Lavoro a buon mercato a Rimini e Durazzo. Uno studio sull’industria turistica balneare

This article presents the findings of research focused on the seaside tourism industry in the contexts of Rimini and Durrës, with particular attention to working conditions within the sector. The underlying question guiding the research concerns the applicability of the world-ecology perspective (one of the most prominent interpretive paradigms in contemporary political ecology, developed by environmental historian Jason W. Moore) to the study of the seaside tourism industry. On a practical level, this meant investigating – through the collection of dozens of interviews – the presence of structurally devalued forms of labor that capital appropriates at very low cost. The concept of an ecological surplus generated by the availability of cheap resources (in this case, labor), which is central to Moore’s world-ecology theory, appears to be confirmed by the dynamics observed in the functioning of the seaside tourism industry in both selected coastal cities. What emerges is that tourism workers, employed in typically reproductive and interactive roles such as table service, tourist reception, and beach maintenance, are systematically underpaid. Due to the systematic intertwining of labor relations and pre-existing social ties, the prevalence of a family-based model in personnel management, and a set of structural conditions that make workers more vulnerable in this industry, hierarchical structures typical of the patriarchal family are reproduced within enterprises. It is argued that this specific mode of producing the tourism offering is what renders the model unsustainable. Therefore, the search for new green areas alone is not sufficient to envision the development of a form of tourism that can be considered ecologically sustainable.