1st Edition
A Hospitable World? Organising Work and Workers in Hotels and Tourist Resorts
The hospitality and tourism sector is a large and rapidly expanding industry worldwide, and can rightfully be described as a vehicle of globalisation. Hotels are among the cornerstones of the industry often drawing workers from the most vulnerable segments of multicultural labour markets, accommodating and entertaining tourists and business travelers from around the world.
This book explores the organisation of work, worker identities and worker strategies in hotel workplaces, as they are located in heterogeneous labour markets being changed by processes of globalisation. It uses an explicitly geographical approach to understand how different groups of workers experience and respond to challenges in the hospitality industry, and is based on recent theoretical debates and empirical research on hotel workplaces in cities as different as Oslo, Goa, London, Las Vegas and Toronto. A multi-scalar analysis is taken where concrete worker bodies and their physical, emotional and embodied labour are seen in relation to, among other aspects: the regulation of national and regional labour markets, city governments with global city ambitions, and global corporate actors and labour migration patterns. The book sheds light on the hotel workplace as a hierarchical and fragmented social space as well as addressing questions on worker mobility, the fragmentation of work, scales of organisation and how workers can help shape the regulation of their industry.
This timely volume brings together contributions from international academics and is valuable reading for all those interested in hospitality, tourism, human geography and globalisation.
1. Introduction: The spatialities of hotels and tourism workplaces David Jordhus-Lier and Anders Underthun 2. Making difference within the hotel: Labour mobility and the internationalization of reproductive work Kristina Zampoukos and Dimitri Ioannides 3. Stretching liminal spaces of work? Temporality, displacement and precariousness among transient hotel workers Anders Underthun 4. Fragmentation revisited: Flexibility, differentiation and solidarity in hotels David Jordhus-Lier 5. The hotel sector in an age of uncertainty: A labour perspective Steven Tufts 6. Labour geographies in India's hotel industry Anibel Ferus-Comelo 7. Outsourcing with a human face: Variegated workplace regimes in the Norwegian hotel industry Synne Dokka, Hege Knutsen and Sylvi Birgit Endresen 8. Diverging work experiences and time horizons: Mapping hotel workers in the Oslo metropolitan area Anders Underthun and Aadne Aasland 9. The resort as a workplace: Seasonal workers in a Norwegian mountain municipality Erik Henningsen, David Jordhus-Lier and Anders Underthun 10. Extinguishing fires. Coping with outsourcing in Norwegian hotel workplaces David Jordhus-Lier 11. Multi-scalar organising in London’s hotels: The challenges of engaging transient workers through labour and community alliances Gabriella Alberti 12. Altering the landscape: Reassessing UNITE HERE in Las Vegas' hospitality industry Mia Gray 13. Examining the opportunities and challenges of union organising within the hospitality industry: The Fair Hotels Ireland strategy Ann Cecilie Bergene, Karla Boluk and Ethel Buckley 14. Conclusion: Five challenges for solidarity and representation in hospitality workplaces David Jordhus-Lier and Steven Tufts
Biography
David Jordhus-Lier is an Associate Professor in Human Geography, University of Oslo and a Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research. He holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of Manchester, and his specialisation is within labour geography and urban social movements. He was the project manager of the "Industrial relations under global stress" project, funded by the Research Council of Norway, which has generated parts of the material for this book. Jordhus-Lier has published a series of articles focusing on geographies of labour, neoliberalism and social movements.
Anders Underthun is a Senior Researcher at the Work Research Institute in Oslo. He holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His interests include the politics of regional economic development, industrial relations in the hospitality and aviation industries, and the impact of Temporary Work Agencies on the politics of work.
