Student Workers as a Source of Instant and Submissive Labour

Abstract

This paper considers student employees in tourism in Antalya, Turkey. The appearance of undergraduate students in the labour market in Turkey has been an observable fact, especially since the beginning of the 2000s. One can see them in many different areas of the labour market. What matters in terms of labour demand is their student status, not their skill, experience, etc. The tourism industry is one of the economic activities in which undergraduate students are densely employed. Undergraduate students are employed informally for casual jobs by agencies functioning like employment agencies, but they are not officially employment agencies. The tourism industry in Antalya has a seasonal nature, and of course employment in this area is seasonal as well. However, in some seasons, there is an instant labour demand, and undergraduate students are viewed as a good labour supply for this demand. Currently, no scientific work has been carried out on this issue. This paper intends to present some preliminary findings on student employment.

Plasmatic thinking and tourism: Plasmatic modernity

“…In particular, in urban studies, investigations into urban aspirations helped illuminate salient aspects of urban life, including the capacity for change and the selective use of the past (Bunnell and Goh, 2012: 2), idealism and entrepreneurial discourses constructed elsewhere (McCann, 2008(McCann, , 2011. In the case of tourism, aspirations, exploitations and freedoms have been examined in works on tourism labour (Turfs, 2006;Baum and Thompson, 2007;Kaykısız and Akpınar, 2021). From structural and political economy approaches interrogating the structures of exploitation and unfreedoms (Church and Frost, 2004;Lynch et al, 2011) to emotional labour and aspirations of tourism and hospitality workers (Harris et al, 2007;Ioannides and Zampoukos, 2018) and to more semiotical and postmodern approaches to freedoms and exploitations (Ong, 2012;Ong and du Cros, 2012;Simpson, 2016), the well-being of tourism workers have remained a significant focus for scholars concerned with tourism as a social phenomenon.…”