The Political Economy of Care: Flight Attendant Unions and the Struggle over Airline Deregulation in the 1980s

Abstract

AbstractThis paper traces flight attendant union activism in the 1980s to demonstrate how the ideology of the family weighed on the practice of care. Previous scholarship, especially the work of Arlie Russell Hochschild, has demonstrated that emotional labor is a defining feature of the flight attendant profession and of other service work. Because airline managers had framed women's jobs as providing care and not as work, flight attendants had always made far less money than their male peers in the airline industry. In the early 1970s, and in conjunction with the women's, gay, and lesbian liberation movements, flight attendant unions transformed the relationship between care and work, as they won large raises that allowed flight attendants to be breadwinners for their families. With flight attendants' economic advances, caregiving was defined in political economic terms, a practice that required a robust wage and affordable benefits. After the deregulation of the airline industry, however, airline managers strove to redefine the meaning of care. Working in tandem with the ascendant “pro‐family” and pro‐business activist movements of the early 1980s that aimed to cut taxes, roll back welfare programs, and eliminate government regulation, the airlines offered “family values” as a means to make up for what neoliberal reforms were taking away. This paper analyzes the ensuing confrontation, arguing that the category of care was a fault line in the struggle over the rise of neoliberalism.