The lack of manpower, «in quantity and quality to meet the business needs of the hotel and tourism sector», is «one of the biggest structural problems in the Algarve today», considers the Association of Hotels and Touristic Enterprises of the Algarve (AHETA) .
In a statement, this association says that the "human factor" plays a crucial and decisive role" in tourism, "especially with regard to the quality of services provided."
O Sul Informação he has already reported on the fact that the Algarve is looking for workers in other regions and abroad to combat this labor shortage.
For AHETA, «the existing bottlenecks in this matter result, to a large extent, from the ancestral lack of mobility between residential areas with the highest concentration of workers and their respective workplaces, located outside urban areas».
Therefore, the association appeals to municipal officials, at a time when the Municipal Councils are preparing to see the Municipal Master Plans (PDM), «for the need to implement active housing policies at controlled costs, with a view to motivating and attracting hands. from other regions of the country, but also immigrants».
According to AHETA, «hotels and tourist enterprises have been developing, especially in recent years, large efforts and investments to try to fill these needs, providing accommodation and other facilities to their workers whenever possible».
However, "these efforts have not been sufficient to resolve the huge structural gaps facing the region in this area."
For AHETA, it is also necessary to «establish partnerships between the public and private sector, with the objective of making workers loyal to tourism and companies, through continuous training actions during the low season, aiming at the creation of stable and lasting teams for the throughout the year, improving the quality of services provided and increasing their levels of productivity and, in this way, the profitability of companies and regional and national tourism competitiveness».
Labor Law does not, by itself, solve «the structural problems of the lack of labor, so the return to a protectionist past in terms of labor legislation, as some political and union forces claim, cannot serve as an excuse to to overcome the bottlenecks that our country in general and the Algarve in particular are facing».
In this sense, says AHETA, "it is important to streamline and make the processes of legalization of immigrants more flexible, with a view to the controlled importation of foreign labor to work in the economy in general and in tourism in the Algarve in particular."
This is because, concludes the association, «the economic activity of tourism has been and will continue to be a determining factor in minimizing the negative impacts of the crises, both in the social and in the macroeconomic sphere of the country».
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