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The IUF’s
Professional Group of Hotel, Restaurant, Catering and Tourism Workers will
gather for a two-day meeting on April 10 through 11. Over a hundred unionists
from around the world will meet at La Granja in Segovia, Spain to assess the
issues and challenges faced by a sector that is continuously growing, but with
its back turned on its workers. Sirel spoke with Norberto Latorre, president of
the IUF’s HRCT Group, to learn about the goals of the meeting and the issues it
will focus on.
-Tell us about
the main problems that will be discussed at this meeting?
-To begin with,
I’d like to underline that this conference will be the first opportunity in
which the members of the Governing Committee of the HRCT Group will be
participating, and that we have also invited unions that represent tourism,
catering and hotel workers from around the world.
At the meeting
we will examine the problems faced by workers in the hotel industry, which is
clearly undergoing an increasing process of concentration at the hands of the
transnational chains. We will also analyze the quality of the jobs generated by
tourism and, naturally, we will define the challenges posed by the sector in
terms of both social and environmental sustainability.
Lastly, we must
continue with our collective work aimed at establishing labor strategies that
will enable us to successfully overcome the challenges and problems faced
globally by the sector and check the ambitions of transnational corporations
that are seeking to profit more, at the expense of the quality of life of
workers, trampling social gains.
-Tourism has
experienced an exponential growth. In 1950 there was a total of 25 million
international tourists, and by 2007 that number was up to 900 million. However,
as you say, that growth is not translated into prosperity for workers, and we
can even say that in terms of wages and working conditions we are definitely
regressing.
-Yes, sadly the
strategy of the new corporate management that is heading transnational
corporations is fueled by the desire to obtain the quickest return on their
investment. There is no place in that strategy for the well being of workers and
the environment. When we speak of sustainable tourism, we see the concept as
involving a search for ways to deal with these situations.
As you rightly
point out, the sector has grown like no other, but workers are not earning
enough, they work under fixed-term contracts or are hired by pseudo work
cooperatives…
-Or they work
under internship schemes…
-Exactly. In
Argentina’s case, by law no more than 20 percent of the personnel can be
engaged as interns, but in other countries such as Nicaragua, some hotels
have up to 80 percent of their personnel in internship schemes.
-And all of
this against the backdrop of a sector that is clearly taking on an antiunion
attitude…
-That’s a very
sensitive issue you’ve brought up. Through our work in the IUF’s HRCT
group we are attempting to contribute to expand union coverage, to reduce the
number of workers that are not unionized. We are well aware that to achieve that
goal we have to overcome several obstacles, including the union discrimination
policies that are implemented by many of the industry’s transnational
corporations. But we are moving forward nonetheless, because it is becoming
increasingly difficult to ignore the IUF’s strength and capacity for
struggle.
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