How are European Tourism Firms Complying with Sustainable Development Goal 8.5? A comparable study of abroad and local workers

Abstract

The tourism industry is an important employer providing millions of job opportunities globally. Their compliance to United Nations’ sustainable development goal 8 is therefore highly relevant. Accordingly, the purpose of this thesis was to investigate how European tourism firms active in the Swedish market comply with SDG target 8.5 surrounding decent work. The aim was to fill in the existing knowledge gap by comparing abroad and local workers. Decent work has been limited to three criteria; fair wage, work security and personal development, that should be fulfilled in order for tourism employers to maintain SDG 8.5. A qualitative method was used with an abductive research approach, where interviews have been conducted with HR managers, abroad workers and local workers. The theories used to analyze the collected empirical data are the job characteristics model and the two factor theory. From the analysis we established that employers for both abroad and local workers were lacking in complying to decent work. Additionally, we found that different living situations mattered where local workers in general were put in more vulnerable situations and had lower compliance to decent work than abroad workers. We concluded that employers’ of local workers lacked in all three criteria of decent work while abroad workers’ employers did comply with fair wage but only partially with work security and personal development.