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Description
Patricia Adler and Peter Adler, Paradise Laborers: Hotel Work inthe Global Economy (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press 2004))
Rachei Sherman, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (Berkeley: University of California Press 2007)
Dan Zuberi, Differences that Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the UnitedStates and Canada (Ithaca, NY: ILR/Cornell University Press 2006)
IN THE MID 1990s, when I first became interested in the challenges facing hospitality workers and their unions, there was relatively little literature outside of human resource management perspectives on the subject. It was as if researchers were misinterpreting the 'please do not disturb' signs guests hang on hotel room doorknobs as a message to leave the entire hospitality sector alone. Rare exceptions were Dorothy Sue Cobble's Dishing it Out and Roy Wood's study of working in catering and accommodation in the UK. (1) In recent years, however, hospitality work has attracted a greater number of scholars interested in 'new' economy labour issues. Hotels are of 'particular interests as post-industrial workplaces that employ growing numbers of marginalized workers, including new immigrants, racialized workers, women, and young people in increasingly polarized global cities. New research addresses an imbalance in labour studies which has arguably tended to focus on workers in 'core' manufacturing industries at the frontlines of global economic restructuring and transition. (2) Three recent studies specifically explore work in North American hotels and resorts. These studies provide different approaches to the study of hospitality work and workers and, although uneven, contribute to our understanding of issues facing workers beyond rustbelt industries and regions.
Paradise Laborers: Hotel Work in the Global Economy is the product of over a decade of research on resort workers in Hawaii by Patricia Adler and Peter Adler. q-be book opens with a description of what it is like to 'land in paradise' from the perspective of a tourist. A somewhat strange introduction to a book which focuses on workers and their post-modern existence employed in large full-service resorts, but it is indicative of the struggle the authors have escaping what I feel is an overly romanticized account of hotel work in 'paradise'. Based in Colorado, the Adlers come clean with their initial conceptualizations of these workers. To their "initially unseasoned eyes, resort workers had it all. They live where the weather was always temperate, they had enough discretionary income to pursue leisure activities, and even on the grimmest day of work, they could look at the scenery and find all tranquil with the world." (23)
A romantic view of hotel workers as prototypical of the growing number of 'trapped' and 'transient' workers who increasingly flow through the global economy continues throughout the book. The end result is a study of hotel workers that, at times, is as labourious as it is provocative. The central argument of Paradise Laborers is that people living and working in postmodern communities and workplaces (i.e., hyper-imaginary resort destinations) "cling to a modernist model of the self." (8) The review of the theoretical literature which provides the underlying framework for the authors' thesis and the Weberian typology of hotel workers is sparse and condensed. An expanded section or chapter situating the work in more detail rather than relegating numerous references to footnotes would have added value.
The study is largely based on traditional ethnographic methods which at times frustrated the researchers. Securing access to hotel and resort workers is difficult, but I was somewhat dismayed at the way the authors sought access to workers through management. While initial interviews were 'voluntary,' the authors' approach of telling workers they had "official permission from management" did create suspicion and unease among participants (admitted in note 6, 242-243). (3) Over the years, the authors largely funded their research through teaching stints and expanded their research methods to include a 'membership role' in which they befriended resort workers over longer terms. In reporting the findings, the authors use extensive quotations from interviews with over 100 hotel Workers listed in an appendix. While these well chosen excerpts from the transcripts do give the hotel workers voice, their length and volume become cumbersome and, at times, detract from the... |
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