The Conditions of Workers in the Characteristic Activities of the Tourism: Socio-Productive Specificities and Trends

This article aims to contribute to the discussion about work in the field of tourism by analyzing the labor interactions established within the production, distribution, exchange and consumption processes. With focus on socio-productive hierarchy organized and created in order to add more direct and indirect value, we present and discuss the concepts of useful productive and unproductive labor with aim at pointing out the dominant social relations in those spaces characterized by ‘comparative advantages’. Through reflection and direct participant observation, with the use of structured questionnaires, we sought to highlight the labor and health conditions of workers in the characteristic areas of the tourism industry, by pointing out the possibilities and limits of labor regulatory actions before not only the State, but fundamentally the sociability increasingly regulated by the market. It is pointed out that the labor conditions in the tourism sector are defined according to certain conditions that allow labor exploitation in relative and/or absolute terms, thus generating bio-psycho-social wear.