Domestic Flight Attendants in Australia: A Quasi Occupational Community?

Abstract

There is a growing willingness among flight attendants to take industrial action, including strikes, particularly during holiday periods. Increasing militancy is a world wide phenomenon, which suggests that processes related to the work organization of the occupation itself are relevant in explaining flight attendants' industrial behaviour. Many factors are implicated, but two major ones are scrutinized here. First, airline management takes on an increasingly bureaucratized, impersonal and calculative form. This and the mobile nature of the flight crew workplace has created intrinsic communication problems. Second, collectivist responses among flight attendants have generated more readily because the occupation has the main characteristics of occupational community that fosters the growth of solidarity and unionism. The sexist history of the occupation, with resignation on marriage or premature retirement at age 35, provided the context for leaders to emerge in an all-women union (from 1956 to 1983) to dismantle the sexist features using industrial action.