Revisiting Flexible Labor: A Case of Freelance Tour Guides under Economic Uncertainty during the Covid-19 Outbreak in Phuket
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Abstract
This study aims to examine the precarious forms of freelance tour guides experiencing economic breakdown, to reconsidering a case of flexible labor, during the COVID-19 outbreak in Phuket. As the major Phuket residents depend their livelihood on and everyday means of support from the travel industry, the emergent measure terminated the dispensable mobility, which brought into a sudden economic downfall to each of individuals. Freelance tour guides are laborers who have generated benefits to other tourism-related businesses and local economy. However, they presently become one of the vulnerable laborers in the collapse of neoliberal tourism system affected by the outbreak. They encountered unemployment instantly after the cease of flight operation and land travel ban. The study is qualitative research and mainly uses ethnographic method by gathering data from interviewing three informants and observing their conversations online during the COVID-19 in March 2020. The results portray the micro perspectives of flexible laborer in the tourism sector, reflecting through the narratives of freelance tour guides experiencing the economic breakdown and blockage of cash flow. They further arise in various informal strategies to deal with the difficult situations and assure the life security, for example, finding alternative sources of income from online sales and family business, relocation for an affordable living, and seeking for network embeddedness. The epidemic does not only infect health conditions, but also perturbs the well-being and transforms the practices of human in economic-driven society.
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