Employment Influence Of Seasonal Workers In Smalltourism Firms

As an important part of tourist destination, small businesses have played a positive role in creating jobs and economic growth. Seasonality is an inherent feature of small tourism enterprises. Correspondingly, seasonal worker is an important participant of small businesses in tourism,which is crucial to the success of tourism.As a special group of tourism practitioners, seasonal workers have many its own unique characteristics compared to long-term employees in small tourism businesses.The abroad research on seasonal workers begins earlier,forming a large number of theoretical and practical achievements on the definition, demographic characteristics, job satisfaction,whereas domestic research in this field is still blank currently.In view of research status of domestic and abroad, this paper mainly aims on employment influence of tourism seasonal workers on their own, the family and tourism businesses.Taking Yangshuo west street as an example,the paper conducts a empirical research on employment impacts to 176 seasonal workers from 202 small tourism businesses by the way of questionnaires and in-depth interviews.The complete questionnaire includes four parts: employment impact on individuals, families and businesses, and individual variables.The individuals and companies employment impacts are mainly favorable and unfavorable effects,meanwhile families impacts are related to family economy and life.Studies have shown that seasonal workers in tourism small businesses are divided into three groups according to occupation: students, specialized probation workers and nearby peasant-workers. The degree of seasonal employment influence is various affecting different groups. Personal development influence has a greater impact on student groups and family impact affects nearby peasant-workers more. Simultaneously, specialized probation workers are greatly affected by businesses impact.In terms of personal impact, seasonal employment in small tourism businesses help workers improve the individual economic condition, civilised quality level, ideology mature and future employment.In the meantime, seasonal workers are confronted with adverse effects of heavy tasks, low levels of pay and benefits, poor management and so on.On the side of family impacts,seasonal employment is conducive to increase and diversify household income. Due to differences in population characteristics, seasonal employment has little effect on their family life such as family structure, family functioning and family relations. in terms of the impacts of small businesses,hiring seasonal workers are helpful to reduce labor costs while increasing the flexibility of labor used in small businesses.However, seasonal workers have low job satisfaction, high job insecurity and low organizational commitment, making small tourism enterprises face lower productivity and higher employee turnover.In concluded, this paper puts forward research disadvantages and future research directions.