Sky Service: The Demands of Emotional Labour in The Airline Industry

Gender, Work and Organization. Vol. 10 No.
5 November 2003
Sky Service: The Demands

of Emotional Labour in the
Airline Industry
Claire Williams*
Following Hochschild’s The Managed Heart, which emphasized the prob-

lematic features that emotional labour had for women flight attendants, a
critical literature emerged which focused on the more enjoyable aspects of
emotional labour in service employee experience. This article draws on this
literature and analyses emotional labour as a gendered cultural perfor-
mance but takes issue with the individualizing and pluralistic tenor
in the post-Hochschild discussions. Using a qualitative and quantitative
study of nearly 3000 Australian flight attendants, it focuses on organiza-
tional and occupational health and safety variables, as well as sexual harass-
ment and passenger abuse — factors barely discussed by Hochschild’s
critics. The qualitative data indicate that emotional labour is both pleasur-
able and difficult at different times for the same individual. Gender is still
pivotal, as Hochschild suggested, linking emotional labour with sexual
harassment. At the same time, the most significant predictors from the
quantitative study of whether emotional labour would be costly were orga-
nizational. Variables such as whether flight attendants felt valued by
the company show that the airline management context is highly influential
in the way in which emotional labour is experienced. As a means of under-
standing the complex relations in this important and eroticized area of
service work where flight attendants, airline crews, airline management
and passengers have convergent and conflicting interests, the article also
deploys a new concept: ‘demanding publics’, to refer to trangressions of
the legitimate boundaries of the service worker.
Keywords: emotional labour, sexual harassment, flight attendants, customer

service, occupational health and safety
Address for correspondence: *Claire Williams, Faculty of Social Sciences, Flinders University,
Adelaide, e-mail: claire.williams@flinders.edu.au
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
514 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION
Introduction
T he job of flight attending gained major attention through Arlie Russell

Hochschild’s The Managed Heart (1983) which coined the concept, ‘emo-
tional labour’, to describe the ‘relational rather than the task-based aspect of
work found primarily . . . in the service economy’ (Steinberg and Figart, 1999,
p. 9). A controversy generated by Cas Wouters (1989) then emerged about the
consequences of emotional labour for the individual service worker. As
Wouters put it, ‘Hochschild’s theoretical stance towards feeling makes her see
costs where there are none or hardly any’ (1989, p. 118). Subsequent research
and analysis has tended to support Wouters rather than Hochschild in
arguing that the performance of emotional labour is generally satisfying and
enjoyable (Frenkel et al., 1999; Wharton, 1993). Hochschild, and those who
have modified or challenged her analysis, have highlighted and extended our
understandings of the emotional and performative elements intrinsic to
service work. While retaining some of the key insights that these analysts
have provided, this article contends, on the basis of extensive empirical data,
that there are a number of related issues about service work and flight attend-
ing in particular that require more research, analysis and discussion.
What are some of these issues? Sexual harassment and abusive passen-
gers are major concerns for the flight attendants described in the studies
reported here. Neither Hochschild nor Wouters had much to say about such
matters. Accordingly the concept of ‘demanding publics’ is developed in this
article to gain some purchase on the various forms of abuse flight attendants
encounter during the course of their work. In this respect, basic employment
rights have yet to be established for service workers in the face of aggressive
and ‘difficult’ customers or passengers.
An important aspect of this study considers the organizational context for
the emotional labour characteristics of the job. The study asks under what
circumstances emotional labour is costly or satisfying for individual flight
attendants — and this includes the somewhat overlooked, yet crucial orga-
nizational context of occupational health and safety. The study incorporates
Hochschild’s emphasis on the kinds of heterosexual feminized gender per-
formance and ‘feelings work’ that women flight attendants are expected to
deliver and expects these to have greater effects for women than for men. It
adds sexual harassment from passengers and expects this to detract from sat-
isfaction. It investigates the airline managements’ seeming lack of acknowl-
edgement of the flight attendant function and expects this to add to the cost
of emotional labour for individuals. And, within this organizational context,
there is a shift towards what Findlay and Newton (1998, p. 225) call the
‘quasi-monarchic’ power that managements and hence airline managements
are increasingly able to deploy in dealing with employees.
At the same time, while the present articles draws on some of the service
work literature with its emphasis on performativity, the latter is deficient
Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

EMOTIONAL LABOUR IN THE AIRLINE INDUSTRY 515
when considering the central elements in flight attending. It is crucial to

understand that flight attendants are on aircraft first and foremost because
they are trained to carry out safety measures and only secondarily as employ-
ees providing a type of service to passengers. While dramaturgical concepts
have helped us to understand customer/service relations, the aircraft cabin
worksite is not a theatre, concert hall or entertainment centre. On major
domestic and international flights in Australia, a certain number of trained
flight attendants must be present in an aircraft to conform to government
regulations on safety. Failure to retain yearly proficiency standards in emer-
gencies, such as the ability to evacuate passengers from planes, is grounds
for dismissal (Williams, 1988, p. 111). In accidents, therefore, passenger
survival depends on crew member survival. Globally, flight attendants must
undertake rigorous emergency and survival training (Boyd and Bain, 1998,
p. 19). A fundamental tension exists between one aspect of production
(namely the generation of repeat customers) and safety, both in terms of the
safety of the aircraft and its ability to reach its destination and the occupa-
tional health and safety of the cabin crew. This is illustrated in the newly
emerging ‘air rage’ literature (Bor et al., 2001) where the cabin crew want to
brief passengers about airline policy on disruptive passengers at the start of
the flight but do not have the support of the marketing managers. Some
airline marketing strategies also encourage excessive alcohol consumption
and sexual fantasies about the availability of women flight attendants. These
promote a sense of entitlement in passengers and lower the standards of pas-
senger behaviour. Thus, as is discussed later in this article, flight attendants
have to negotiate an ambiguous world of work where the most important
part of their job, that is, safety, is subsumed within a less important but more
publicly visible display of service, captured in the concept of emotional
labour.
The research on which this article is based is a 1994 survey of 2912
Australian-based flight attendants investigating emotional labour, com-
mitment to employing organizations, occupational health and safety, the
work/family interface and union militancy. It will report on a segment of this
research, namely the emotional labour dimension, particularly as it relates to
the Wouters/Hochschild controversy. It will make some reference also to a
1988 survey of 1468 domestic flight attendants. The author began her study of
emotional labour amongst these Australian airline employees with the latter
survey and even then began to make links with sexual harassment and abuse
which the new concept, ‘demanding publics’, more fully articulates.
It should be stressed at the outset that these phenomena are culturally and
historically specific: what occurred, and still occurs, in the course of flight
attending work discussed here has an ‘Australian’ dimension on planes
crewed by Australian flight attendants here and overseas, and it may not
apply to the circumstances and experiences of planes crewed by ‘Asian’ or
‘European’ flight attendants1 (Folgero and Fjedlstead, 1995; Linstead, 1995).
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

Some of the unruly behaviour on flights originates with Australian sports

teams who may be more prominent as passengers, given Australia’s strong
sporting cultural identity.
Emotional labour: some considerations

As is well known, Hochschild’s study of United States flight attendants
(which also focused on debt collectors) projected the significance of ‘feeling
work’ in service organizations and occupations. She argued that the flight
attendant job was different, depending on when the incumbent was a man
or a woman. Women, particularly those who are recruited into a job like flight
attending, are oversocialized into a demeanour which produces feminine
skills in delivering deference (Hochschild, 1983, pp. 164–5). Here she was not
making an argument about women per se, so much as the cultural creation
and deployment of ‘patriarchal femininity’ (Pringle, 1988). The femininity
was mobilized as part of providing service on an aircraft, and this was linked
to emotional labour. Hochschild pointed out that women flight attendants
were presented as distillations of subordinate feminine heterosexuality (1983,
p. 175). One result, however, was that they were less protected from pas-
senger misbehaviour because this subordination took away any status shield
against passengers’ frustration and anger. Consequently, their own feelings
received rougher treatment. She found that women flight attendants were
more exposed than male flight attendants to rude, surly speech and tirades
about the service and the airline (1983, pp. 171, 174).
Hochschild (1983, pp. 37–42) makes the point that service work, for
women especially, was an assault on the self and was potentially exploita-
tive. It was a source of strain underneath displays of ‘surface’ and ‘deep’
acting. ‘Surface’ acting refers to managing the expression of behaviour rather
than feelings. In this situation people know they are only acting. There is a
clear division between the ‘face’ they consciously assume and their sense of
their central ‘self’ or ‘me’. By contrast, ‘deep’ acting involves emotion work.
People know they ought to feel something but, at that moment in their
working day, they do not feel it. It is then that they engage in a series of
momentary acts, to which they give little thought, to draw on their emotion
memories so as to induce the required feeling towards a passenger.
Hochschild regarded airline companies as engaging in sophisticated tech-
niques that were located well beyond surface acting in the realm of deep
acting. They suggested how staff could imagine and, thus, feel in specific
encounters with passengers. It was in relation to deep acting that the psy-
chological costs may potentially emerge, when the distinction between the
‘face’ and ‘central self’ can become blurred. Yet, as the present study shows
later, this requirement of the job is insufficiently acknowledged by airline
companies beyond the stage of initial recruitment and training.

The Managed Heart opened up three related ways in which emerging areas
of people work, such as the face-to-face relations central to customer service,
could be theorized and understood. To begin with, Hochschild presented a
gendered concept — emotional labour — which took seriously the qualities
of the largely invisible sociability involved when women interacted with
others in their everyday lives in families and workplaces. Women’s work has
had a long history of being naturalized and being regarded as unskilled
(Wajcman, 1991). Hochschild highlights these qualities, especially when parts
of the self are made available in the job of the service worker to be consumed
by customers or passengers. She suggests that the skills deployed should be
socially and commercially acknowledged, even honoured.
Secondly, Hochschild gives a political reading of emotional labour that
should not be ignored. In choosing the word ‘labour’, she brought into the
concept the relations of domination and subordination implicit in work
(Lee, 1998, pp. 15, 27). Crucially, her analysis focused on the potential for
alienation that arises from the commercialization of feeling involved in
service work such as flight attending (Hochschild, 1983, pp. 17–19). This
concept offers an alternative to the de-politicized and individualized litera-
ture on ‘job stress’. But, as Newton (1995) suggests, this alternative has been
slow to take off academically because stress discourse appeals to the prefer-
ence of managements for a more individualized definition of employee sub-
jectivity and whether employees are ‘stress fit’ or not (1995, p. 49).
Hochshild’s third, and arguably most significant, legacy is that she fore-
shadows the development of newer and more appropriate forms of occupa-
tional health and safety for occupations in which emotions and feelings are
an integral part. Although the situation is changing, with a greater recogni-
tion of issues like bullying, even current occupational health and safety
models and policies are still biased towards sudden traumatic injuries. But
jobs such as flight attending (among a host of others in the service industry)
carry their own dangers which do not readily fit into industrial and often
male-oriented frameworks (Messing, 1998, pp. 120–1). In employment
involving emotional labour, the customer, rather than the machine, in part
sets the pace and nature of the labour process.
Hochschild’s analysis inspired and even provoked a growing literature
which will not be reviewed here. Rather, selected studies and commentaries
(for example, Adelman, 1995; Schaubroeck and Jones, 2000; Wharton, 1993;
Wouters, 1989 and others) that touch on the Wouters’ initiated controversy
will be briefly reviewed and assessed to develop the point that the indi-
vidualistic and depoliticized emphasis in the above literature illegitimately
undermines the legacies from Hochschild’s pioneering contribution.
In his study of five KLM flight attendants, Wouters took strong exception to
Hochschild’s notion of the commercialization of feeling and her implicit
concern with the exploitation inherent in service work. In his view, Hochschild
was insufficiently detached and had, in fact, exaggerated the negative

features. In his critique of Hochschild’s theoretical approach to emotion

management, Wouters claimed that she worked with ‘an image of a free and
independent individual with a natural self-regulation of his or her own, only
helped by some outside guidance’ (1989, p. 103). Here he seems to overlook the
social constructionist features of Hochschild’s own analysis (1983, Appendix
A). Nevertheless, he poses a more complex social constructionist view based
on Elias’s notion of a social habitus, which refers to the dominant pattern and
level of self regulation or emotion management in a society, and to social defi-
nitions of respect. Individuals learn to regulate their emotions according to the
social habitus. The long-term western trend towards democratization and
informalization creates more self-restraints but also allows for greater sensi-
tivity and flexibility and the possibility for enjoyment in the management
of emotions. Elias conceptualized as the ‘We-I-Balance’ the tension between
detachment and involvement, between the way people allow themselves to
give in to their impulses and self-interests while at the same time giving in to
the need and the necessity to take others into account (Wouters, 1989, p. 106).
Furthermore, Hochschild did not situate her work in a broad historical context
and, as Newton observes, ‘in consequence it might benefit from . . . the kind of
perspective provided by Elias’ (1995, p. 140).
Three reservations are, however, in order. Firstly, as Newton (1995)
indicates, it is highly questionable whether the long-term trend to informal-
ization has been extended to the workplace in a thoroughgoing way. The
monarchic power that employers wield is still significant and, after a phase
of democratization in the mid 20th century, is arguably gaining ground with
increasing casualization, the spread of individual work contracts and the
deregulation of occupational health and safety (Quinlan, 1999). Compared
with the 19th and early 20th centuries there is probably greater informality in
workplaces but managerialism frames the display codes which surround
workplace emotions and subjectivities (Newton 1995, pp. 72–7). Employees
are expected to maintain emotional control when operating front stage, that
is, to remain ‘cool’, not to vent aggression and certainly not to ‘crack up’. If
the latter occurs it should take place backstage or, best of all, in the private
sphere off stage.
Secondly, while Wouters dismisses in a footnote Hochschild’s analysis of
the social construction of gender at work (1989, p. 121) his own approach to
gender is superficial. For example, as Newton (1995) points out, Wouters fails
to examine the relationship of emotional control in the 20th century to the
types of permissible masculinities in the front stage of the workplace where
men are the main managers dictating display codes.
Thirdly, Wouters writes about the succeeding waves of democratization
and informalization as if they were the result of ‘natural evolution’ and not
the result of social struggles, conflicts and attempts to diminish exploitation.
Trade unions have been, and continue to be, part of the struggle to democ-
ratize workplace relations. Occupational health and safety represents one of

the most significant democratic rights won by workers in the west in the 20th
century. More pertinently, flight attendants have a long history of unioniza-
tion (Nielsen, 1984; Williams, 1988, p. 113) and, in the Australian case, within
a context of state-enforced conciliation and arbitration procedures which had
the effect of underpinning employee bargaining strength in disputes and
negotiations with employers. Many of the changes Wouters assumes in rela-
tion to flight attendants’ working conditions, such as part-time hours, child
care and gay employment rights, are the result of such political action, espe-
cially in this occupation, which has provided a model for good conditions
for service employees.
It is Wharton’s (1993) empirically sound research which supports Wouters
strongly in emphasizing the positive aspects of emotional labour. Women
workers who performed emotional labour in higher status professional jobs
were no more likely than men to suffer adverse consequences from the
performance of emotional labour and even reported higher levels of job sat-
isfaction than the men. On the other hand, in this comparative study of hos-
pital and bank workers, emotional labour did lead to increased emotional
exhaustion among workers with low job autonomy, longer job tenure and
longer hours. However, just because emotional labour is sometimes enjoy-
able and satisfying does not diminish the claim that it should be recognized,
socially honoured and performed in a context where workers’ health is
optimized. After all, it has never been suggested that, because skilled
manual workers enjoyed the use of their skills, they should not be paid for
them or socially recognized for them and that potential hazards should be
overlooked.
Wharton moreover situates her conception of emotional labour in the
innate qualities that individuals bring from their biographies to the work-
place such as the ability to monitor themselves. Her assumption is that such
qualities are ‘natural’ — requiring neither learning nor training. Conse-
quently she fails to examine the institutional and organizational characteris-
tics and management policies that are likely to mediate the costs of emotional
labour. Such oversights ignore the crucial point that regulation and moni-
toring by the self are socially organized and that individual performativity
is the outcome of specific social relations (Adkins and Lury, 1999, p. 602). We
have even reached the point where Morris and Feldman (1996), for example,
seriously advocate the screening out of potential employees for whom emo-
tional labour might be a problem. Adelman (1995) similarly calls for the
elimination of the two-fifths of workers in her study who chronically suf-
fered from a lack of fit between feelings and their expression. This sugges-
tion reproduces an erroneous association of emotions with individual
diseases of the mind that the Romans introduced into western culture
(Averill, 1996). By contrast, the sociology and anthropology of emotions take
the view that emotions are corporeal thoughts; they are complex, embodied
cognitive processes, imbricated with social values and frequently involved

in preserving social bonds (Rosaldo, 1984; Scheff, 1990). Social rules and
social interactions are not only core features of the employment relation
between management, employees and customers. They also help constitute
the emotions which employees manage and display. According to this
perspective, emotions are not correctly or incorrectly fabricated in ‘dysfunc-
tional’ or ‘functional’ external contexts — like the family — before the
employees arrive at work. Through their emotions, service workers can be
empathetic to customers but at the same time be attuned to the violation of
socially acceptable standards of conduct, including sexual harassment.
Thus, the screening out process takes the social engineering of service
employees to an extreme and reductionist point. Not only is it discrimina-
tory, it is managerialist, and it is one of the least satisfactory strategies in the
history of occupational health and safety. For example, formaldehyde is a
common contaminant in the plastics industry. It can trigger acute allergic
reactions such as asthma or skin rashes in some people and is also known to
be a human carcinogen (Hubbard and Wald, 1993, p. 133). Removing workers
who develop short term or temporary illnesses such as asthma leaves unpro-
tected the remaining employees who may experience long-term effects like
cancer. It can lead to the exposure of those remaining in the workplaces to
even higher levels of the hazard. Excluding the ‘vulnerable’ category actu-
ally worsens occupational health and safety practice. It would be far better
to mitigate the hazard (for example, by substituting the chemical) or change
the process in order to reduce risks for all of the employees.
Psychologists like Adelman (1995) place the focus on so-called susceptible
individuals who use the discourse of emotional labour (in their replies to her
questionnaire) to talk about problems in their jobs. Adelman fails to examine
the hazards themselves, their mitigation, or their removal. This strategy
leaves unsafe the organizational context in which emotional labour is carried
out and sends a message that the organizational environment will not affect
negatively those who remain.
Further to the above discussion, with the economic impact of globaliza-
tion, the rise of Human Resource Management as an organizational philoso-
phy and the spread of the ethos of ‘quality management’, power has passed
increasingly from organized and unorganized workers to employers (Legge,
1995; McKinley and Starkey, 1998). Airline managements everywhere are
under increasing pressure to be more viable and competitive than ever. In
Europe cabin crews have already been replaced by ‘flag of convenience’ staff
with lower training standards and more ‘flexible’ working arrangements
(Boyd and Bain, 1998, pp. 18, 26). At the time of writing, the domestic and
international airline, Ansett Australia, employing labour with regulated
working conditions, has gone bankrupt. This occurred partly because of the
entry into the market of Virgin Blue, with its deregulated labour practices.
This airline pays its domestic flight attendants wages 34 per cent lower than
Qantas and the former Ansett. Virgin Blue’s cabin crew clean aircraft cabins

and help out with ‘ground tasks like administration and marshalling check-
in queues when they are not rostered to fly’ (Long, 2002, p. 6).
At this point, the article will present the concepts of demanding publics
and cultural and gendered performances to develop the point further that
emotional labour in the context of weakening employee power in the era of
customer service widens the space for customer abuse to occur. Here too,
management can be complicit in this process.
Demanding publics and cultural and

gendered performances
The service encounter has been described as an old but also a new kind of
social relationship, a special kind of ‘stranger’ relationship, informal and
quasi-intimate (Czepiel et al., 1985, pp. 4–6). It allows strangers to interact in
a way that transcends the barriers of social status. It is supposed to be limited
in scope and to have well-defined roles. But this article questions whether
this is the case and whether legitimate boundaries and limitations are
enforced for non-professional service workers like flight attendants.
The organizational or management perspective aims to have passengers
return to the airline as future customers and to give the business a competi-
tive edge. To a lesser extent, this business orientation entails some concern
for the motivation and retention of flight attendants as employees in order
to achieve its primary aims. The customer service and marketing literature
is quite clear about what kinds of customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction fit
with the primary production and competitive goals. Bitner et al. (1990) use-
fully summarize three kinds of passenger dissatisfaction with flight
attendants which airline companies legitimately seek to redress. Airline pas-
sengers are most satisfied or dissatisfied with the quality of the core service
and with the handling of requests for customized service. Next in importance
is when a flight attendant is unable or unwilling to respond when the system
fails, as it inevitably does at times; for example, if the plane is delayed or
overbooked and the flight attendant does little to help and seems uncon-
cerned. Of still lesser importance is the verbal and non-verbal behaviour of
flight attendants. However, even in this proto-management article, Bitner et
al. (1990, p. 82) discuss the boundaries of the service relationship:
Broad endorsements, encouragements, and guidelines such as ‘the
customer is always right’ or ‘we put service first’ are not enough. As all
customer contact employees soon find out, not all customers are right,
and some are even abusive and out of control.
The concept of ‘demanding publics’ refers to those situations where the inter-
ests of customers and service workers are in conflict and where management
has sided with customers or when its support for its service workers is, at

best, ambivalent. It includes situations where elements of customer abuse are

present in the encounter. Also included are situations where there is no doubt
that the rules of conviviality and respectful behaviour have been broken and,
if service workers were not entrapped by the inadequate boundaries pro-
vided by their employer, they would decisively exit the situation without
fear of reprisal. Instead they are often forced to be loyal to both the abusive
customer and their employer at the expense of their own health, well-being
and safety. Therefore a question could be posed such as: what happens in
the service encounter when customers engage in offensive behaviour? One
way to explore this question is to regard emotional labour as a cultural
performance.
This article will use three different but inter-related readings of ‘perfor-
mance’ to establish that emotional labour for flight attendants is a cultural
performance. Embedded within the latter is a gender performance but, like
all performances, it may go ‘wrong’ and not be carried off. ‘Performance’
(following Goffman, 1959) immediately suggests the presence of an ‘audi-
ence’ (in this case, the passengers) who are also expected to play a part. Suc-
cessful and recurring public performances such as those by jazz musicians
have assumed expectations about audiences and the same is arguably true
of organizational performances (Barrett, 2000). For example McDonalds’ cus-
tomers are already ‘trained’ to be ready with orders, to move speedily and
not to expect customized service (Leidner, 1996). In this context of perfor-
mativity, the concept of demanding publics is about passengers as members
of audiences who seriously unsettle the shared expectation that the perfor-
mance will be carried off with mutual benefit to all, including a healthy and
safe flight.
One relevant definition of performance comes from Sass’s (2000) study of
emotional labour as cultural performance in human service work. In this he
seeks to extend emotional labour beyond a simple set of display behaviours,
such as smiling, to include the interactive nature of emotional expression. He
defines cultural performance as episodes through which members construct
organizational reality. Pertinent to the workplace of the flight attendant are
two of the types of rituals he defines (task and personal) and one type of
sociality. Task rituals refer to recurring procedures to accomplish the job,
including greeting, smiling, eye contact and thanking. Personal rituals are
the particular styles flight attendants develop to negotiate their identity
within the organization and their individual way of relating to passengers.
In addition are sociality performances that encourage co-operation and
promote smooth organizational operation. Sass (2000) calls these acts
‘courtesies’. Bitner et al. (1990) note their importance to passengers satisfac-
tion when systems break down.
These cultural performances of sociality and, to a lesser extent, the rituals,
are either misunderstood or deliberately misused as an opportunity to take
advantage by abusive customers, as the later data analysis will illustrate.

To begin with, gender provides much of the cultural meaning for the
performance of sociality. Here, Butler’s (1994; 1997) conceptualization of
gender performance is crucial. In her conceptual schema, normative gender
identities are achieved by a set of repeated acts and repeated stylizations of
the body. The workplace is an obvious site where these gendered acts are
repeated. As each individual repeats the performances, they are constituted
by them as men/women and heterosexual/homosexual. This is not a vol-
untary performance where individual men and women deliberately and
playfully assumes their gender/sexual identity. Rather, people induce their
bodies to obey the accepted form of ‘men’ and ‘women’ for that point in
culture and history. It is a deadly serious process that serves to maintain
gender within its binary frame. It happens under constraints, through pro-
hibition and taboo. Compulsory heterosexuality is a fundamental part
of this. A heterosexual hegemony is therefore achieved by this gender
performativity.
But in the airline cabin workplace gender performativity bears an addi-
tional dimension. Hochschild’s analysis shows that women flight attendants
symbolize the heterosexual construction of woman; they are creations of
feminine heterosexuality, ‘highly visible distillations of middle-class notions
of femininity’ (1983, p. 175). Airline managements strongly socialize their
employees in recruitment and training and through grooming rules and
supervision, creating a rigid ‘natural’ appearance of the two genders and
‘natural’ heterosexual dispositions (Butler, 1997, p. 408). This is enforced
during the performances in front of the passenger audience. In Butler’s
terms, these performances are compelling social fictions. However, in the
example under review, the two halves of the binary of the social fiction
maintained by airline marketing are definitely not male and female flight
attendants: the gender icons are eroticized women flight attendants and
male pilots. Here the eroticized female flight attendant is conjoined with
an image of male pilots as bearers of eroticized heterosexuality. (Mills, 1995,
p. 180)
Male flight attendants, both straight and gay, and lesbians are a threat to
these social fictions. Williams’ (1989, p. 135) study of men and women in non-
traditional occupations suggests that women are less threatened psychologi-
cally than men by the presence of men in occupations regarded as ‘women’s
work’. Masculine gender is defined by that which is not feminine and it is
men, not women, who are instrumental in establishing this difference. Male
pilots (the technical crew), as will be discussed later in the data analysis,
engage in virulent forms of gender and a homophobic harassment of male
flight attendants that de-legitimate men in this occupation. Part of this
includes giving voice, but with derogatory intent, to the widely held stereo-
type — at least in the Australian context — that male flight attendants are
‘poofters’. This in turn makes straight male flight attendants defensive about
their sexuality.

Sufficient progress has been made in gay employment rights in Australia

in flight attending for gay identity to sometimes be safely expressed back-
stage (for example, in the galley) but not in the cabin where a homophobic
gaze prevails.
Nevertheless, while the presence of gay men is at least acknowledged pub-
licly (if ironically) by the presence of the stigmatizing stereotype, lesbian
identity in comparison is almost invisible. Whereas gay male flight attend-
ants do occasionally act gay publicly, some research suggests that lesbians
must present a convincing display of patriarchal femininity at work, in this
case in the airline cabin and in the airline workplace generally. Putting on
‘glamour drag’, (make-up, dresses, provocative poses) is a way for lesbians
to protect their secrets in an intensely homophobic workplace (Higgs and
Schell, 1998, p. 65). All of this makes both women and men flight attendants
more reflexively discursive about sex and gender and leads to a higher level
of conscious gender performance and parody than with other workers.
The section so far has established a conception of cultural performance
that is gendered and occurring in the aircraft workplace. This will be used
in the data analysis to follow. The idea has been introduced that the gender
component of emotional labour performances is highly stylized and may
invite sexual harassment but is also sometimes parodied. A third notion of
performance is also necessary to cover the contingency of ambiguous per-
formances of emotional labour but, more importantly, those that cannot
be sustained because of demanding publics. For this purpose, Hopfl and
Linstead’s (1993) concept of ‘corpsing’ can be used. This refers to the situa-
tion in the theatre when the audience is watching and waiting, but the actor
freezes to the spot and cannot sustain the illusion. In this case, the mask slips
and the audience is in doubt. Hopfl and Linstead (1993, p. 92) pose the impor-
tant question: What are the costs to corporate actors when they find their role
unbearable, and are ‘unable to carry on’? Passenger sexual harassment
promotes the possibility of occasional corpsing by flight attendants. In the
best case scenario, individuals feel sufficiently confident that organizational
reprisals will not occur to be able forcefully to reject the sexual harassment
occurring and call the police to meet the plane. In the worst case scenario,
individuals go to the union for assistance but are so demoralized that they
go on extended sick leave and eventually quit the occupation.
Before we discuss sexual harassment further, another point needs to be
made in delineating demanding publics. From Hochschild’s innovative con-
ception, the proposition can be established that service workers should not
be placed in the position where they have to present themselves for employ-
ment without well-established boundaries marking off the potentially dis-
tressing spaces of people work. Similarly, Paules’s (1991) work is suggestive
that a genuine space of safety and social honour around service work is pos-
sible, but first it is necessary to break the nexus with the notion of the 19th
century ‘silent servant’. In her view, because this notion has not been broken,

some customers assume the posture of ‘master’ to ‘servant’ with all the
accompanying rights of irrationality, condescension and unrestrained anger
(Paules, 1991, p. 163). This appears to be a vestige of the Masters and
Servants Acts where workers could be brought before a magistrate for inso-
lence, disobedience and absconding (Walker, 1988, p. 45). In the Australian
case, workers in the pastoral industry (sheep and cattle) were central in the
struggle to establish employment rights. They were deemed ‘servants’ under
the Masters and Servants Acts and could be imprisoned for three months if
they broke their labour contract (Fitzpatrick, 1969, pp. 366–7). This situation
was not overturned until the shearers’ strike in the early 1890s which was
pivotal in the development of tribunal employment law. However, service
workers have never been incorporated into the full spectrum of employment
citizenship because their occupations developed from pre-industrial social
relations embedded in forms of employment such as domestic service
(Kingston, 1975). According to Paules (1991) the paternalism of the
‘master–servant’ relationship is therefore the source of the widespread belief
among customers that service workers who showed anger could be censured
and could lose their jobs. The concept of demanding publics is an attempt to
problematize these paternalistic relationships embedded in widely used dis-
courses of quality service and the ‘customer is always right’. There needs to
be a third party employment law (Hughes and Tadic 1998) to provide a shield
between workers and customers and the employers who are on the same side
on this issue.
Sexual harassment is a special case of predatory paternalism. Hall (1993)
has usefully researched what she calls ‘the job flirt’, which she defines as a
job-prescribed form of sexual harassment. Her study of American waiters
and waitresses takes a gendered organizations approach, regarding job tasks
as loaded with gendered meanings. Hall found that waitresses were more
likely than waiters to be sexually approached and harassed by customers.
Servers themselves tended to differentiate between harassment and flirting
and to associate harassment with female servers. While both men and
women servers might flirt, both saw harassment as something done to wait-
resses. Servers who provided good service were expected to enact three
scripts: friendliness, subservience and flirting. But a kind of job flirt which
was part of the service style applied more to waitresses than to waiters —
that is, women were required to exhibit their sexual availability as part of
the job — and so the job flirt encouraged customers to harass women staff
sexually.
In Adkins’ study of British service workers in tourism, women workers
who tried to resist this sexual commodification risked dismissal or the
aggression and abuse of men (1995, p. 154). One of the rare articles in the
academic literature on customer sexual harassment (Hughes and Tadic, 1998)
makes a similar point. There, women in retail were left with little choice but
to normalize sexual exchanges as a routine part of the job. Hughes and Tadic

directly tackle the issue of management power. They argue that tension exists
between policies which protect worker well-being and those promoting cus-
tomer service. Management requires service workers to approach customers
in a friendly and engaging manner. This creates an added layer of ambigu-
ity. The norms surrounding customer service in work that is explicitly sexu-
alized leads to intense constraints on workers and indirectly encourages
sexual harassment. The ubiquitous harassment Hughes and Tadic encoun-
tered in retail work was dealt with in individual and indirect ways. As a
result employees felt they could never use direct confrontation which might
lead to a complaint and would receive automatic negative job performance
evaluations by management. Sexual harassment at work is therefore not
a non-economic relation imposed on an economically-structured labour
market. Indeed it constitutes part of the (gendered) ‘economic’ itself (Adkins
1995, p. 155).
Having established the theoretical context of the article, the next section
will deal with methodology and findings of the empirical material.
Methodology and findings
In 1994 the author administered a survey of the membership of the Flight

Attendant Association of Australia.2 This union has comprehensive union
coverage of flight attendants (2912 answered — a 60 per cent response rate
for the whole population, not merely for a sample of a population). The
survey was carried out at a time of almost complete union membership and
so a very considerable number of flight attendants were reached. There are
also buoyant numbers for each of the main airline groups, ages and length
of service.
The survey especially encouraged flight attendants to describe their feel-
ings about the survey itself. This is important for two reasons. Morris and
Feldman (1996) suggest that this format, rather than face-to-face interviews,
may be more likely to produce the revelation of sensitive information. People
may be more honest about their feelings via anonymity. This is a way of
making this representation of the different flight attendants’ voices as promi-
nent as the researcher’s analysis.
The process of measuring the costs of ‘emotional labour’ has also
improved since my original research. The 1988 survey asked a question
which resonated with the respondents: ‘To what extent is it an accepted
feature of the Flight Attendant occupation that individuals are required to
control their feelings and smile (no matter how they feel at a particular time)
to create a good feeling in passengers?’ This was followed with a question
which just emphasized the costs of such behaviours/performances. In
response to Wouters’ (1989) critique of Hochschild, the next survey in 1994

reflected the possibility of satisfaction as well as costs. In addition, the words,

‘emotional labour’ were placed in the question itself: ‘To what extent is it an
accepted feature of the Flight Attendant occupation that you do “emotional
labour”? This means that individuals are required to control their feelings
and smile (no matter how they feel at a particular time) to create a good
feeling in passengers’. This was followed with a question which tried to
assess the costs or satisfaction to the individual. The question is long but such
questions are justified in methods texts (Cannell et al., 1981). Moreover,
Australian flight attendants are generally well-educated and my respondents
were no exception (67% had completed high school, 58% had post-secondary
qualifications including a degree; 18% were currently studying and 66% of
these were working towards a tertiary qualification.) So a question like this
was appropriate for them. The question itself reads:
There is disagreement about whether the daily management of your feel-
ings is a positive or negative job experience. This question is aimed to find
out if it is a job stressor or a source of satisfaction for you. One flight attend-
ant said ‘Making someone feel good is part of your daily job’. Another said
‘If you are not the best on a particular day and a passenger is upset and
takes it out on you, it can be very upsetting when you’re trying not to show
your feelings.’ Do you experience the management of your feelings on the
job as a source of satisfaction, or as a cost or source of stress to you?’
A source of great satisfaction
Slight source of satisfaction
Neither a satisfaction nor a cost
A slight source of stress
Creates a great deal of stress
The quotations used in the question were taken from comments written by
domestic flight attendants on the 1988 survey. Moreover, those who found
‘emotional labour’ satisfying in the 1988 survey did not elaborate on the rich-
ness of that satisfaction to any extent. It was as if it were a ‘non-cost’ rather
than a positive satisfaction — hence the addition of a scale in 1994.
In the 1994 survey respondents were also asked about the incidence and
handling of passenger anger and sexual harassment. A direct question on sex
was asked as well: ‘Do you ever feel there is a sexual component to the job
so that you are required to pay passengers sexual attention in addition to
the customer service relationship?’ Before the survey, these questions were
piloted on 20 flight attendants, who had no hesitation in making it clear
whether they thought a question was inappropriate or unrelated to their job
experiences. There was a positive reaction to the ‘emotional labour’ ques-
tions but a negative reaction to the direct sex question, which eventually
brought out a resounding answer in the negative from 77% in the final
survey. However this negativity did not extend to the questions on sexual

harassment. ‘Emotional labour’ as conceived by Hochschild was recognized

instantly.
The quantitative part of the study revolves around a log linear regression
analysis. The latter allows us to discern if there is a relationship among vari-
ables. It also enables us to gauge the strength of that relationship. In these
data the dependent variable is cost/satisfaction with emotional labour. Here
we are interested in finding out the relationship of each of the independent
variables on the dependent variable, cost/satisfaction with emotional labour.
Log linear regression allows a systematic evaluation of the relationship
among independent variables, for example, gender and sexual harassment,
including their effects on each other. There are two levels to the analysis. The
first is called the univariate level, where we are assessing whether a variable
is a significant predictor variable, (with a P-value <0.1), to retain it in the
equation for the multiple, or second level of analysis. These significant vari-
ables are the only ones to be carried forward to the more powerful multiple
logistic regression equation. This will be called the multiple level of analysis
where the impact of each variable on the cost/satisfaction of emotional
labour is examined each in turn.
The independent variables are grouped into three categories: firstly
gender, including sexual harassment; secondly organizational and occupa-
tional health and safety variables like one’s position in the company, one’s
perceptions of one’s value to the company, whether management attitude
causes dissatisfaction, one’s morale, whether one is treated as individual or
category, one’s loyalty to the airline company, fatigue and, finally, individ-
ual variables. The variables which were significant can be seen in Table 1.
Findings
(1) Emotional labour

Overall, in the 1994 survey, there were more flight attendants who found
emotional labour costly or stressful (44%) than those who found it a source
of satisfaction (34%) with 22 per cent who found it neither a source of satis-
faction nor a stressor. As a crucial step, in the log linear regression analysis,
and as part of the first level of analysis, univariate logistic regressions were
calculated, taking as the response variable whether emotional labour was a
source of stress or not — that is, its emotional cost (no, yes). The odds of the
job being a cost were also calculated for gender. The results showed that
women were 32% more likely to feel the job had an emotional cost than men
(see Table 1).
A common theme amongst those who found emotional labour ‘a great
source of satisfaction’ was the way that encouraging and forcing themselves
to look more cheerful than they actually felt made them feel better. Or, as one

Table 1: Results of simple logistic regression = cost
Description OR (odds ratio) 95% CI overall P-value
Gender
Male n = 1027 1.00 0.001
Female n = 1837 1.32 1.12–1.56
Highest education level 0.060
Yr 10 1.00
Yr 11 1.31 0.99–1.74
Yr 12 1.31 1.04–1.64
Extent of value to company
Not much 1.00 0.000
Very little 0.68 0.54–0.85
Fair amount 0.45 0.35–0.57
A lot 0.17 0.12–0.26
A great deal 0.23 0.11–0.49
Management attitude causes 0.000
dissatisfaction
No 1.00
Some 2.09 1.62–2.72
A great deal 3.29 2.53–4.29
Staff morale
Low 1.00 0.000
Medium 0.52 0.45–0.63
High 0.23 0.15–0.36
Management treats as
individual
Very much as individual 1.00 0.000
Usually as individual 1.81 0.89–3.67
Varies 2.42 1.24–4.70
Number/part of category 3.86 2.01–7.41
Very much as category 4.02 2.08–7.77
Loyalty
No loyalty at all 1.00 0.000
Very little loyalty 0.47 0.28–0.79
Fair amount of loyalty 0.33 0.20–0.55
Lot of loyalty 0.22 0.13–0.38
Great amount of loyalty 0.19 0.11–0.34
Experience unwelcome
language
No 1.00 0.000
Yes 1.51 1.28–1.79
Unwelcome sexual
propositions
No 1.00 0.000
Yes 1.81 1.47–2.39

Table 1: Continued
Description OR (odds ratio) 95% CI overall P-value
FA job caused fatigue

Not at all 1.00 0.000
Very little 1.35 0.69–2.65
A fair amount 1.82 0.98–3.39
A lot 2.74 1.48–5.07
A great deal 3.55 1.94–6.49
27 year-old married woman flight attendant flying overseas for Qantas for
two years put it, ‘Often if I am feeling depressed, having to smile for PAX’s
[passengers] benefit lifts my emotional level’. This response suggests surface
acting rather than deep acting because there is a conscious performance of
positive sociality. Another theme amongst those who by and large found
emotional labour rewarding was the sense of achievement they derived from
overcoming difficulties at work. But, even when they did find it satisfying,
they also point to these difficulties. For example a 25 year-old single woman
flying for two years with a regional airline derived slight satisfaction from
emotional labour and stated, ‘It can be satisfying to do your job well under
duress but also very draining.’
Interestingly, a 22 year-old single woman, who had been flying 12 months
for a regional domestic airline where she is the only flight attendant on each
flight, answered that, for her, emotional labour was neither a source of
satisfaction nor a cost.
Single F/As must always be happy — no one else there!
Controlling my feelings is part of the ‘job’. It doesn’t make me feel better
or worse. It has to be done.
Her comment demonstrates how emotions are fundamental to the job and
that they have to be performed all the time to be effective. Furthermore, while
men derived the most satisfaction from emotional labour, they were reticent
about it. Those who did speak provide a few clues. One 28 year-old single
flight attendant flying for a large domestic airline for over two years said:
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a good day or a bad day. It’s important to
segregate one’s feelings in the workplace. If this is achieved it’s a great
feeling of achievement.
But other men, like the women, could find it stressful. A 32 year-old man,
flying overseas for Qantas for six years drew attention to the emotionally
abusive ‘demanding public’ in the context of having to smile after being
awake for 24 hours. He said:

Besides the physical stress of time change, long duties and the odd emer-
gency, the management of my feelings is the main source of stress. When
you are doing your best (and often covering the company’s mistakes) pas-
sengers who ridicule, really take it out of you emotionally.
Similarly a 33 year-old married male flight attendant, with ten years of flying
experience with a large domestic airline, answered that emotional labour
‘creates a great deal of stress’. He was also experiencing the highest level of
fatigue (‘a great deal’) from his job. He went on to make the connection
between the stress of his performance of emotional labour, the prevalence of
customer abuse and the conflict with his flight attendant identity as a safety
professional in the confined space of the cabin workplace:
For the goodwill of the PAX [passenger] to the company, the FA must
refrain from expressing contrary opinions to PAX and if a FA is maintain-
ing an important stance (e.g. cabin baggage) the company often will not
back up the FA. The FA’s are expected to take everything from a customer;
to blindly follow the adage: ‘The customer is always right’, no matter how
wrong the PAX is; or how dangerous their view, stance is (fighting to
smoke, insisting on cabin bags etc.) No matter how hard you try, some PAX
will love your assistance/service; whereas others will hate it. Often, those
who hate it will complain, forcing the FA to be questioned by management
who will not acknowledge the good comments in an equivalent manner.
In relation to angry passengers he went on to say:
As customers have more ‘consumer rights’ in deregulation, [the climate
created by the deregulation of government airlines] they feel they have
a right to take it out on us and again, we don’t often get backed up by
management.
As a result he worked out in the gym; used punching bags and cried as his
ways of handling his feelings relating to incidents with angry passengers.
This man’s detailed account suggests the difficulties with creating a cultural
performance when a core organizational task (to observe safety regulations)
is ambivalently represented to passengers by airlines. He enforces cabin
baggage policies because bags not firmly secured become dangerous missiles
in an airline incident or crash. Women also made the point that passengers
can be abusive when they enforced cabin baggage regulations.
Moreover, if we return to the first stage of the quantitative analysis (the
univariate level in Table 1), other information emerges on how the facets of
gendered and cultural performances are linked to the experience of emo-
tional labour. As noted earlier, emotional labour as a stressor was constructed
as the response variable. The independent variables related to gender, orga-
nizational, occupational health and safety and individual characteristics (see
Table 1). In terms of the first, or univariate logistic regression, the individual

variables were not found to be statistically significant in relation to the ex-

perience of emotional labour, except for education and then only marginally
so. But the gender variables were significant, especially sexual harassment,
which is related directly to femininity, masculinity and sexual preference.
That is to say, those who had been sexually harassed by unwelcome and
vulgar language, off-colour jokes, embarrassing remarks or stories about
women’s bodies, sexual intercourse or their sexual preference were 51 per
cent more likely to experience emotional labour as a cost than those who
had not been sexually harassed. Similarly, those who had experienced
unwelcome sexual propositions in their present job were 81 per cent more
likely to experience emotional labour detrimentally.
In the qualitative data many flight attendants also wrote that emotional
labour was not so straightforward as defined in the survey. In fact, it was
satisfying at times and at other times costly. As one of them stated:
It’s great to come off a flight on a high, you’ve made the passengers happy
and receptive to you. As you’re saying Goodbye, you’re getting a response,
eye contact, thank you’s, hope to see you next flight! Then there are days
when you’re happy and friendly and they just don’t want to acknowledge
your presence or nothing you can do will help solve their problem. You
are verbally abused and left standing red faced with a plastic smile
crumbling on your face. (30 year-old single woman flying for a domestic
airline for ten years)
Another woman made a direct connection with fatigue:
It is satisfying to know you can do it (manage your feelings) but it does
take its toll and results in fatigue. (35 year-old divorced woman flying for
13 years for a large domestic airline)
My data suggest that Wouters and others are right to emphasize emotional
labour as potentially positive, but that this is not straightforward. Other find-
ings conform only marginally to Wouters’ idea of intrinsic satisfaction and
the skill of playful flexibility exemplified in one of the KLM flight attendants
he spoke to who said she liked to build up light-hearted exchanges with pas-
sengers after she put them at their ease. These Australian flight attendants
are closer to Paules’s interpretation of waitresses who actively reformulate
and reject the coercive forces they encounter. They also describe working at
the development of skills to maintain a sense of well-being. They frequently
observe the emotional reactions of other flight attendants and suggest ways
the latter could redefine negative encounters with passengers:
How you feel is a personal choice except under circumstances of extreme

stress. I refuse to take things too personally. I decide how I will feel for the
day. I have read many books on not letting others pull my strings. I often
think such books or training would be helpful to flight attendants as it con-

cerns me that some seem so distressed at times, especially junior flight

attendants. (Woman engaged to be married, 41 year-old, flying for domes-
tic airline for 14 years — emphasis in original)
Another woman spoke of the necessity for service workers to manage emo-
tionally the flying public who respond with aggression or anger:
The problem comes when one relies on ‘smart’ retorts to hide their feel-
ings: not everyone (crew and PAX) can accept these comments (usually
sarcastic or patronizing). Perhaps if the ‘customer is always right’ attitude
was not encouraged as much generally — people would think first before
they act or speak. (31 year-old married woman flying for a domestic airline
for ten years)
Moreover, the skills which flight attendants had developed over time to
handle the emotional labour aspect of their job had not been learned in train-
ing school. Rather they were the result of a long and successful project, even
involving accessing individualized ‘self help’ books. Private attention to the
self had led finally to enhanced job control.
(2) Demanding publics: the customer is always right

The organizational reality for airlines is that safety and service are both
important because the plane has to complete its journey safely for the service
to be accomplished. However, as we have seen, the silent servant assump-
tion, ‘the customer is always right’ ethos, represents a major obstacle around
which flight attendants must construct their gendered cultural performance
of emotional labour. One in-flight 35 year-old single woman customer service
director (formerly purser) flying for 14 years for a large domestic airline
stated that this ethos had created ‘monsters’ who ‘cannot be appeased no
matter what [flight attendants] say’. Passengers, especially in business class,
expected to be served immediately as ‘they marched in the forward door’ of
the aircraft — ‘Hang my jacket will you?’ — rather than wait for the flight
attendants to carry out their necessary duties in a ‘pleasant friendly manner’.
She also noted an increasing lack of eye contact and ‘please’ and ‘thank you’
from passengers. Another example demonstrates how, in a conflict between
the cabin crew and customers, airline management may embrace the
assumption that ‘the customer is always right’ and denigrate the cabin crew
member in favour of the fare-paying, potential return customer:
Once I refused a group of 20 PAX pre-dinner drinks on a Melbourne to
Brisbane flight. I explained very nicely it wasn’t our service policy and
drinks were on the trolley. Well, I was reported — the supervisor told me
the complaint was very serious. I am to remember that ‘the customer is
always right’ even though the service has the drinks on the trolley, I was
told I should have given the group of 20 pre-dinner drinks!!! I felt very

angry about this. (35 year-old married woman flying for a domestic airline
for 12 years — emphasis in original)
So far findings have been presented on the cultural performance of emo-
tional labour and the difficulties of constructing an organizational reality
within the context of superficial managerial policies based on scant under-
standing of the problems of the work in the air and the relationship of cus-
tomer service to safety. The next section will present findings about gender
performance embedded within the cultural performance of emotional labour.
The mandatory gender performances leave flight attendants exposed to
sexual harassment from a different sort of ‘demanding public’ which they
must manage in order to carry out emotional labour successfully.
(3) Demanding publics: sexual harassment

Following the 1988 survey, the author interviewed in depth four women and
one man who had complained to the union about sexual harassment. The
points raised by one of these women exemplify the problems with this issue,
which were also noted extensively in the 1988 survey data, problems that
still have not been resolved and that therefore reappear in the 1994 data. As
we shall see, with the domestic airlines (1988 data) the most common and
irksome form of sexual harassment is heterosexual and comes from sports
teams — especially football and cricket — and from men in business class.
The long internal flights, over four hours in some cases between widely dis-
persed capital cities — roughly equivalent to flying from London to Rome
non-stop — are a feature of Australian flying that may not be duplicated as
much in other countries.
The flight attendant mentioned above was 31, single and had been flying
for nine years. She describes two incidents of serious harassment involv-
ing both sports teams and business passengers. The first concerned the
Australian men’s test cricket team. The team had been on her flight and were
staying at the same hotel, on the same floor, where she was over-nighting
with other cabin crew. The team asked four of the flight attendants to have
a drink with them. Two of the men then ‘put the hard word’ on her while
they were drinking together. Eventually the four women left the room at the
same time:
I went to my room and locked the door. The phone started ringing. Both
of them started to give me a really hard time and I just said ‘you are not
funny, guys, not interested, see you later’. They kept ringing up until I had
to unplug the phone which was a hassle for me because I have to have a
wake up call but luckily I had my own alarm clock. The next day they also
played this stupid joke on me because obviously I was not interested in
them. One of the girls rang me next morning and said to be careful when
you walk outside your door. I asked why? As a joke, they had set up a

bucket outside my door leaning on my door inwards so that when I

opened the door inwards a bucket of water would fall on my feet. So my
feet would be saturated by the water when I opened the door. I stood side-
ways when I opened the door so it poured in all over the floor.
We discussed how childish we thought that was. I thought I had pro-
voked at least some of it because I went in for a drink, which was when I
think about it was not really my choice because they saw our room
numbers — so if we did not go in for a drink we were going to get knocked
on the door anyway regardless. I felt obligated to go in for a drink. I felt
that would placate them if we just went in for a couple of drinks that they
would be happy with that and then we could go to bed and get some sleep.
The second incident concerned a business passenger in first class whom this
flight attendant had called by his first name. While she was waiting in the
airport for a ‘turnaround’ (her return flight), her name was read over the
public address system and she was told there was a phone call from ‘Steve’.
She asked the passenger if there was something wrong and if he had left
something on the flight. He replied that he was ringing to find out when he
could see her again. She described him as in his 50s, an overweight merchant
banker who was ‘revolting and totally unattractive to me’. She was also in
front of the crewing staff who were watching her while she took the call:
If something happens in front of them it is not a secret — the whole world

knows, including the supervisors. So I said, ‘Well when are you going to
be flying with us again. I might be on your flight.’ He said that he could
tell they had something between us. He inferred that there are signs that
people are attracted to you. I said ‘but aren’t you married?’ and he replied
‘Yes but my wife and I have got an understanding.’ I said ‘I am not inter-
ested’ and he said, ‘I’m sure you will change your mind.’ I said, ‘No’ and
I was a bit worried because he must have only been about downstairs in
our baggage collection area and I thought I did not want to risk him
coming up and being rude here and so I said ‘I am sorry I have got a
boyfriend’ which I didn’t have at the time.
This woman used an individual strategy. She was not able to corpse or neu-
tralize the gender performance of emotional labour by going out of role, even
though the pressure put on her was unbearable. This was because of the
scrutiny, rather than support, from supervisors, and the lack of any shield
between her and one member of the airline’s demanding public. She was
forced to use her body to continue to provide emotional labour in a dubious
marketing customer service role. She went on to say:
I must admit it makes me angry. A male calling another male by his name
it is looked on as a highly professional approach to business, but if a
woman does it, it is just a come on — she is interested in me.

I have heard of girls that a passenger has waited for them, especially fre-
quent business travellers. They know the system; they know where we
come, where we sign on and sign off, they see us walk in and out of the
lift and they know eventually we have to walk out past the valet car park
to go to where our car is and half of these people they go through valets
to get their cars parked and we have to walk through that area past them.
In the 1988 survey data, which, as established, develop issues around sexual
harassment, more women than men had experienced sexual harassment. The
main sources of harassment for domestic women flight attendants were from
the passengers (51%), the flight or technical crew (32%) and the cabin crew
(14%). For example:
Usually drunk sportsmen or rude businessmen (30 year-old married
woman, flying for a large domestic airline for two years)
Usually sporting groups/drunk businessmen. I had the Commonwealth
police arrest a first class businessman who grabbed a F/A and put his hand
up her skirt. He was kept in the watch house (part of a gaol) overnight and
appeared in court and fined the next day. Often sporting groups, mainly all
male, get quite carried away both with drinking and language. (33 year-old
married woman, flying for a large domestic airline for ten years)
Similarly, a 27 year-old married woman flight attendant flying for a domes-
tic airline for four years reported that she had two passengers arrested for
sexual harassment. She was able to corpse when she found the role unbear-
able because of the authority of her position as a purser in charge of the cabin.
Other women report similar experiences:
Drunken football teams/tech crew hugging us without asking us first. PAX
reading pornographic mags whilst sitting next to us and making com-
ments on the pictures they see. PAX putting their hands on our hips as
they pass us in the aisle. Men as old as my father trying to find out where
I’m going to stay on overnights to come round without my invitation. (24
year-old married woman, flying for a large domestic airline for three years)
Flight attendants have a bad reputation amongst the general public as
over paid, husband hunting, money grabbing ‘flying mattresses’. This is
so far from the truth as we are all hard working conscientious, moral
people, who find this attitude highly degrading. (27 year-old married
woman flying for a large domestic airline for four years)
Another woman takes up the idea of degradation when personal dignity has
to be sacrificed:
Degrading behaviour at times been tempted to tell the offender so. Some
passengers feel they have the right to degrade, or whatever you may call
it. If we react badly, they report us. (21 year-old single woman, flying for
a large domestic airline for eight months)

Interestingly in this context, Hughes (1964), the classic sociological writer on

‘dirty work’, regarded the loss of personal dignity as an aspect of ‘dirty work’.
Indeed, yet another flight attendant reveals the way in which emotional
labour is the conduit which makes sexual harassment a ‘normal’ part of the
‘dirty work’ of Australian flight attending. The expectation of positive dis-
plays implicit in emotional labour acts overrides the self-preserving reactions
to sexual harassment which normally protect women’s privacy and honour
(Folgero and Fjeldstad, 1995, p. 305). This is symbolized in the notion of what
is expected of flight attendants while they are ‘in uniform’ or ‘on duty’:
It is very difficult to respond in a firm and negative (rude) manner when
in uniform. Male PAX often treat F/As as if they have bought them and
their emotions with their ticket, as if we’re obliged to be nice and tolerate
their attentions. (28 year-old married woman, flying for a large domestic
airline for seven years)
Similarly another woman described the way the ‘job flirt’ stereotype, which
still discursively constructs the occupation of flight attendant, led to her also
being sexually harassed by men outside of work. She goes on to say how the
‘job flirt’ image coerces her into subservience and renders in her a sense of
powerlessness in relation to crew and customers. In the confined space of the
aircraft this effectively made her feel ‘trapped’ in her own workplace as an
open target for sexual harassment:
Also males out of work who know I am a F/A. I am becoming increas-
ingly disturbed by the myth that has evolved surrounding the typical
image of the F/A. The company is responsible for perpetuating this sexist
image and the union has done little to try to change it. Frequently I find
that both passengers and crew consequently view the F/A as being pri-
marily ‘out for a good time’ — which includes being very sexually active
and also this image is entwined with their forced subservience and sense
of powerlessness with regard to crew and customers. F/As are often
treated with little respect for our individuality, intelligence and emotions
because it is assumed that we are all the same (that is, attractive, sexual, a
little dumb and lacking in professional ambition) and therefore we are
prone to be abused. I am fed up with being made to feel uncomfortable
and upset by males who take advantage of the fact that I am ‘cornered’ in
the work situation and I am equally angry over having to defend and
justify my role within my occupation, and my character. (33 year-old,
single, flying for a large domestic airline for seven years)
At the same time, a small proportion of respondents were more like the
Norwegian flight attendants who did not regard sexual harassment as a
problem in the right setting, a service organization (Folgero and Fjeldstad,
1995, p. 311). Instead it was regarded as a part of the job, or part of being a
woman:

Minimal. All incidents have been of a trivial nature and well within my
control. (26 year-old single woman, flying for a large domestic airline for
three years)
Accept it as a hazard of the job. (35 year-old single woman, flying for a
large domestic airline for ten years)
The last section dealt with male passenger heterosexual harassment. As we
have already established, some passengers and airline employees, including
the cabin crew, have multiple identities of which homosexuality can be one
and this also surfaces in the experiences of cabin crew sexual harassment.
Lesbian sexuality is barely referred to in the data at all except in the follow-
ing quote in the 1988 survey about approaches from other women in the
cabin crew.
Over the years I’ve had a couple of female flight attendants make advances
which surprised me. (34 year-old single woman, flying for a large domes-
tic airline for 12 years)
Additionally, in the 1988 data, the sexual harassment of male staff by women
passengers was not regarded as a problem. Men said that it happened occa-
sionally but that they loved it, or, alternatively they said things like, ‘I wish’
or ‘No such luck’. However sexual harassment by other men of male flight
attendants was a problem. In 1988, one man describes abusive sexual harass-
ment from a male passenger. ‘As PAX disembarked he rubbed my crutch’
and he then goes on to point to the explicit use of gender and homophobic
harassment by the male technical crew to de-legitimate men’s presence in the
occupation:
Being a male flight attendant I get a little bit tired of stupid sexist com-
ments by some of the narrow-minded tech crew. Tech crew are the rudest
and most obnoxious to fly with. (28 year-old single man, flying for a large
domestic airline for five years)
Another refers to the way the technical crew use homophobic stereotypes to
attempt to police the masculinity of all male flight attendants:
Tech crew believe most male cabin crew are gay. (27 year-old single man,
flying for a large domestic airline for four years)
Other men gave voice to the opposition to their presence in the
occupation:
Occasionally negative comments towards gay people. (26 year-old single
man, flying for a large domestic airline for seven months)
This could be experienced as stigmatizing. A single man who did not give
his age wrote sarcastically:
Don’t all male flight attendants have AIDS? (Flying for a large domestic
airline for four years).

Significantly, by the time of the survey (1988), gay men had made major gains
in opening a less furtive ‘queer space’ for themselves in the occupation. In
the 1980s, for example, gay men working for Qantas successfully challenged
in the New South Wales Equal Opportunity Tribunal the married and de facto
roster, which permitted heterosexual couples to select the same shift roster
so they could fly on the same trip, but excluded other kinds of live-in part-
nerships such as gay and lesbian ones. This resulted in 100 paired positions
where gay partners in the crew could be rostered on trips together. However
this recognition of homosexuality applied only to the ‘backstage’ (staying in
hotels) and not the cabin ‘front stage’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 209). Flight atten-
dants generally responding to the survey also wrote about the need for
company support in the face of the types of harassment outlined so far, indi-
cating that considerable progress had yet to be made. Although sexual
harassment from the cabin crew was also a problem, passenger sexual harass-
ment was seen to pose more assaults to the self because of its links to emo-
tional labour and the implicit ‘customer is always right’ ethos.
By the time of the 1994 survey, the situation had not improved much on
the domestic airlines, despite the change of policies, and sexual harassment
as an issue had barely been dealt with at all on Qantas long-haul flights. For
example, most women flight attendants (79%) were dealing with verbal
sexual harassment in their jobs. Almost all of it was coming from male pas-
sengers (97%). While male flight attendants were verbally sexually harassed
by passengers as well (61%), this was also mainly from men. This included
both homophobic and homosexual harassment which were covered in the
question. Ten per cent of women flight attendants had also had to handle
unwelcome physical advances from passengers, (as had 4% of men) and 18%
of the women had handled unwelcome sexual propositions (as had 14%
of men).
By 1994 heterosexual women passengers and flight attendants were begin-
ning to harass male flight attendants and it was starting to be experienced
as unwelcome physical advances:
There’s lots of subtle ‘arse-grabbing’ whilst passing in confined areas e.g.
galley, aisle. (28 year-old man in a de facto relationship flying for six years
with a domestic airline)
The foregoing discussion has set out the experiences of sexual harassment
where heterosexual harassment of women flight attendants, and gender and
homophobic harassment of male flight attendants by the technical crew con-
stitute the most profound assaults on the self. At the same time, only a small
group — 74 (7%) women and 17 (4%) men — had complained officially about
an incident, using available channels. Of these, 47% of the women regarded
it as having been handled satisfactorily while this was only true of a third of
the men. However more than half of both genders were left dissatisfied with
the way the matter had been dealt with.

In addition, while heterosexual harassment came from passengers as well

as the cabin crew and the technical crew, most homophobic harassment came
from the cabin crew and the technical crew rather than passengers. In the
words of male flight attendants in the 1994 survey:
Some people take unbelievable and unacceptable liberty at degrading
people because of their sexual preference, including tech crew [pilots].
(Male flying for ten years for Qantas long haul, lives with another adult,
did not give his age)
I am gay. There are a few homophobes I work with or those that taunt
— not on! (39 year-old male, living alone, flying for three years for a large
domestic airline)
The next man’s comments point to underlying tensions between the
‘normals’ and the stigmatized, even in the backstage areas of the job, and he
feels the need to police his own sexual style because of the overt presence of
sexual harassment and prejudice in the cabin and technical crew:
As a homosexual who is often very discreet and not obvious as to my pref-
erence, I hear much slander about openly gay crew members. It affected
my feelings about myself and when I have confronted crew, it has created
friction. One comment I received was ‘change your diet. That’s why you’re
a poof’. (A 33 year-old man living in a male to male de facto relationship,
flying for a year with Qantas long haul)
Like these gay men, many women flight attendants positioned their subjec-
tivities against the attempts to force them into fixed, outdated cultural con-
structs of femininity and masculinity which they characterized as ‘wind up
Ken and Barbie dolls’ and ‘brainless bimbos’. Nevertheless, they regarded
management as continuing to promulgate and support the ‘job flirt’ harass-
ment. For example, ‘The airline must promote this image for this attitude to
have survived’. The following quote illustrates the persistence of the ‘flying
mattress’ perception revealed in the earlier survey.
I have very little time for male pilots or passengers due to their precon-
ceived ideas of female flight attendants. I get the feeling the majority feel
you should be blonde, 21, have an hour glass figure and enjoy being servile to
them. (40 year-old married woman flying for large domestic airline for 20
years — emphasis added)
So the cultural performance of emotional labour is permeated with a
gendered performance. This maintains flight attendants’ gender in a frozen
binary in which Ken and Barbie doll stereotypes are the icons of compulsory
heterosexuality. Femininity, masculinity and straightness, but not queerness
(Doty 2000, p. 109), are allowed to circulate in the cabin. In fact, the strong
evidence of sexual harassment of women flight attendants by passengers
and of male flight attendants by the technical crew demonstrates that the

heterosexualizing gender performance is successful in line with airline

management’s expectations. These data therefore suggest that Adkins (2001,
p. 685) is right to be sceptical of McDowell’s (1997) claim that service labour
involves fluidity, mobility and complex, generative subject positions in terms
of gender displays at work. Adkins implies these male workers would have
to be careful in taking on a performance of femininity and treating the
heterosexual male gaze with bravado. As she notes, women’s performances
of masculinity are also often denied, as when women flight attendants are
abused for enforcing safety using ‘masculine’ qualities such as assertion,
physical actions and bravery. At the same time their ‘feminine’ skills are
devalued by being naturalized. Furthermore, the spasmodic ability of indi-
vidual flight attendants to corpse and thus draw attention to and reject the
naturalizing of passenger sexual harassment and the half-hearted manage-
ment approach to employee complaints, attest to the deep presence of the
congealed job flirt expectations in selling airline tickets to preponderantly
male customers.
This section has found passenger sexual harassment as a form of ‘demand-
ing public’ behaviour to be ubiquitous on Australian-crewed planes both
within Australia and overseas. An ambivalent, hetero-normative sexual aura
constructs Australian flight attendants as sexually available fantasies. But, as
we have also seen, they resist marketing attempts to sexualize them. They
regard themselves as serious-minded ‘workers’, even ‘professionals’, not
objects of sexual denigration. In the author’s view it is this strong ‘work’ and
‘safety’ identity which is involved when they sometimes engage in indus-
trial action and even serve on picket lines.
(4) Organizations and management mediate the experience

of emotional labour
Quantitative analysis of the 1994 data brings this heady mix of the cultural
performance of emotional labour and demanding publics together and
gives us information on the organizational contexts when emotional labour
is satisfying or when it is not. This has a great deal to do with sexual harass-
ment and how management manages either to support the complex
flight attendant service and safety function in the air, or to reiterate a
simplistic set of customer service platitudes which, as we saw earlier,
even the managerialist customer service literature regards as outdated and
erroneous.
Before the results of the multiple regression are presented (Table 2), it is
worth pointing out that, even in examining the organizational variables at
the first level of analysis (see Table 1), the flight attendants’ stance towards
and perceptions about their employing organizations is deeply implicated
in the experience of emotional labour. For example, those who described
their morale as medium, compared to low, were 1.9 times more likely to find

Table 2: Results of multiple logistic regression
OR odds
Description ratio 95% CI overall P-value
Position
Flight attendant 1.00 0.000
Lev 2 Fl-Att/Air Chief 0.67 0.53–0.84
Purser 0.70 0.51–0.96
Flight service director 0.41 0.28–0.61
Other 0.58 0.44–0.76
Extent of value to
company
Not much 1.00 0.003
Very little 0.81 0.63–1.04
Fair amount 0.74 0.55–0.99
A lot 0.36 0.22–0.60
A great deal 0.73 0.29–1.82
Management attitude
causes dissatisfaction
No 1.00 0.025
Some 1.40 1.02–1.92
A great deal 1.62 1.14–2.28
Staff morale
Low 1.00 0.011
Medium 0.74 0.60–0.92
High 0.57 0.32–1.01
Loyalty
No loyalty at all 1.00 0.005
Very little loyalty 0.60 0.33–1.07
Fair amount of loyalty 0.55 0.30–1.00
Lot of loyalty 0.40 0.22–0.74
Great amount of loyalty 0.39 0.20–0.76
Unwelcome sexual
propositions
No 1.00 0.001
Yes 1.61 1.22–2.13
FA job caused fatigue
not at all 1.00 0.004
very little 1.15 0.51–2.58
a fair amount 1.34 0.64–2.83
a lot 1.83 0.87–3.85
a great deal 2.00 0.96–4.17
N = 2,912

emotional labour satisfying, while those with high morale (very few) were
4.3 times more likely to be satisfied in this way. One of the most important
variables of all, in relation to the invisibility of emotional labour, is whether
flight attendants feel valued by the airline companies. It is noteworthy that
those who felt valued by the latter (and answered that they were valued ‘a
lot’ compared with those who did not feel valued and answered ‘not much’)
were six times more likely to find emotional labour satisfying. The impor-
tance of these organizational factors was confirmed even more strongly when
the independent variables were entered into the multiple logistic regression
equation, which enables a systematic evaluation of the effects of each of
the independent variables on the dependent variable, cost/satisfaction of
emotional labour.
To remind the reader, these independent variables represented three areas.
The first were gender and sexual harassment; the second were organizational
and occupational health and safety variables: position in the company, value
to company, management attitude, morale, treated as individual or category,
loyalty to airline company, fatigue; finally came individual variables: educa-
tion. A technique called ‘backwards elimination’ considers the effect of
leaving each one out in turn. The allowed us to derive the parsimonious set
of variables shown in Table 2.
A way of explaining the meaning of Table 2 is to put it this way: those
finding emotional labour a strain were more likely to be the bulk of base level
flight attendants, rather than those who had been promoted in some way —
such as being in charge of the cabin. These ‘lower level’ flight attendants did
not think the airline company cared much about them and tended to be
unhappy with management. Such individuals had low, rather than medium or
high morale and little loyalty to the airline company. They also experienced
high levels of fatigue and, finally, they had been subjected to extreme sexual
harassment in their present job in the form of unwanted sexual propositions.
The variables which emerge most prominently with regard to whether
emotional labour is a cost or satisfaction at the most powerful level of analy-
sis in the multiple logistic regression equation are organizational ones (such
as feeling valued by their airline company), sexual harassment (for example,
unwanted sexual propositions), and fatigue. These (shown in Table 2) incor-
porate the effect of gender. But more than this, the multiple logistic regres-
sion disclosed the complex relationship among the variables in relation to
emotional labour and cost/satisfaction. This finding on the importance of the
organizational variables thus calls into question studies like Wharton and
Adelman’s that posit essentialist, non-social notions of emotional labour; for
example, that the costs of emotional labour come down to the individual’s
own personality inadequacies, or deficient skills in self-monitoring. It points
clearly towards the mediating effects of the organizational context where
social, managerial and power relations strongly influence how emotional
labour is experienced at work.

Concluding remarks
This article has engaged with the debate and selected parts of the literature
which emerged from Wouter’s (1989) reply to Hochschild. It supports those
accounts which argue that emotional labour is not gender neutral (Taylor and
Tyler, 2000). Here gender is important in determining whether or not emo-
tional labour is experienced as stressful in various ways. However, accord-
ing to my data, the more important gender link is between emotional labour
and sexual harassment. Indeed the concepts of sexual harassment and emo-
tional labour provide discourses through which women flight attendants can
discuss their problems with the kind of work they do, in ways that have not
been possible using questions and concepts from the world of men’s work.
My analysis here also attempts to counter the tendency in much of the
academic literature to subsume employment rights under individualizing
issues of personal preference, personal inadequacy and even emotional
pathology (e.g. negative affect) or a poor grasp of appropriate emotional
labour skills. Employees are assumed to ‘know’ rather than be trained.
My research does show that some of the time flight attendants find emo-
tional labour enjoyable and satisfying. There are other times, however, when
the same flight attendants find it stressful and costly to themselves. This
study makes it clear that there is an ongoing dynamic between the enjoyable
and satisfying features of service work and some of its unsavoury and unsafe
aspects. The strongest predictors of how individuals experience emotional
labour were organizational. This suggests that airline management is highly
influential in determining how emotional labour will be experienced and this
is at odds with Leidner’s (1996, p. 39) bland pluralism where she states that
management is just one party in a complex dynamic in which each of the
three groups of participants — management, employees and customers —
have interests that bring them sometimes into alliance, sometimes into oppo-
sition, with the others.
The importance of the organizational variables reminds us of the ‘labour’
aspect of emotional labour. Both men and women flight attendants are sub-
ordinated by their place in the hierarchy deriving from quasi-monarchical
power (market and bureaucratic relations) in their airlines, particularly
with managements who devalue their contribution to the labour process.
But an added dimension comes into play with customers who can define the
pace and, at times, even the nature of the labour process in the cabin. The
latter is organized to emphasize a somewhat one-sided customer service
ethos, giving considerable weight to customers’ perceived needs while de-
legitimating reasonable, self-preserving responses on the part of flight attend-
ants. The labour process also encourages excessive alcohol consumption in
passengers. This production politics means that both genders can be treated
abusively as quasi-servants. They open themselves to potential punishment
in their employment if they respond to abuse. Management can mitigate the

quasi-servant aspect of the abuse by letting flight attendants know they are
valued, providing training on handling abuse and enforcing policies against
passenger anger, bullying and inappropriate behaviour in the workplace.
Gender is imbricated in the quasi-monarchic power exercised in airline
workplaces, as Hochschild found with Delta Airlines, and my data continue
to affirm this. The job, while ostensibly the same, takes a different form for
each gender because of the different performances of hegemonic masculin-
ity and femininity and because the script of patriarchal femininity brings
with it the potential for the sexual harassment of women flight attendants
who are more likely to be sexually harassed by male passengers. In my data,
women find emotional labour more demanding than the men and unwel-
come sexual propositions make emotional labour more onerous still.
Two sets of concepts were deployed to examine the empirical data. Firstly,
emotional labour was regarded as a form of gendered cultural performance
to reflect analyses around ‘performativity’ where individual workers mobi-
lize resources — ‘such as emotion and style and aesthetics’ — to increasingly
shape labour markets and organizational hierarchies (Adkins and Lury 1999,
p. 610). My data indicate that women flight attendants’ feminine skills con-
tinue to be naturalized as Adkins (2001) suggests; and this author shares her
scepticism that flight attendants of either gender can perform complex, fluid
and mobile subject positions in front of passengers. Tension is created by the
hidden presence of a safety job-task which must be accomplished at the same
time but is subsumed under the gendered cultural performance. Concur-
rently, the gender presentation is replete with ambiguities of its own. These
both inhere in the flight attendants’ individual selves and in broader social
and discursive contexts. This creates further tension in flight attendant work
for both men and women — particularly the latter. It occurs in the perme-
able boundaries between relatively harmless or innocent expressions of
sexuality (such as flirting) and more serious and unsettling actions (notably
sexual harassment). This tension is ubiquitous (or potentially so) because the
main flight attendant workplace, namely the aircraft cabin, is an eroticized
site where women flight attendants are constructed as the main objects of
desire. Even so, this environment does not ‘cause’ sexual harassment or other
unwanted sexualized behaviours. Rather it provides a space where it is more
likely to happen, particularly if the harassers have been drinking alcohol
which has been supplied as part of the service. Sexual harassment by pas-
sengers and pilots (the technical crew) also continues to enforce the male
gaze and makes sure that only femininity, masculinity and straightness, and
not queerness or other transgressive subjectivities, are manifest in the cabin.
This brings us to the second major concept, demanding publics, which
was developed to draw attention to an aspect of the job not taken sufficiently
seriously by the emotional labour literature. This was defined as trans-
gressions of the legitimate boundaries of the service worker — in this case
from sexually harassing and abusive passengers. The problem posed by

demanding publics was shown to be exacerbated by contradictory manage-

ment goals such as the unresolved conflict between marketing and safety,
including both air safety and cabin crew occupational health and safety.
The data presented, both quantitative and qualitative, also make it
clear that such problems are intensified by the simplistic stance management
takes towards the complex flight attendant function. The flight attendant
‘aesthetic’ or ‘style’ which is central to the ‘service’ airline companies expect,
and which most flight attendants are willing to deliver, is actually invisible
to these self-same companies. In other words Australian airline companies
and airline managements pay only lip service to flight attendant work.
Despite recruiting flight attendants in terms of these qualities, they manage
them without showing adequate respect within the organization for their
contribution to the airline. Indeed the findings on the variable of being
valued by the company were the strongest statistically in terms of explain-
ing how emotional labour would be experienced. Further to this, Australian
airline managements continue to enforce, even at times aggressively, the
paternalistic customer service ethos that ‘the customer is always right’.
The importance of the organizational context within any discussion of
emotional labour cannot be overstressed. In this study, part of this context
includes sexual harassment. Australian airline management is remiss by not
setting clear and enforcable limits on sexual harassment. In failing to do this,
it actually establishes lowest common denominator standards for passenger
behaviour. Furthermore, it is well to be reminded that flight attending is
potentially dangerous and sometimes fatal in itself because the occupation
is carried out in the air. The September 11 2001 terrorist suicides in New York
graphically illustrated that the technical and cabin crew can die when planes
crash. After September 11, and with growing concerns about ‘air rage’,
there has never been a better time for passengers to be receptive to making
cabin safety visible and to de-legitimize disruptive passenger behaviour.
Australian airline managements need to set genuine limits on sexual harass-
ment of all kinds — passenger, technical crew and cabin crew — as well as
other kinds of abuse by ‘demanding publics’. It could do this by enforcing
policy in some well-publicized cases.
Finally, this article supports Hughes and Tadic (1998) in calling for the
need for a third party employment law for service workers. This would
provide a shield between service workers and demanding publics. Employ-
ers who supported abusive customers would not gain a competitive advan-
tage because there would always be the risk of exposure and prosecution and
the business could be represented as unsafe for all, including other cus-
tomers. This would represent some progress towards breaking the nexus
between service workers and pre-industrial ideas about ‘the servant’.

Acknowledgements
I would firstly like to thank Dr Bill Thorpe for his intellectual and editorial
help. Julie Henderson provided invaluable assistance with Internet library
searches. Next I would like to express my heart-felt thanks to Clare Dunster
from the editorial team of the journal and two anonymous readers who have
provided extensive and scrupulous input which has improved the article
immeasurably.
Notes
1. Despite this cultural disclaimer, I suspect that the concerns of this article relate to
flight attendants globally because air transport is a global industry with planes
carrying tourists from all countries in the world including Australians who are
great travellers. Indeed in 1998 I travelled from Australia to the United States on
JAL (Japanese Airlines) on a regular JAL route and had a delightful service expe-
rience, involving being served a great deal of green tea (which I love) from white
teapots, and being given a small gift of green tea bags before landing. I was seated
opposite three Japanese women flight attendants during landing. I said to them
that I had written about flight attendants. They thought I said that I had been a
flight attendant. They began to talk openly and critically about their jobs, saying
how the general public had an entirely false view of flight attending and how
glamorous it was. In reality it was a hard job, involving shift work and so on.
What struck me was how similar they were to Australian flight attendants in the
way they characterized the nature of their jobs and problems. However, except
for the case of Norway (Folgero and Fjelstad, 1995), comprehensive research
remains to be conducted on disruptive passenger behaviour. Nevertheless, since
most airlines carry sports teams and their supporters, a common problem may
have been highlighted.
2. The study uses triangulation, or the mixing of methods, including data sources
(Denzin, 1989; Maynard and Purvis, 1994; DeVault, 1996; Hammersley, 1992), to
‘mitigate against the pitfalls of uni-dimensional research’ (Hurd and McIntyre,
1996, p. 88). Triangulation allows quantitative analysis to provide evidence to
shed light on controversial issues. At the same time, qualitative analysis enables
us to delve into meanings about how key processes behind these issues operate.
The aim should be to ‘represent’ rather than ‘reproduce’ reality from a point of
view which allows for the multiple, non-contradictory and valid descriptions and
explanations of the same phenomenon (Hammersley, 1992, p. 51).
I first began to study Australian flight attendants in 1981 when I worked with
the union on a survey. Later, in 1988, I was invited by the feminist leadership at
that time to assist with discussions of the findings of the 1988 survey on sexual
harassment on the media. The campaign in which I played a small part led to
sexual harassment policies in the domestic airlines.
As a result of this initial engagement, I have continued to have access to large
data sets about Australian flight attendants. I have designed questionnaires

within the parameters of high academic standards and reserve sections of the
questionnaires for topics of academic interest to me such as emotional labour,
occupational health and safety, handling angry passengers, sexual harassment,
organizational context, work/family interface and militancy.
In addition, a great deal of attention went into maximizing the response rate
by having my photo near the front of the survey booklet and emphasizing the
independence and confidentiality of the data collection process where the data
would be kept securely at Flinders University.
These high standards aside, it could be argued that those flight attendants who
are more dissatisfied were more likely to respond. However it could also be
argued that this union mode of entry encourages flight attendants to regard them-
selves as ‘out of uniform’ when they respond. In studying emotional labour, this
is important because feeling constrained by the ‘customer is always right’ ethos
could bias interview data such as that collected in the manner described by
Wouters where the researcher is a passenger and the flight attendants are ‘in
uniform’. By way of contrast, I have noticed that flight attendants always dress
down deliberately, usually in jeans, when they come to be interviewed in the
union office. In any case, problems exist with any data source. The mode of entry
will always encourage more of some voices than others.
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Sky Service: The Demands of Emotional Labour in The Airline Industry

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Gender, Work and Organization. Vol. 10 No.

Sky Service: The Demands

Following Hochschild’s The Managed Heart, which emphasized the prob-

Keywords: emotional labour, sexual harassment, flight attendants, customer

T he job of flight attending gained major attention through Arlie Russell

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

when considering the central elements in flight attending. It is crucial to

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

Some of the unruly behaviour on flights originates with Australian sports

Emotional labour: some considerations

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

features. In his critique of Hochschild’s theoretical approach to emotion

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

Demanding publics and cultural and

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

best, ambivalent. It includes situations where elements of customer abuse are

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

Sufficient progress has been made in gay employment rights in Australia

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

Methodology and findings

In 1994 the author administered a survey of the membership of the Flight

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

reflected the possibility of satisfaction as well as costs. In addition, the words,

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

harassment. ‘Emotional labour’ as conceived by Hochschild was recognized

(1) Emotional labour

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

Table 1: Results of simple logistic regression = cost

Description OR (odds ratio) 95% CI overall P-value

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

Description OR (odds ratio) 95% CI overall P-value

FA job caused fatigue

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

variables were not found to be statistically significant in relation to the ex-

How you feel is a personal choice except under circumstances of extreme

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

cerns me that some seem so distressed at times, especially junior flight

(2) Demanding publics: the customer is always right

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

(3) Demanding publics: sexual harassment

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

bucket outside my door leaning on my door inwards so that when I

If something happens in front of them it is not a secret — the whole world

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

Interestingly in this context, Hughes (1964), the classic sociological writer on

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

In addition, while heterosexual harassment came from passengers as well

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

heterosexualizing gender performance is successful in line with airline

(4) Organizations and management mediate the experience

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003

Table 2: Results of multiple logistic regression

Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003 Volume 10 Number 5 November 2003