Tourism and precarisation of labour: theoretical notes and empirical incursions

Article History

Received 28 April 2022

Accepted 1 June 2022

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Жан Энрике КОСТА

Государственный университет Риу-Гранди-ду-Норти

(Мосоро, шт. Риу-Гранди-ду-Норти, Бразилия)

Раони Борхес БАРБОЗА

Государственный исследовательский фонд Ампаро Пиауи] DCR-CNPq/FAPEPI

(Терезина, шт. Пиауи, Бразилия)

Анджела Теберга де ПАУЛА

Федеральный университет Токантинса (Пальмас, шт. Токантинс, Бразилия) кандидат наук в сфере туризма и гостеприимства, профессор;

ТУРИЗМ И ПРЕКАРИЗАЦИЯ ТРУДА: ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ И ЭМПИРИЧЕСКИЕ ПОДХОДЫ К ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯМ

В данном исследовании обсуждаются вопросы прекаризации труда - перехода от постоянных гарантированных трудовых отношений к неустойчивым формам занятости, ведущим к потере или ущемлению социально-трудовых прав работника. Особую актуальность вопросы прекаризации труда имеют в туризме, и в частности, среди турагентов, что усугубляется спросом на профессиональную квалификацию и высокую конкуренцию на рынке труда в сфере услуг. В текущих условиях от работника зачастую требуется высокая лояльность к компании, работник зачастую чувствует не всегда оправданные чувства незаменимости и ценности усилий и заслуг, сплоченности и причастности к организационному целому, материализуемые коллективной работой; веру в эффективное сотрудничество на работе, чувство самоотдачи, самоотдачи и самоотверженности. При этом, такая лояльность требуется от сотрудников в условиях ненадежность условий труда и отношений во многих секторах туристической деятельности.

Дата поступления в редакцию: 28 апреля 2022 г.

Дата утверждения в печать: 1 июня 2022 г.

Introduction

This study discusses the issues of subjectivity 'hijacking' (Faria; Meneghetti, 2007) and capturing subjectivity under manipulative capitalism (Alves, 2008; 2011) in the specific dimension of current labour conditions and relations in the tourism economy. It seeks to think of ways of refining and expanding the intensification of the exploitation of tourist work in flexible (Harvey, 1994), short-term (Sennett, 2012), uberized (Slee, 2017) and precarious (Standing, 2019) capitalism, having the new service proletarianization (Antunes, 20191) as an analytical category to think about the metamorphoses in the world of work.

The research problematizes tourism beyond the economistic logic of subjects in a fet-ishized world and in a reified scheme of thought that reduces them to the mere objective condition of exchange value. We emphasize that many academic discourses in the "scholarly common sense" (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 44) of tourist activity reproduce the instrumental logic of tourism as an administrative imperative of total quality and of the "qualified worker", reinforcing and hiding the work degradation in favor of the modernization of services and the expansion of competitive outsourcing of tourist products. Contrary to this uncritical perspective, we deconstruct such ideological discourses and unveil the flexibilizing and degrading neoliberal agenda of work. Here we try to think of work from its humanization "beyond capital" (taking up the expression of Istvan Meszaros), considering general human work not as a mere appendix of work processes and value creation, but as a center for which the whole debate about the direction of our civilization should start.

We start from the premise that the structural crisis of capital (Meszaros, 2000) drives processes of productive restructuring and, therefore, of intensification of work super-exploitation, creating and reproducing new forms of exploration and refinement of control (objective and subjective) over the worker. As Marx rightly pointed out, the motive that drives and determines capitalist production is the greatest possible self-valorization of capital (Marx, 1983)2. In th is way, in the capitalism of dominantly Toyotist reproduction, refined forms of work management and control are implemented aiming at the worker's complacent engagement with the neoliberal agenda. The logic of Fordist rigidity is replaced - especially in the most proactive and engaged occupations - by flexible and subordinate relationships, always open to greater worker involvement with capital, in order of the worker giving up his workforce, his social time and his personality to the business collective.

The captured subjectivity: thetoyotist logic of total engagement

Alves (2011) defines the structural crisis of capital as a critical process of value formation and, therefore, a crisis of value appreciation. Hence, the need for new conditions for the exploitation of the wage labour force, in addition to the growing financializa-tion of capitalist wealth. Let us rememberthat Meszaros (2000) understands that this structural crisis is expressed in the manifestation of the encounter of the system with its own intrinsic limits. Added to this, Alves (2011) points out that there is a critical process of human-social (de)formation, with the capital demonstrating its inability to fulfill civilizing promises of human well-being. For Alves (2011), the current precarisation of labour is not just a precarisation of the workforce as a simple reproduction of a commodity, but a much deeper precariousness of the human being itself. There is, consequently, a de-ef-fectiveness of human as a generic being, so that the new social metabolism of labour implies new modes of (de)constitution of the human being3.

Thus, unlike the Fordist pattern of rigid work management, (Alves, 2011) the process of amplified de-effectiveness by Toyotism leads to a growing work flexib ility, u nderstood as the full capacity of the capital to make the workforce tamable, complacent and submissive (a much more advanced and developed real subsumption). In this sense, proactive and purposeful attitudes are required from the worker, who has to be capable of efficiently fulfilling goals and making him a member of the corporate collective body. The new capitalist company seeks the flexible worker, who adapts with plasticity to the new emotional (and behavioral) skills of the new world of work (Alves, 2011).

This complicity with objectives outside the individual expresses the greater mastery and control of capital over the worker's body and subjectivity. Faria and Schmitt (2007) deepen this issue by discussing forms of social control within organizations. For them, this social control aims to reach the physical body of workers and their subjectivity. One of the strategies used by organizations is to exert control over the individual through the bonds he establishes with the organization. It is about subtle control, which is almost always imperceptible and related to the individual's intimacy: the desires, the need of belonging, of being affiliated, of feeling oneself loved and fulfilled. Faria and Schmitt (2007) show that the management in organizations is increasingly exercised in the sense of 'hijacking' subjectivity so that the worker can achieve their goals of productivity and profit, since for the capital is essential that the individuals-work-ers are engaged and, above all, that they establish strong affective bonds.

Alves (2008) points out that the constitution of the new consents required by Toyotism takes place through an intense process of manipulation of the subjectivity of living work (which is the content of the "capture" of subjectivity). Therefore, capturing and 'hijacking' subjectivity are structural conditions for obtaining the flexible worker. In the capitalism of flexible accumulation, there is a refinement of the work exploitation, implying the need for a much more submissive, engaged and self-disciplined workforce. Therefore, it is not just about the precariousness of the objective conditions of work, but the precariousness of the generic condition of the human being (Alves, 2011). The refinement of the toyotiza-tion of work generates the figure of a disconnected worker, uprooted and without solid references that guide him in the long term. Therefore is created the dominance of the worker always willing to get involved and to surrender to values outside their condition as a subject, especially in structural contexts of intense unemployment and internal competition in the labour markets.

In the next section, we discuss how this process of ideological co-optation fits into the concrete working relationships among travel agents. We seek to show a part of this refined and, therefore, more effective dynamic of subordination of labourto capital.

Control, engagement and capture of subjectivity among travel agents

This subsection specifically retrieves some empirical reports obtained in a previously published study (Pereira, Costa & Barbosa, 2020). To do so, we resume the notion of 'hijacking' subjectivity pointed out by Faria and Meneghetti (2007, p. 98) and its five basic forms by organizations: Forms of 'Hijacking' Subjectivity:

• i.    'Hijacking' by identification : it refers to the condition of worker adjustment to the imaginary instituted by the organization that makes the worker to consider it as part of himself;

• ii.    'Hijacking' by valued essentiality : it refers to the feeling of indispensability due to merit, which is fed by the worker; as it also refers to the belief of the worker in the recognition of their merits by the organization;

• ill.    'Hijacking' through solidary collaboration : it refers to the development of attitudes by the worker that are aimed to contributing to organizational projects through adherence, bonding, support and involvement with work groups;

• iv.    'Hijacking' for productive efficiency : it refers to the worker's belief in effective collaboration as way of obtaining better results than those previously intended;

• v.    'Hijacking' by total involvement : it refers to the worker's feeling of self-delivery to the seduction and enchantment provided by

  the organization values, which act as an incentive forself-commitment (Faria & Meneghetti, 2007, p. 98).

In the multiple, contradictory and resistant processes of capture and 'hijacking' of subjectivity, the five indicated ways were perceived among the travel agents. There is not always an explicit discursive adhesion between the form of 'hijacking' and the speech of the travel agents, but the link between some elements of the testimonies and the way they adhere to organizational engagement also becomes perceptible.

During the study, a certain adjustment of the worker to the company's imaginary was verified ("I feel part of the company"); the feeling of indispensability and deserving of the worker's effort and merit ("It's impossible not considering myself as an important part of the company"); the adhesion and involvement with the organizational whole materialized by teamwork ("We are all responsible for its success or failure"); the belief in effective collaboration at work ("I do a little bit of everything"); the feeling of self-delivery, self-giving and self-commitment ("It is not only my name that is at stake, the company's as well. I am its mirror").

Thus, in addition to the need of categorizing and typifying the ways of capturing subjectivity, it becomes more important to highlight that this organizational involvement has consequences for the everyday life of the travel agents. The testimonies show that this "hijacking" subjectivity legitimizes and naturalizes some marks of the most refined toyo-tization of work:

• 1    Expansion of teleworking (sales and post-sales shifts);

• 2    Intense need of achieving goals (by commissioning and by maintaining the employment relationship);

• 3    Famtour⁴ as the 'masked' precariousness of the valued worker("l worktraveling!");

• 4    Constant surveillance and monitoring: checking the agent's conversations in the messaging app WhatsApp;

• 5    Kind of uberization of labour via freelancer agent (worksharing).

Thus, it is verified that:

• •    The travel agencies seek to create and to reinforce the image of the strong collective and of the big family, in which everyone is important and the worker needs to feel at "home".

• •    The agencies encourage the flexibility of working hours and the extension of working time beyond the fixed working day, so it implies that the travel agent ends up not having a very clear demarcation between their working and non-working time.

• •    The use of technology (WhatsApp, for example) ends up configuring not a factor of autonomy for the subject, but an element of greatersubmission, since the company also starts to control the workers outside of work (by goals to be followed and by surveillance for what they write in the app).

• •    A direct dependence is created between productivity and commissioning, resulting in the income flexibility.

• •    There is also a striking aspect in the travel agency sector that deserves attention: the number of autonomous workers (freelancers) who are self-employed providing services to the agencies. It is, in a certain way, a sharing (of the network) of the workforce loaned to the agency, being a type of uberization of work (Slee, 2017) opened up in this market. The agency in this case, like the Uber, is not an employer, but it deals with individuals who independently decide when and how to work (many call themselves "micro-entrepreneurs"). What appears, at first glance, as a light and flexible model of work, in the hands of the travel agency turns into work that is paid exclusively by commission, dispensing with any contractuality or legal responsibility.

The precarisation of labour among travel agents follows the structural trend of the world of work, but it still more exacerbated by the need for high professional qualifications and service excellence. This ends up requiring workers who need to sell their personality (Mills, 1969) and to smile in a pleasant, friendly and self-committed way to the customers (Hochschild, 1990), despite the enormous degradation of working conditions and relations in the tourism activity sectors.

Conclusions

The reflections contained here, despite being limited to occasional reports from travel agents from a medium-sized non-tourist city in the countryside of the northeastern region of Brazil, reveal much more than isolated cases. They express the global refinement of the overexploitation of labour that involves these workers, since thinking about work in tourism requires reflecting on a globalized economic activity that implies - in competitive contexts - the need for highly personalized services and differential quality at the expense of a poorly paid workforce that is subject to long working hours.

In this sense, the modern capital employed in tourism does not work with amateurs: it has workers who are always available (to work while traveling, on weekends and on holidays), relatively qualified (who speak a second or third language), with expressive mastery of techniques of interpersonal relationships (good oratory, intergroup communication, conflict negotiation, etc.) and with expertise in management, sales and marketing administration techniques. Such a demand for qualification and productivity is almost never made at the expense of objective (higher remuneration) and subjective (recognition and stability) compensation for the worker, but of great responsibility on the employee who, already co-opted by the dominant ideology, feels co-responsible for the success or failure of your company.

As a more general consequence of this process, the worker is co-opted into very subtle relationships of domination, reinforced by the tourist economy of hedonism (the lure of work permeated by a certain playfulness on

'* Derived from English, Familiarization Tours. It means a work tripthat the agent (worker) makes in order to know the destinations he sells. These work trips are generally financed by the operators and/or by economic actors from the receptive centers.

beaches, swimming pools, bars, festive events, etc.); for ideals of the consumer and of the spectacle society; by the ideology of human capital that transfers the responsibility for their professional success or failure to the worker, disregarding structural contexts of social inequalities; and by the ideology of self-entrepreneurship that tries to make each worker a company of its own.

We would venture to say that the greatest exercise of symbolic violence perpetrated by the tourism economy is selling highly conspicuous leisure packages and lifestyles through workers who, perhaps, will never be able to enjoy what they sell. The difference between selling, for example, a trip ora luxury car is that the car will be consumed far away from the dealership seller, unlike the tourism, which will place worker and tourist side by side, in a perverse symbiosis.

This is one of the many faces of this "industry without chimneys" that has served as a strong agent for concentrating income and capital (Standing, 2019). Therefore, it is urgent to problematizethe everyday life-and the future - of these workers, so that we do not fall into the prey of the end of history in which the capitalism and the western liberal democracy are the final stage of humanity (Fukuyama, 1992).

Thus, thinking aboutthe precarisation of labour in the tourist activity should avoid bumping into a conservative and, therefore, comfortable attitude, justifying that without these occupations many "tourist" municipalities would be doomed to a moribund economic life. The hegemonic discourse is not interested in revealing the picture of social inequality in the labour markets.

Therefore, the banner that proclaims "more work and less rights" fits like a glove in the neoliberal agenda of expansion of the flex-ibilization and degradation of work. We must escape this complacency and problematize the precarisation of labour, aiming, at least, to maintain the immanent criticism and to envision a world - even if it is a utopia - beyond the shackles of capital.