Sustainable Tourism Employment, the Concept of Decent Work, and Sweden

This chapter considers the sustainability of tourism employment in Sweden. Examining current understandings of tourism employment through discussions of sustainable human resource management and decent work (following the Sustainable Development Goals, specifically Goal 8), the chapter asks if tourism employment can be sustainable. The chapter reiterates that there remains a lack of empirically grounded, relevant literature on the sustainability of tourism employment and utilises data from a qualitative systematic review of literature to explore these issues in relation to Sweden. The chapter finishes with positive examples of sustainable initiatives from the Swedish tourism industry but concludes that without meaningful engagement at many scales and with many stakeholders, the sustainability of tourism employment, and the capacity for decent work in tourism, remains dubious.