NS34 Session 29

 

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Title: Towards Decent Work? Dynamics of Employment in Arctic Tourism Sector

Organisers: Gunnar Þór Jóhannesson (corresponding), Outi Rantala, Jarkko Saarinen, Linda Lundmark, Cenk Demiroglu, Bente Heimtun, Patrick Maher and Suzanne de la Barre

Affiliation: University of Iceland

 

Description

Tourism has often been promoted as pivotal for sustainable development by generating local employment and economic growth. However, it is not without significant challenges, particularly concerning employment and decent work. Tourism is intrinsically linked to a global process of neoliberalisation, which has driven decentralisation and deregulation of markets, including labour markets, thus raising questions of how susceptible it is for building up decent work.

Despite a growing interest in labour market research, there is still a lack of knowledge about how tourism employment is positioned in and affects local and regional labour markets. This gap is evident in the Nordic, and more general, Arctic countries where tourism has increased in recent years. Tourism in the Arctic and sub-arctic region is characterised by strong seasonality, distance and weak infrastructure and limited labour pools. Hence, tourism companies in those areas, often struggle to provide full time year-round jobs, decent housing, and rely on temporary workforce to considerable extent. This poses challenges for sustainable tourism development.

This session proposal is related to the ongoing project Tourism Employment in the Arctic: Towards Decent Work conducted by seven universities within the UArctic Thematic Network on Northern Tourism and funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers Arctic Co-operation Programme, the Canadian Global Arctic Leadership Initiative (GALI) and Nordplus and Erasmus mobility schemes.

We invite both conceptually and empirically focused papers. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • Precarity and precarious tourism work
  • Social dumping and modern slavery in tourism work
  • Sustainable development and tourism employment
  • Internationalisation of tourism labour
  • Community dimensions of tourism employment
  • Employment satisfaction in tourism
  • Gender dimension and youth in tourism employment
  • Career development in tourism and hospitality