From headline-making strikes at British Airways, Cathay Pacific, and VARIG of Brazil to two decades of anti-union austerity at major North American carriers, the airline industry provides a provocative venue to engage the dilemmas of labor on the terrain of globalization. Two new books center the working lives of flight attendants as a lens to deepen understandings of these political, economic, and cultural shifts.
Kathleen Barry's Femininity in Flight offers a social and cultural history of flight attendant labor and activism, largely focussing on the period before 1970. Barry's work traces the emergence of flight attendant work as a domain of white femininity by 1940. In an era of widespread public anxiety surrounding still-novel air travel, Barry argues that airline marketers highlighted the safety and comfort of flying via dominant discourses of race and gender. Advertisers portrayed passengers as safely in the scientific expert hands of white male pilots aboard airplanes dependable enough to be the workplace of vulnerable, genteel, young white women. In the years that followed World War II, government regulations that eliminated early safety problems also strictly limited the means by which airlines could compete for passengers. Barry asserts that air carriers turned to white women's bodies to differentiate themselves from the competition when government regulation prevented them controlling route networks and fare structures. This increasingly gratuitous sexual exploitation became a basis for an increasingly militant flight attendant activist movement. Barry argues that feminist politics guided flight attendant claims both on trade unions and the nation state, spawning independent, woman-led unions unprecedented in the US labor movement, and making flight attendants among the most vocal supporters of watershed anti-sex discrimination legislation of the 1960s.
Drew Whitelegg's Working the Skies pays similar attention to the history of flight attendant politics, but embeds such analysis in a text centering the physical and spatial dimensions of flight attendant work. Whitelegg's extensive collection of in-depth ethnographic interviews allows him to argue that “spatial remuneration” has long been the primary reward of labor aloft. After World War II, flight attendants harnessed the mobility required for their careers in order to “produce space,” building an occupational community of women aboard airplanes and in layover cities subverting the suburban domesticity required by race and gender norms. After economic gains by unions in the 1970s, flight attendants manufactured new spaces outside of airline work, allowing higher pay and additional days off to make way for second careers and social mobility unprecedented for service-sector women workers. Yet as the workforce diversifies in the current period, global deregulation and political attacks on unions are “squeezing” the space that flight attendants have long produced. Whitelegg argues that vastly longer workdays, shorter layovers, fewer days off, and lower pay compromise both the spaces for social and political linkages on the job, and flight attendants' ability to control their lives outside of work.
Both texts are immensely strong in demonstrating how the nexus of trade union and 1960s “new social movement” politics transformed flight attendant work from a short-term finishing school for middle-class white women to a stable career for a diversity of workers. Yet their dedication to US legal and trade union history also limits the scope of political mobilization at the moment it is most important – when past advances unravel amidst neoliberal austerity. The continuing “globalization” of the airline industry has fundamentally transformed what it means to make political demands on individual liberal nation-states via trade unions. Ongoing scholarship must further grapple with new modes of flight attendant political mobilization enabled by the ever-increasing mobility of capital and labor in the airline industry.
