March 16, 2010 The Damage of the Strike
Flight attendants are an extraordinarily popular subject of study (Hochschild, 1983; Taylor and Tyler, 2000; Williams, 2003). Research focuses on the emotional labour and body work involved, as Dawn highlighted recently. The customer here is a powerful, but shadowy figure, who extracts and deserves service, and whom the cabin crew must please. These academic concerns are some way from the story of the ongoing British Airways dispute between management and unionised workers over different cost-cutting measures, and the manner through which negotiations are taking place. Given long-standing tensions between BA and its workforce (at least since the Gate Gourmet confrontations), it’s hardly surprising to hear the discussions are strained.
What’s notable about the reporting of the dispute is who is imagined to be damaged by strike action: it is you, my reader and telly watcher, you the imagined, eternal and all-important consumer. You are no longer a shadowy presence; you have had your honeymoon plans destroyed. Whilst the workforce are specified by the fact of their employment for BA, you the consumer are everyman, and you the consumer ought not be disadvantaged by those pesky strikers. There is no hint that you are also a worker.
Casablanca Airport by John Spooner
The BA dispute — and the political interventions provoked by it — has broader implications for discussions of pay and working conditions than just this case. It influences the landscape in which further discussions and decisions about labour law and labour rights are made, and relates to political sensitivity to the consumer the worker, to the power of management and the privileged status afforded to protecting the brand. The consumer is not the only universal figure in our social life. We are workers, too.
References
- Hochschild, A. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press.
- Taylor, S. And Tyler, M. (2000) ‘Emotional labour and sexual difference in the airline industry’. Work, Employment and Society. 14:77–95.
- Williams C. (2003) ‘Sky service: the demands of emotional labour in the airline industry’. Gender, Work and Organization. 10 (5) 513–550.
John Spooner photographs used under creative commons license
Comments
A very good point, Lynne, which i duly requisitioned as a talking point for a Guardian podcast here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/thebusiness
Dan Milmo, our transport correspondent, makes the very good point that the vast majority of BA cabin crew are Mail readers who live in Surbiton or other nice areas close to Heathrow. Hardly the stuff of the Militant Tendency.
At 1:15 pm on March 17, 2010 Aditya Chakrabortty said:
This is a demonstration of the ways in which discourses of consumption can be seen to operate in the interests of management rather than in the interest of ‘our rights as consumers’. As Lynne rightly states, it is not our rights as consumers that are at stake here, but this is the dominant way in which the strike has been presented. The focus on the disruption that this strike causes to us ‘hard working consumers’, (who are only looking for that ‘well deserved break’), obviates any necessity to consider the dispute in any wider context. By invoking the paying air travel consumers into the centre of the dispute the management line is strengthened, as the management interest is portrayed as only wanting to get those strikers back to work so we (the consumers) can all get back to enjoying our holidays.
This representation of the strike functions to characterise it as a process understood primarily from the context of market disruption. It allows for the political nature of the dispute to be marginalised. The disrupted consumer discourse works to appeal to us all, the common bond between us being that we are all consumers and hence all potentially at one point or another affected by these type of disputes. This is the pseudo-democratisation of the consumer, as if being a consumer is the common factor that defines our human experience, cutting across class, gender or ethnicity. It connects with us at an individual level, not offering any other conception of the dispute which might allow us to couch it in terms of a collective understanding of labour laws and workers rights, and indeed to consider how erosion of these rights might have direct impact upon our human experience as workers, not consumers.
It would be interesting to see how many newspaper photographs of disrupted airport departure halls feature inconvenienced business travellers in suits as opposed to inconvenienced holidaymakers in jeans and jumpers…but to do this would invoke a element of work into the dominant representation, and that may well undermine all the hard work that has been done framing it as a consumer issue.
At 6:11 pm on March 17, 2010 Ewen Speed said: