Ryan Patrick Murphy. Deregulating Desire

That the past three decades of economic change have hobbled the labor movement comes as no surprise. To view this process from the vantage point of one group of airline workers is a revelation. Ryan Patrick Murphy’s Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice explores the history of flight attendants from the 1970s to the twenty-first century. His study covers labor history, business history, and cultural history. Each mode of exposition interacts with and enhances the others. In part, Murphy treads a path carved out by historian Bethany Moreton in her innovative study To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (2009). He shows how values, attitudes, and ideology infuse the story of labor relations—in his words, “how cultural discourse shapes economic policy” (14). Murphy anchors his cultural analysis in the concrete stuff of labor history—wages, hours, strikes, contract negotiations, and legal battles. Flight attendants of the 1970s, the lowest-paid of airline employees, challenged the image of “stewardess” long promoted by airlines (a short-term worker, soon to be married), as well as the all-male leadership structures of traditional unions. They formed their own unions, fought for higher wages and better work rules, and used ties to feminism and the gay rights movement to demand the family wage that other airline employees and comparable workers earned. Two victories, one in a successful strike against National Airlines in 1975 and the other in an averted strike against Trans World Airlines (TWA) in 1983, bracket flight attendants’ era of ascendance. This group of employees was distinctive, Murphy explains; it included many “who chose relationships that fell outside the boundaries of traditional heterosexual monogamy and domesticity” (48). In his starting chapters, as elsewhere, Murphy ably extracts cultural messages from many sources, including his own interviews with thirty activists who look back on the early years of their careers.

Cultural history · Economic history · Ideology · Labor history · Labor relations · Negotiation · Political science · Politics · Shadow (psychology) · Sociology · Wage · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies