The economic sector representing the engine for Spanish economy, tourism industry, has lost throttle. Records in the last five years are desperate. Up to 600,000 jobs have been wiped out from the industry since recession ensued when the credit crunch struck.
In the first quarter of 2008, when the Spanish economy was still growing and unemployment rates in the country were steady at the 10pc mark, tourism industry employed in Spain 2,533,080 people, 611,441 more workers than those listed from January to April this year, when occupancy figures reached 1,921,639 employees.
Jorge Carrillo, CC.OO union representative for aviation industry, said to EFE news agency that 'a fourth of all employees across the country's tourism industry have been wiped out. That is horrific'.
Out of job
In what regards people out of job, in two years unemployed workers in tourism industry have skyrocketed from 242,229 to 523,364, up by 116pc, as unemployment rates -percentage of people out of job out of the overall workforce any community has- have soared from 8.7pc to 21.4pc, according to data gathered by the Encuesta de Población Activa (EPA), distributed by theInstituto de Estudios Turísticos.
In this sense, another contributing factor has been a decrease in working population, which in scarcely five years has shrunk from 2.7 million to 2.4 million people.
Small and large corporations
It is widely believed that widespread job adjustment plans launched at large companies such as Iberia, Orizonia and Paradores de Turismo, Spanish State-owned chain, have propped up job destruction.
But alongside large adjustments across the industry, numerous small catering-linked businesses, like 'pubs, cafes or restaurants' would have been 'disappeared', reminded Santos Nogales, representative for the UGT union on catering and accomodation industries.
In addition, sources from the Unión de Agencias de Viaje (UNAV) informed that from an initial 9,000 travel agency branches existing in 2007 across Spain, these would have been reduced to a mere 5,500, approximately.
Source: 02b
