Confronting labour loss in the tourist city

This paper examines emerging forms of labour loss in the tourist city as a provisional incapacity to work otherwise. This phenomenon is associated with the breaking of promises regarding labour prospects in Barcelona, from the austerity period to the post-pandemic crisis. This examination presents three situations, set within the mundanity of resistance and adjustment, to reflect on distinct yet equally significant labour losses that ground the affective nature of the neoliberal tourist city: occupational illness among chambermaids, youth unemployment, and the cancellation of rickshaw tours. These negative events are experienced through ambivalent dispositions towards labour mobility, migration, and unionism, and through emerging affections of estrangement, belonging, unwillingness, and solidarity that reflect the politics of undoing the tourist city as seen through workers’ experiences.