Tourism is an increasingly important industry throughout the developing world. The reduced costs of transportation, particularly with the rise of budget air carriers, combined with the higher disposable incomes in the developed countries have enabled tourism to take place at an ever increasing rate. What are the implications of this for local labour markets?
First, there is generally increased demand for labour in tourist destination areas. Hotel and guesthouse accommodation, restaurant and personal services and tourism services are the principal areas of increased demand. Other areas where more jobs can be created include personal transportation (e.g. motor cycle taxis or cars), informal retail (souvenirs and ethnic minority produced items) and entertainment. The last-named category indicates the possibility of tourism straying into maldevelopment, when it becomes associated with prostitution and even human trafficking. Where there is demand, there will inevitably be supply. On some occasions, the supply itself provokes the demand.
When jobs are created within large, multinational hotel chains, employees can anticipate (if they show commitment and loyalty) long-term employment with a reasonable career progression path and a respectable salary. Training and development opportunities will also be present. Skills required include language ability, service-mindedness and honesty. These skills may not be available in remote labour markets which offer eco-tourism or ethnic minority-based tourism opportunities and, in these case, people are drawn from further away to take what appear to be attractive positions. In these cases, the tourism may bring little long-term economic benefit to the local economy - indeed, when environmental impact costs are brought into the equation, local areas and people who live there may actually suffer when tourism development takes place.
However, when job development takes place in the locally-owned sector, the prospects for employees can be less bright. When family-owned businesses are concerned, the problems for employees who are outsiders are well-known. There is also the difficulty of injecting professional management within such firms, which tend to rely on suppressing wages and producing basic, low-cost products to compete rather than looking for differentiation or adding value to basic products. This makes such firms vulnerable to bankruptcy when better firms, from outside and perhaps even internationally, arrive in the local market. Employees are soon cast aside and have few opportunities to accumulate savings. This is particularly true when the tourism work is seasonal. It may be that tour guides spend half the year unemployed because of lack of tourists and so must find casual work elsewhere.
While tourism development is a generally positive event for a local community, it is far from certain that it will benefit everyone equally. It is the nature of capitalism, of course, for the endless process of creative destruction to produce both winners and losers. The winners, by and large, can look after themselves. It is the losers who require assistance.
