Tourism and precarisation of labour: theoretical notes and empirical incursions

This study discusses the issues of hijacking and capturing subjectivity under manipulative capitalism in the current labour conditions and relations in the tourism economy. In this sense, it points out to the structural trend of precarisation of labour among travel agents, even more aggravated by the demand for high professional qualification and excellence in services. There is a certain adjustment of the worker to the company's imaginary; a feeling of indispensability and worthiness for effort and merit; adhesion and involvement with the organizational whole, materialized by teamwork; belief in effective collaboration at work; and feeling of self-delivery, self-giving and selfcommitment. This implies a labour context of intense imposition of conduct on workers, who need to demonstrate sympathetic and total personality engagement for the reproduction of capital, despite the precariousness of working conditions and relationships in many sectors of tourism activity.