Working career progress in the tourism industry: Temp-to-perm transitions in Spain

In this article, we analyze the dynamics of temporary workers’ transitions into permanent contracts for workers related to the tourism industry. For this purpose, we use an administrative retrospective dataset from Spanish Social security records. Results show that while individuals with a weaker attachment to the tourism industry achieve open-ended contracts sooner than in most other industries, on the contrary, it takes more time to those with a greater attachment to the tourism industry to exit from the temporary status. In addition, we find that for workers substantially engaged in the tourism industry, it takes more time to reach an open-ended contract when they have held between six and ten contracts in the past (as opposed to holding only one previous contract). On the contrary, for individuals with a weaker attachment to the tourism industry, holding between two and ten previous contracts implies a quicker exit from temporality.