Deregulating Desire
Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4154829 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nicholas L Syrett (University of Kansas, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 104 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 819-820 |
| Publication date | 2017-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jax409 |
| OpenAlex | W2768635936 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
Deregulating Desire is a history of flight attendant unions from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century. It highlights the connections between labor activism and the desires of flight attendants, many of them queer and single people, to sustain themselves and their kin. Ryan Patrick Murphy argues that flight attendants built a workplace rights movement out of feminist and gay liberationist principles, and that they continue to foreground those same goals. He focuses on flight attendants' struggle to earn a family wage. The story begins at a time when “stewardesses” were presumed to be working until they wed, and were thus underpaid vis-à-vis their male coworkers, and moves to a high point in the later 1970s when union organizing secured work rules and pay commensurate with a living wage. Murphy then charts the consequences of deregulation and the rise of neoliberal capitalism, which stripped flight attendants of hard-won benefits. All the while, “flight attendant unionism ... has been about the struggle to balance family and work without a family wage” (p. 173
Capitalism · Economic Justice · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Wage · Gender Studies · Labor Movements and Unions · Law
| Citations per year | 0.63 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2022 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |