Transformational job-policies as pathways to a degrowth future in tourism? Understanding the workers’ perspective

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that it will only be possible to move towards a sustainable transformation in tourism, if path dependencies rooted in neoliberal growth-oriented economies are addressed. A central transformative component is the labour market and the decoupling of work from the pursuit of economic growth. The aim of this study is to contribute to the tourism degrowth debate by elucidating the often-neglected perspective of workers concerning their situation on the labour market and the resulting demands regarding policies for change. For this purpose, a focus group with nine tourism workers from Barcelona, complemented by ten stakeholder interviews, allowed to analyse their current situation and explore to what extent different popular policy proposals would empower them and thus have path creating potential towards a sustainable transformation of the tourism industry. The results outline that the workers find themselves in an exploitative system rooted in neo-colonial capitalist practice, which reproduces the precarisation of predominantly female and migrant labour even more since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. To improve the situation on the labour market, workers endorse all of the discussed policy programmes, but clearly favour bottom-up initiatives for empowerment such as a strengthened system of economic democracy.