Tourism, the global city and the labour market in London

Abstract

Global cities, such as London, are viewed as distinctive in terms of their role in the increasingly globalized economy. There has been considerable academic debate over the nature of global city labour markets and how these can be explained in relation to global city functions. New empirical evidence is presented for the tourism labour market in London and the UK. The pay, conditions and social characteristics of tourism workers in London are examined, and they appear distinctive in terms of their full-time, gender (male), student, ethnicity and migrant characteristics. An explanation is developed that explores the interactions between the global city role of London and other scaled geographical processes that originate, especially at the national level

Internationalization and innovation in tourism

“…Increased international migration has had implications for employment in a range of tourism environments, whether global cities such as London (Church & Frost, 2004) or mass tourism destinations, such as the Balearics (Salvà-Tomas, 2002). This internationalization of labour has consequences for innovation through mediating both the supply of labour, and the role of employees in the co-creation of innovation; in other words, as a factor of production versus source of knowledge transfer.…”

Patterns of occupational segregation by gender in the hospitality industry

“…Church and Frost (2004), Hicks (1990) and Kattara (2005) show that women have jobs with lower status than those of their male coworkers, indicating vertical segregation in the hospitality sector. Richter (1995) and Walsh (1990) show that women in this sector are employed in subordinate positions that are worse paid.…”

London's Migrant Division of Labour

“…Official data sources for 2001 indicate that as many as 46 percent of those doing elementary jobs such as domestic work, cleaning, caretaking, refuse collecting and labouring were born overseas and the vast majority of these came from poorer parts of the world (Spence, 2005). Official data also show that the hospitality sector is most dependent on foreign-born staff, with rates well over 50 percent (Church and Frost, 2004;Evans et al, 2007a;Matthews and Ruhs, 2007).…”