Tourism provides more jobs than ever before
Tourism employment reached a record high of 400,000 people last summer, according to data compiled by the Institute of the Greek Tourism Confederation (SETE Intelligence).
In the period from July to September 2017, tourism employed 19,000 more people than a year earlier – an annual increase or 5 percent from the 381,000 employed in the summer of 2016.
In the last decade (from 2008 to 2017) employment in tourism recorded an average annual growth of just 0.9 percent, but the negative trend of the first years of the crisis was reversed from 2014 onward, with the annual growth rate soaring to 7.8 percent.
Due to that rise and the parallel shrinking of employment in most other sectors of the economy, tourism’s contribution to employment in Greece climbed from 7.5 percent in 2008 to an all-time high of 10.4 percent in 2017. The main age group employed in tourism is 30- to 44-year-olds.
The increase in part-time employment in tourism observed since the industry’s recovery in 2013, due to structural changes in the labor market, has not taken place at the expense of full-time employment but is complementing it, SETE Intelligence explained. This offers an alternative option of work to tens of thousands of Greeks at a time when other sectors companies are fairly reluctant to hire due to the crisis.
