is true that the quality of jobs in accommodation and hospitality is often lower than in other sectors of the economy.
This poor quality is due to the specifics of these sectors: low-skilled, seasonal work with long working hours, including weekends. Moreover, the tourism labour market offers below-average wages and few opportunities for training and professional development. This situation particularly affects the most vulnerable segments of the workforce, such as young people and migrants.
Tourism development and non-tourism employment
Reliance on the tourism sector does not necessarily mean an increase in lower quality jobs overall. There are two factors to consider here.
Firstly, tourism development indirectly creates jobs outside the tourism sector in areas such as consultancy, energy, transport, healthcare and public administration – all quality jobs that help to redress the overall balance in the quality of employment within the region.
Second, the quality of work depends heavily on the rights, regulations and protections provided by national governments, which vary widely from country to country.
The impact of government on job quality
In addition to the education level and employment rate of the population, another factor that strongly influences job quality is a country’s “institutional employment regime.” This is a term that encompasses labor laws, employment policies, and labor-management relations. When this term is applied to job quality, it is called the employment regime theory.
At the European level, the theory categorizes different institutional regimes into five broad groups.
Social Democracy, found mainly in Scandinavian countries. These regimes tend to provide strong and extensive social security, support worker training, and have influential trade unions. Liberal, such as the UK and Ireland, have weak employment protection laws and weak trade unions. Continentalism, this includes countries such as France and Germany. These fall somewhere between the social democratic and liberal regimes. In Southern Europe, including Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc., the state is relatively uninvolved in labor regulation, and trade unions have relatively little influence on working conditions. In these countries, state-sponsored vocational training is limited, employers have low incentives to invest in training, and employees have little enthusiasm for lifelong learning. This results in low skill levels among workers. Transitional (a term applied to liberalization and economic efficiency, as well as the strengthening of a country’s legal and institutional regimes), this includes countries such as Bulgaria and Poland. In this category, autocratic management structures limit participation in worker organizations, economic liberalization reduces job security, and cost-cutting measures increase when training staff.
Tourism and job quality: location matters
Our recent study, published in March 2024, analyzed the relationship between tourism development and job quality in several European regions.
Based on the European Working Conditions Survey samples from 2015 (approx. 44,000 people) and 2021 (approx. 72,000 people), we analysed the quality of employment in different European regions, in particular using the EU’s NUTS2 administrative units.
All kinds of regions appeared in our study, from regions with very high levels of tourism development, such as the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands in Spain, to regions with much lower levels of tourism development, such as Radomski in Poland and Severo-Zapaden in Bulgaria.
Although Southern European regions have higher levels of tourism development and generally lower job quality, our analysis shows that job quality is not directly related to tourism activity. In fact, in all the regions we studied, job quality was most strongly influenced by the institutional environment, that is, government laws and labor rights.
Tourism is not inherently low quality
Our study shows that in Europe, there is no direct relationship between tourism development in a region and job quality. However, we find that social democratic regimes are associated with higher job quality, followed by continental and liberal regimes. Southern Europe and transitional regimes are the worst in terms of job quality.
Given these results, policymakers seeking to improve job quality should focus on analyzing which elements of government and institutions are falling short, rather than the type of job.
