1 Introduction

The global transport industry is “built on silence”, stated Will, a trade union representative from the ITF, in November 2018 when speaking about labour conditions and changes in the global maritime and aviation industry. There is silence about the mass eviction of people and the exploitation of labour and nature needed to construct large transport patterns and infrastructures. And there is a silent tendency of transnational cooperations to intensify labour processes. To make some of those aspects visible, we follow two research questions: Firstly, what corporal impact does this process of intensifying labour conditions have on cabin crew workers in Argentina (Aerolíneas Argentinas) and Portugal (TAP) during the companies’ first stages of renationalisation processes? Secondly, how do cabin crew workers resist the impact at the scale of their bodies? To answer both questions, we combine concepts of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and materialist state theory. We identify a global process of labour intensification based on increasing workload via less staff, more tasks, and more working hours, with a high impact on occupational health and safety. We call this “Ryanairisation” to capture how this low-cost airlines’ labour regime unfolds both in public and transnational private cooperations. The text focuses on the state’s role in the renationalisation of aviation enterprises in the cases of Argentina and Portugal as a reaction to each internal political crisis in 2008 and 2016–2020, respectively.

We explore labour conflicts (in the air) as a relevant sub-discipline of conflict- and peace studies (Koppe 1999, 62). However, rather than focussing on conflicts in the arena of international relations, we turn to asymmetric social power structures where divergent interests of corporations and workers are vindicated against one another (Kißler 1999, 355).Footnote 1 Although civil aviation itself is regarded as a tool to implement peace by connecting spaces and transporting diverse knowledge and cultures, it is an arena of social and labour conflict itself (Hippler 2017). In this research, we seek to disclose the violence in exploiting workers’ labouring bodies in renationalised airlines. By doing so, we want to contribute to discussing the state’s and corporations’ roles as political actors. We also want to point out that the political decisions of corporations and their move towards ‘Ryanairisation’ is not a fixed and irreversible process, as the struggle of the cabin crew workers demonstrated.

We developed a qualitative research design for collecting and evaluating 15 semi-standard and theory-generating expert interviews with cabin crew workers and trade union officials from Argentina, Portugal, and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF).Footnote 2 Those interviews stem from larger snowball samples of our recent research projects in which each of us engages with working conditions in the transport sector. We re-evaluated our material along the parameters of the nationalisation of the airlines, experiences in the intensification of labour processes, and forms of resistance. We decided to keep some key terms in the native language of workers and explain them, as the context, political meaning, and workers’ collective knowledge can get lost in translation. In addition to our snowball samples, our text is based on further newspaper articles, labour studies, and trade union material of the ITF, SITAVA (Sindicato dos Trabalhadores da Aviação e Aeroportos); SNPVAC (Sindicato Nacional do Pessoal de Voo da Aviação Civil); AAA (Asociación Argentina de Aeronavegantes), APA (Asociación de Personal Aeronáutico). To complement the statements made in the interviews we selected leaflets, strike announcements, and Facebook and Twitter posts in the period between 2008–2015 (Argentina) and 2014–2021 (Portugal). We analysed the sources following four dimensions: working conditions, renationalisation and labour process, health and safety, and conflicts and disputes. In the case of Argentina, the newspaper sources consulted were “La Nación” and “Página 12”, between 2008–2015 and the following corporate publications: AR corporate reports (2010–2013), the reports and balance sheets from 2014 and 2015, the institutional internal magazine CoOrdendas. In the case of Portugal, we concentrated on articles and comments published in the “Público” and broadcasted in the public studio of RTPFootnote 3 between 2014 and 2021. In both cases, the terms airlines, strikes, labour struggles, and nationalisation guided our newspaper research.

Our analysis is based on a relational and incorporated comparison between Argentina and Portugal. We choose both states as we could see similar processes albeit with different geographic, social, economic and political specificities. Despite the general renationalisation processes being part of a general improvement in salaries and working conditions in Argentina as well as Portugal, the everyday and silent labour intensification becomes visible through the body lens: tiredness, daily pain and constant unrest are the hallmarks of the Ryanarisation process in workers’ lives. The comparison of the dynamics towards Ryanairisation helps in a dialectical way to explain each of the other and mark spatio-historical differences (Hart 2018, 373) and how they are embedded in a larger global social and political conjuncture (McMichael 1990, 389).

In the second section, we underline our theoretical approach towards the labouring body as a contribution to enriching the agency focussed debates in conflict and new global labour studies. In the third part section, we explain the concept of Ryanairisation and introduce the cases of Portugal and Argentina. In the fourth part of the text, we focus on how, despite increasing salaries and generally improving working conditions, nationalised companies relied on the intensification of labour and are pushing the very workers’ physical and mental boundaries. Initially, cabin crew workers resisted it on a rather individual level and by hybrid collaborative workplace actions, as shown in section 4.1. In section 4.2 we explore how workers also apply organised trade union actions and open confrontations to AR and TAP corporate policies. The fifth part of the paper states that during the pandemic, both governments used the aviation industry as a laboratory for changing labour conditions, justifying dismissals and extending working weeks.

2 Conflicts and labour agency in transnational corporations through the lens of the body

Geostrategic tensions over pipelines and oil fields, the shipping blockade of the Suez Canal, the closure of national borders as a response to Covid-19, recent labour struggles at warehouses, ports, and in aviation across the world demonstrate that infrastructures are not solely technical footnotes (Easterling 2014; Scheper and Vestena 2020). In contrast, they contain and express political, social, and economic power relations. Spaces and legal frameworks are shaped by processes of capital accumulation and spatial and political re-scaling; social movements, trade unions, and other activist networks that oppose the uneven and unequal spatially inscribed processes can also turn to certain scales and employ them as vantage points for resistance (Brenner 2008, 76).

Coming from the field of industrial relations, when considering the transport sector, we observe a marginal or absent analysis of the reproduction of the labour force and the impact of work on the labouring body, leading to tensions and conflicts. We include the political scale of the body into our analytical framework to analyse the political role of corporations in the aviation sector and the resistance to it.

Following Brookes and McCallun (2017) and their critical review of new global labour studies, we are looking more moderately at labour conflicts using mid-range concepts to analyse particular effects of the dynamics of labour conflicts. We agree with integrating various forms of organisation and strategies, contributing to the discussion on collective action and workers’ power beyond the ‘institutionalised collective action model’ (Gallas 2018; Nowak 2018; Marticorena and D’Urso 2021; Doutch 2022), who argue for a broader understanding of power and labour agency beyond the workplace. We address the workers’ agency via the lens of the body and not via trade unions, which are organisations representing workers but are not themselves labour agencies as such (Doutch 2022, Brookes 2018; Gallas 2018). This approach allows us to look at collectively organised actions and practices of solidarity beyond institutions such as trade unions and unpack internal reactions and tensions in workers’ organisations. In this way, we seek to broaden the labour analysis and focus on collective action and workers’ power beyond the ‘institutionalised collective action model’ (Atzeni 2021). That also contributes to conflict studies by moving the focus away from larger spaces and institutions to the small, often overseen scale of the body. In struggles, activists have up-scaled their demands and widened fields of struggle by addressing the national aviation industry and international institutions like the EU and ICAO or transnational corporations (TNCs) like Ryanair. They widened terrains, improving conditions for struggle within already existing (global) structures. Vice versa, there is also the dynamic of down-scaling struggles by addressing the international safety and security standards in national conflicts, both in union-led actions and collective bargaining and in everyday struggles at the workplace (Cufré 2018). Workers politicise the scale of their bodies in their daily experience by rejecting specific tasks, gestures, or clothes, as shown below.

Generally, from the perspective of SRT, the labouring body is the receptacle for variable capital. Still, it is, at the same time, a social and natural entity which needs to be regularly reproduced, maintained, healed, loved, dressed, nurtured, cleaned and educated (Bhattacharya 2017; Ferguson 2016). The body is produced through processes of differentiation that are a structural necessity for capital, as spatial differentiation is (Orzeck 2007). These differentiation processes regarding gender, race and citizenship status, among others, set the value for the labour power before they arrive at the workplace (Rioux 2015). No one leaves the materiality of their own bodies at the doors of ‘the hidden abode of production’. That is particularly relevant in the case of cabin crews who have to meet specific standards of body shape as well as attitudes such as empathy and politeness. Their ability to display specific emotions is what Arlie Hochschild coined as emotional labour in her book The managed heart (1983). Other critical contributions to understanding the gendered and racialised differentiation of labouring bodies in aviation have focused on the trajectories of workers (Castellitti 2019, Evans and Feagin 2012) and the women and LGBT people’s struggles for labour rights (Rolón 2021). As we consider the body a materialist totality, we perceive the mental and physical parts as inseparable.

The labouring body is constantly pushed to extend its productivity limits and capacity to absorb more workload. While accidents, illnesses and injuries are individualised, in our conducted interviews, workers highlight their systematic immanence in the capitalist mode of production.

In a nutshell, our analysis of the labour conflicts departs from the experience of workers in relation to their labouring bodies as one that is socially and historically produced in both the spaces and activities of ‘people-making’ and ‘profit-making’ in terms of SRT (Arruzza et al. 2019, 21). It highlights how they challenge the constant expansion of the limits of their labouring bodies in their day-to-day actions.

Other lenses on corporations and the state, like election results, nationalisation, or wage increases, might prove progressive practices. However, with the body lens, we see a different picture when analysing, for instance, former centre-left governments in Argentina and Portugal. We understand that the progressive political orientation regarding social welfare and the economic recovery achieved through market regulation set a new period that contrasted with the previous neoliberal era, albeit it did not entirely reverse it. The progressive governments did not improve the legal frameworks or challenge international standards.

Apart from SRT, we employ a materialist state theory using Nicos Poulantzas’ relational approach towards the state (Poulantzas 2014). This approach seeks to unpack the state as a crystallisation of past class struggles and conflicts. The state is a processing field in which state apparatuses are structures that canalise present conflicts upon a materialisation of past conflicts, like laws, legislations, institutions, infrastructures, and norms (Ouviña and Thwaites 2018).Footnote 4

The aviation industry is a vibrant example of the materialisation of past struggles and how national and transnational state apparatuses intersect. The sector has its own regulatory framework, negotiated by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the United Nations specialised agency, and the International Air Transport Association (IATA), representing commercial and civil flight corporations. Airlines must comply with the global safety and security standards that states introduce in their regulations. For instance, the working hours of cabin crews are set by national collective agreements that rely on international standards considering fatigue and resting times. Such standards are based on conflicts, which led to studies concerning embodied experiences and physical limits to extract surplus labour from workers. Hence, workers’ bodies’ physical and mental boundaries are implicated in the national and global trends of laws and infrastructures, and so is their resistance (Cufré 2018).

Accordingly, the corporally inscribed practices on labour regulations are dealt with on national and international scales and fought by cabin crew workers in Argentinian and Portuguese aviation. Both the struggle for renationalisation and the conflicts shaped and produced by national and international legal frameworks took place in and were shaped by institutionalised settings, like trade unions, negotiations with the government, and more. In this text, we want to move beyond labour rights and regulations by analysing conflicts related to labour intensification through the lens of the body.

3 Ryanairisation in AR and TAP

During the first stages of the renationalisation processes—from 2008 to 2015 in AR and from 2016 to 2020 in TAP—the labour policies sought to align companies to global trends of labour intensification. We understand this as a global process of undermining global conditions that we refer as Ryanarisation. In this section, we briefly introduce the case studies and explain this concept.

Aerolíneas Argentinas (AR) was state-owned from 1950 to 1990; afterwards, it was privatised and sold to the Spanish group Iberia. Mass dismissals of workers, asset cuts, and service reductions put the company in a critical situation that led to its bankruptcy in 2001. It was bought by Marsans Group (Thwaites Rey 2001; Frescia 2008) and renationalised in 2008 when it was on its way to bankruptcy again. Although this was not the original plan of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the trade unions pushed for state ownership and opposed its selling to private national capitals.Footnote 5

The defence of the national flagship airline and the pride of belonging to a ‘great family’ based on the values of safety and security, whose members are skilled and combative workers, is deeply embedded within the union tradition and workers’ collective memory (Cufré 2019). Workers and union representatives shared the corporate aims of recovering the company, restoring customers’ trust, and expanding its commercial operations. They had struggled to keep up the company’s operation during past crises, especially in 2001 (Miguel 2022, Thwaites Rey 2001).

The national civil aviation airline Transportes Aéreos Portugueses (TAP) was founded in 1945. During the Portuguese Revolution in 1974/75, the airline was nationalised due to the pressure of the cabin crew and ground workers. In that period, the company was a stronghold for the workers’ movement (Lorenzo, Portugal, 2017—long-standing trade union activist). Civil aviation developed very slowly in the country. The Portuguese Air Force remains a dominant part of Portuguese aviation as part of NATO. However, with the revolution in the 1970s, the flagship carrier developed connections between Lisbon and Madrid and later Lisbon and Latin America. At the same time, other airports in the North and the South of the state were inaugurated.

Subsequently, due to the integration of Portugal into the Eurozone and the economic crisis between 2010 and 2014, Portugal transformed its tourism sector into a significant financial asset. The Brazilian airline Azul, one of the largest low-cost airline companies in Latin America, became the primary owner of TAP between 2015 and 2020. TAP oscillated between being fully privatised in 2015 and partly renationalised in 2016 and 2020, with a share of government bonds of 72.5%. In 2021, the government renationalised the airline to launch a bailout programme of 1.2 billion euros to rescue the airline from bankruptcy. Passenger transport at the central airport in Lisbon alone doubled between 2012 and 2019.

The transnational low-cost airline RyanairFootnote 6 is most prominent for low occupational health and safety standards (Boewe et al. 2021). We call this race to the bottom “Ryanairisation”. In recent labour studies on transport, there is a discussion of “Uberization” (Abílio Costhek 2020; Edward 2020; Haidar and Garavaglia 2022) which, similar to our term, follows a restructuring process of work that is mainly driven by one transnational corporation, in this case, Uber. Even though both companies, Ryanair and Uber, operate in the global transport sector, the trends in restructuring and casualising labour in aviation still differ from those in the road and delivery sector. Uber introduced a labour regime based on platform algorithms and the trend towards misclassified self-employment, putting workers under pressure to work quickly to meet the programmed targets. In contrast, the aviation infrastructure uses global spatial-economic divergences to hire lower-paid labour from one region and employ them on a transnational scale. Also, aviation is a critical state infrastructure in which workers’ conditions are still subjected to a transnational legal framework considering the state security and the passengers’ safety and therefore requires a specific certificate for pilots, cabin crews and maintenance technicians, among others.

Ryanair directly impacted the Portuguese flight sector and indirectly impacted Argentina. The political implications of “Ryanairisation” pose a direct threat to workers in European airlines. Portugal is a member of the EU, and, in consequence, European Open Skies Agreements introduced from the mid-1990s onwards regulate Portuguese aviation. Low-cost airlines such as EasyJet and Ryanair used the ‘opened space’ to widen their market share (Button 2009, 60). In contrast, Argentina’s regulation of the aviation market is still under a Close Skies framework, and low-cost carriers only started to operate in 2018 (Reinoso and Basteiro 2022). However, the example of Argentina shows that workers in spaces beyond the current market access of Ryanair and other low-cost carriers are affected by Ryanairisation. Under the presidencies of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015), the renationalisation of public services took place, including Aerolíneas Argentinas (AR) in 2008. Similarly, in Portugal, the progressive Partido Socialismo government under António Costa reversed several privatisation projects in public infrastructure, including the flag-ship airline TAP, in 2020. The cases show a similar trend in the airline renationalisations, despite their differences in terms of the context of each renationalisation and the state’s historical development as a former Spanish colony and the centre of the Portuguese Empire, respectively, as well as their current position in international politics in the global economy. In both countries, we identify common issues as part of a global tendency in the civil aviation sector to intensify the workload and undermine occupational health and safety standards.

In 2019, about 4.4 billion passengers were arriving and departing worldwide.Footnote 7 Freight transport via air has been growing in volume and distance by more than 400% since the 1970s (IATA 2019, 12).Footnote 8 Numbers of passengers and commodities are growing, and so is the lack of capacities and infrastructures of airports, which have become pending bottlenecks for the economy. Globally operating companies urged states and local governments to invest in airports (IATA 2019).

The current survival of renationalised former transnationally operating airlines Aerolíneas Argentinas (AR) and Transportes Aéreos Portugueses (TAP) is based on a constant breach of the physical and mental limits. Workers first fought for public ownership and used this struggle for better working conditions, like permanent contracts, sufficient staff and time for labour tasks. However, for the two governments, nationalisation was an urgent step towards controlling a critical sector of the national economy.

4 The (revolting) labouring body in aviation

As we will demonstrate in this section, cabin crews embody a form of non-militarised security management while simultaneously being addressed as ‘passenger entertainers’ and company representatives. While they organise security, they expect to work under safe working conditions, as their own safety is required for a safe flight. However, their safety is at risk due to the intensified workload of company policies and is under attack by new legislation introduced during the pandemic.

When cabin crew workers receive the passengers, they have been on the aircraft for at least forty minutes, preparing everything before take-off. The passengers’ greeting is a moment to gather vital information to anticipate passengers’ behaviours during the trip, identify disruptive clients, and pay special care to those who fear flying. Carlos, a young worker and former union delegate with ten years of seniority and a strong union tradition, says: “You learn over time to semblantearFootnote 9 people, you see them and say: ‘this one is like this kind of person” (Carlos, Argentina, 2016). Each crew member is assigned to specific rows of seats, so they pass that memorised data among them; as Pamela, a 28-year-old cabin crew worker with three years of experience, puts it:

“It’s something that you perceive. Sometimes we look at each other with my colleagues and say: ‘he is really shitting his pants [makes a gesture with her hand opening and closing her fingers to indicate that]” (Pamela, Argentina, 2013).

That constant need to pay attention, the emotional skills involved, and the physical labour they perform engage their labouring body as a whole in the labour process. As explained above, this subjective experience includes the gendered and racialised social hegemonic discourses on the body and its resistances. The corporate efforts to expand the limits of the labouring body by extending working hours, reducing workers per flight, and adding more tasks (e.g., selling products onboard) increase the workload, impacting workers’ physical, mental, social, and emotional health (Ines, Portugal, 2017—mother, mid-30 former cabin crew now handling worker). In the following section, we will show how this workload increased due to the policies implemented during the renationalisation processes and how workers resisted.

4.1 Intensified workload and resistance in nationalisation processes

The changes in the workload during both renationalisation processes transformed the work experience for cabin crew members. Some are more visible or directly linked to the labour process, such as multiple tasks during stopovers (AR) and fewer workers on board despite more passengers with special needs (TAP). Wearing off the workers’ bodies results from intensified workload (e.g., physical pain and mental stress) that they resist at a rather individual level or via hybrid collaborative workplace action, as will be elaborated in the following lines.

4.1.1 AR in Argentina

Since 2008, the company’s public administration introduced reforms to increase competitiveness, regain lost markets, improve the service supply, and increase profits to restore the company economically and symbolically. One of the strategic policies was to join the Skyteam alliance and to reorganise operations with two changes in the company policy: 1. by using the internal flight’s airport (Aeroparque) for regional services and 2. by modifying the domestic routes to connect cities without making a stop in Buenos Aires, known as ‘Federal Corridors’. As a result, the flight frequency increased by 83% between 2008 and 2013 (Aerolíneas Argentinas 2013, 12).

These policies involved increased workload for cabin crews, which led to increased working hours, while for passengers, the service improved. Pamela, a cabin crew worker who joined the company during the renationalisation, explains this two-sided development:

“Now everything is interconnected. When someone talks about connecting the country, that’s what it is, that not everything should be centralized in Buenos Aires. […] It’s good. Anyway, as a worker, that interconnectivity, that’s what I like the least, because you have eight thousand flights with stopovers, boarding and disembarkation […]. For me, as a physical worker, stopovers kill me! Besides, when you arrive at a stopover, some passengers get off, and others remain on board in transit. In other words, you are left with those who are going to another stopover. It’s a mess […]. It wears you down. It’s not the same to arrive at a stopover, have all the passengers get off and then be alone—to have a glass of water, I don’t know, with your legs up to rest—as it is to make a stopover with passengers on board, to refuel. And this might happen or not. It’s not that you have a standardised number of flights with or without stopovers […] that is randomly assigned in the monthly plan. […] And you have months when you don’t get that by chance and others when you get three days in a row and you say:‘why me?’” (Pamela, Argentina, 2013).

At the beginning of this quote, the informant supports the importance of higher connectivity for the company and the country. However, she changes the subject quickly to explain how the work overload ‘kills’ her as a ‘physical worker’ because she has to take care of people at all times with no time to rest. In general, more take-offs and landings per day mean more pressure changes in the body due to air pressurisation, resulting in the tiredness of legs and feet. However, the worst thing about stopover flights is never being alone without passengers. During direct flights without intermediate stopovers, Pamela can rest “with her legs up” (ibid.) and drink water while not paying attention to passengers. As another worker reports, the variation of pressure during the working day has other consequences on their bodies, such as turning a simple cold into a permanent hearing problem:

“Imagine you have a sore throat, an earache. Then, you can’t fly because it’s really risky. Pressurisation is no joke. See, when the plane is pressurised, all the gases, it’s as if they widen […] If you have a cold, […] then the eardrum can’t equalise the pressure, so it bursts. See, iIt’s really dangerous to fly with a cold. But if you fly every day and it’s your job, then the crew member has to take good care of his health in that sense. That’s also why you don’t fly pregnant.” (María, Argentina, 2016)

In the daily life of cabin crews, the way to counterbalance the ‘killing’ effect of so many stopovers during a working day is to organise themselves to gain a bit of rest during the flights. Workers “take turns implicitly”, in the words of a 24 years old worker who had been working for five years in AR (Camila, Argentina, 2016). In some cases, female workers ask the crew supervisor to get off the plane in the shoes they wear onboard instead of the high heels they are obliged to wear at the airport. As one interviewee the same worker reported: “When you’re on the plane, you change your shoes from the high ones to the low ones and you work more comfortably—in theory—with the lower ones. And as soon as you get off the plane you have to be impeccable again with the high ones to walk around the airport. That’s in theory. I always wear trousers and with trousers you hardly notice the highs and lows, but with a skirt you might notice them much more. I’ve been wearing the low-cut shoes for a thousand years because high-cut shoes do hurt my bunions more, so I try not to wear them. And in the end, if someone asks, I always have the excuse that my bunions hurt” (Camila, Argentina, 2016).

In this way, they partially mitigate some of the pressures directly exerted on their bodies individually. They support each other to endure long shifts and anxiety in the long run and sometimes negotiate informally with supervisors to flexibilise the uniform policy to feel more comfortable. Those internal negotiations and conflicts were up-scaled when the company introduced changes in the contract to extend the working hours or aimed to change the production rhythms.

4.1.2 TAP and Ryanair in Portugal

Similar to Argentina, connectivity and the number of flights in Portugal increased. TAP employed more aircraft and dealt with more specific needs and tasks for passengers. However, an interviewee pointed out that the company refused to hire more crew members:

“TAP was trying to get down the number of people necessary to work in aircraft. Nowadays, we are with a minimum of, for instance, in the A330, a minimum of nine crew members; they are trying to make eight. But with eight, you don’t give customer service to the passenger... So if they don’t employ more people, they have less crew members to be available to make the flight.” (Pedro, Portugal, 2017—mid-30 cabin crew worker for international flights and trade union official).

With the increase in flights, the percentage of older people and people with special needs rose significantly, posing a further challenge to cabin crews and airport workers (Ines, Portugal, 2017). The company aimed to expand and increase its market share without additional staff, following the strategy to play passengers out against cabin crews. In 2017, cabin crew workers refused additional services onboard, protesting against the employment policy. They felt the mental stress on the scale of their bodies when refusing to do more than secure the flight:

“[I]t’s very difficult to come in and say: ‘I don’t make any service on board, I am going to just sit here on my bench and don’t do anything for four hours, no water, no anything.’ They were trying to make [a] psychological impact on the crew members for us to give up and make the service.” (Pedro, Portugal, 2017)

Workers reacted to the pressures of worsening working conditions and services by converting their grievances into a collective struggle (Boewe et al. 2021). This strategy to refuse services and withstand the mental stress from passengers and managers alike allowed TAP cabin crews to succeed: From 2018 onwards, the TAP management promised to employ more staff to fill the estimated 500 vacancies until 2020 (Pedro, Portugal, 2017). The success encouraged cabin crews in other airlines operating in Portugal to resist low working conditions.

However, the race to the bottom of the working standards of low-cost airlines increases the pressure on national flagship airlines to compete on the back of their cabin crew workers (Pedro, Portugal, 2017). Despite its semi-privatisation-renationalisation process, TAP still guarantees better working conditions to flight attendants than, for instance, Ryanair in Portugal. A key difference is the labour contract, as TAP cabin crew workers have a collective bargaining agreement. In contrast, Ryanair outsourced labour employment to the Irish company Crewlink, which is not obligated to fulfil Portuguese labour standards (Pedro, Portugal, 2017).

4.2 Cabin crew workers’ resistance on the national and transnational scale

The airline nationalisations in Portugal (2020) and Argentina (2008) had a common feature: an intensified workload on the labouring bodies of cabin crew workers. The nationalisation process had given workers new self-esteem to organise for their rights until the pandemic, even though the trade union strategies remained limited, focusing predominantly on salaries. In both cases, the call for strikes was halted by negotiations, as shown in this section.

4.2.1 AR in Argentina

Once renationalised, AR sought to align with the international production standards based on increasing workload and constant workforce substitution. AR cabin crews work fewer hours than workers in other companies, so they will likely stay longer. The informant, Marcelo from Argentina, who already has five years of experience and plans to continue working there, wishes to be a university teacher when he graduates, says:

“I believe the company is betting on you leaving your job, one way or another. Because it is not so convenient for them if you stay. It’s because they prefer new people, who have no union tradition or who do not know what happened (...) They need young people because of the standards that other companies have. This is my point of view. I think that this last management [the 2008–2015] introduced much stronger comparisons with other companies by saying: ‘hey, let’s see how much our crew members fly. Let’s see how much others fly. Let’s see what benefits they have. Let’s see what they don’t.’ So many of the attempts to change the Collective Agreement and everything were legitimised—or they tried to legitimised them—on the basis of what other companies did.” (Marcelo, Argentina, 2016)

Since the renationalisation, the company has been recovering from years of poor service, expanding market participation and regaining ‘international networks’ (Aerolíneas Argentinas 2011, 49). However, re-entering the airline into the international system happened mutually with the need to install international labour standards. AR tried to change the flight schedules and extend the working hours. Every month, cabin crews receive their flight plan with their schedules, days off, and days on guard. However, this is subject to change due to technical or climatological reasons. The company has to pay for extra service hours with a maximum ‘Duty Time’ limit of 14 h and warrant resting time afterwards. In March 2012, cabin crews received flight plans that violated both points. The Asociación Argentina de Aeronavegantes (AAA), the trade union representing cabin crew workers, presented a formal denouncement to the Ministry of Labour. The union claimed those plans were illegal (as they contradicted the collective agreement) and posed a threat to the safety of the flight of passengers and workers. Negotiations with the company were unsuccessful, and during the days before New Year’s Eve, the union announced that they would refrain from working on flights that did not respect the collective agreement. The Ministry of Labour dictated the ‘mandatory conciliation’, a dispute-solving mechanism that forces the parties to negotiate, and the company had to restore the previous terms.

Although the company failed to extend the working hours, it incorporated other changes in the organisation of flights through the Federal Corridors policy that increased flights and stopovers in the domestic market. The exigence of punctuality and the strict time organisation of the airports increased the pressure to accelerate the production rhythms. Cabin crews’ resistance to this process by rejecting to replace cabin crew chiefs and denying to work with expired working hours. Union officials did not lead these actions, but workers relied on their knowledge of collective agreements, asked for shop stewards’ support and employed the union tradition based on the appeal to international security standards.

4.2.2 TAP in Portugal

In Portugal, TAP is considered a part of the national sovereignty and a public company heritage of the Portuguese Revolution. When privatisation was looming in 2014, the TAP workers and affiliated trade unions created a public social movement that supported their struggle (Sara, young social movement activist, Portugal, 2017). The sectoral dispute attracted activists of the social movements against austerity that peaked in mid-2013. The announcement of the planned privatisation of TAP mobilised those forces again, yet on a sectoral level. By the end of November 2014, TAP workers held regular meetings and planned to organise a strike during Christmas (João, Portugal, 2019). However, the centre-right government increased pressure on trade unions and workers’ councils to refrain from the strike (ibid.).

Nevertheless, a ten-day pilot strike and demonstrations were launched to keep the airline public in 2015. Activists of the anti-austerity movement who had previously been involved in the anti-Troika protests in 2011 until 2013 and trade unions of TAP held joint assemblies. They decided to found the association ‘Não TAPem os Olhos, in English: ‘Don’t blind your eyes.’ It was a movement to moderate discussions with the government, launch a website and make the struggle visible (Pedro, Portugal, 2017). Due to the specific character of Portugal as a state with a sizeable migrating population, TAP workers could up-scale their struggle against privatisation from their industry to the national scale. The large Portuguese diaspora heavily relies on aviation to return home and abroad. As one cabin crew member pointed out:

“So, every time they try to hurt TAP, it’s like they are trying to hurt something of me as [a] Portuguese.” (Pedro, trade union official, Portugal, 2017)

This quote underlines the physical and mental connection of the worker to his workplace and the national symbolism of the company.

In October 2015, the right-wing and conservative parties lost votes, diminishing them to a minority government. After eleven days and the failure to privatise TAP completely, the centre-right government stepped down, and a new centre-left minority government came to power by the beginning of 2016. António Costa from the Socialist Party (PS) carried the pressure of the solid anti-austerity protests and a high disappointment of 40% of people who abstained or spoiled their vote. Additionally, industrial conflicts in different sectors forced the government to change the mandatory working week from 40 to 35 h, as before the economic crisis. This new government opposed the total sell-out of TAP and rebought the majority of shares (51%) to keep control over the airline. Moreover, since salaries were frozen for about ten years, workers in all public or semi-public sectors demanded a pay rise and an end to precarious contracts (João, Portugal, 2019).

In Argentina and Portugal, workers in the flagship airlines have developed a biased relationship towards ‘their’ company: They won the struggle to renationalise the airlines and are believed to be in a position of organising overtime to ‘help’ the company survive and be competitive. The feelings for the company pose a contradiction between resisting the grinding of working conditions and contributing to the company’s recovery, both as a symbol of national pride and a strategic economic resource. The symbolic weight of a national flagship airline and the legitimacy of ‘progressive governments’ can sometimes be a limit for resistance. However, when the collectively gained labour conditions are under attack, that feeling triggers the struggle for better working conditions. These forms of resistance of cabin crew workers demonstrated that the ‘Ryanairisation’ is not a static and irreversible process.

Lastly, Inspired by this experience of TAP workers’ resistance, Ryanair’s Portuguese cabin crew workers were the first in Europe to launch a strike against the low-cost carrier. The cabin crew trade union’s Easter Holidays strike 2018 played a critical role in initiating further European-wide actions against the airline. In international conferences, cabin crew workers exchanged strategies to struggle towards a European scale (see Mendonça 2020). By the end of 2018, Ryanair had to make concessions, accept trade unions, and sign national bargaining agreements (see Boewe et al. 2021). By upscaling the struggle, Portuguese cabin crews challenged the worsening of working conditions to a greater degree with the joint forces of other European trade unions. Now, Ryanair is attempting to change the international ICAO rule on the mandatory flight attendants per fifty seats and/or every set of doors. The company aims to install more seats between a set of doors and eliminate the 50 seats per person criteria (James, United Kingdom, 2018).

The resistance to the intensification of exploitation and the threats to labour rights driven by corporate policies is a complex phenomenon that occurs not only when institutional trade union action is openly but also in daily life disputes. When labour rights are under threat, workers get involved in national struggles and union-led action to resist the changes in labour conditions. This variety of actions and strategies shaped the day-to-day experiences of workers who resisted the wearing of their labouring bodies. However, the pandemic provided ‘progressive’ governments in both states the ideal window of opportunity to push for a race to the bottom.

5 The embodied experience of the pandemic flight

Messy airports, long queues and angry passengers during the 2022 “post-pandemic” Summer in the Global North is another vivant example for how changes in labour have an impact on workers. Flight cancellations and delays resulted from staff shortages in 2020 when companies based their survival strategies on labour cuts as global transport and supply chains were disrupted due to international lockdown policies. The pandemic deepened the already existing crisis in the aviation sector, which implied a job cut of 50% of the globally existing jobs (IATA 2020, 11). This development unfolded in an already precarious scenario with flexible and casual contracts, long working hours, and more tasks for less staff and time. Speed is the business of aviation with severe advantages for tourism and the capitalist circulation of time-sensitive commodities but with apparent disadvantages for global health. During pandemics, airports and the aviation industry have become global superspreaders. The measures taken during the health crisis of Covid-19, especially in the transport sector and regarding the working conditions, can be seen as a laboratory for corporations to test and implement further forms of exploiting workers on behalf of their bodies.

The need to wear masks for passengers and cabin crew workers alike interferes with what we described above as ‘semblantear’ as communication between cabin crew workers on board via facial expressions is limited. Moreover, the constant reminder that passengers must wear masks added an extra layer of paying attention and being exposed to possible aggression of clients opposing those safety requirements.

The repatriation flights meant high cognitive energy on the side of the workers. Meanwhile, the companies were more concerned about whether the design of the masks matched the cabin crew workers’ uniforms. They were putting the corporate design, displayed on the workers’ bodies, before the safety of the staff. On top of this, they operated under special and ‘emergency’ conditions, such as whole non-stop flights with two cabin crews that worked either on the outbound or return flight, which meant sleeping in the aircraft. The extension of working hours intensified the disruptive routine of workers and increased after-flight fatigue. In addition to this, the general uncertainty and pressure due to passengers stressed by the pandemic also intensified cabin crews’ mental and emotional work. These changes in mental and emotional labour were generally underestimated concerning contagion risks.

At the beginning of the pandemic, cabin crews dealt with new protocols on board, though, in some cases, they were not as clear as the official sources claim. Carolina (Argentina, 2020), with more than ten years of experience in Aerolíneas Argentinas, explained how the company did not provide basic protective measures, such as masks and disinfectants, or that workers did not trust them enough. This observation is expressed in the narrative of pilots cleaning with their own disinfectant. Interviewees also spoke about crew members carrying their food to avoid eating the one they delivered for the whole 28-hours-flight. In this ‘do it yourself care among workers, there is also emotional work involved, as Carolina comments:

“When we say Aerolíneas [Aerolíneas Argentinas] and Austral is family, it’s family. We all take care of each other and we all try to make sure that even though it’s a distressing situation, it’s a pleasant one, and we bring little things with us. Like ‘Hey, I brought chocolates’, you know what I mean?” (Carolina, Argentina, 2020).

Although it was an off-the-normal regulation, we understand the processes in the aviation sector as a laboratory for a post-pandemic way of organising the labour process. For instance, during repatriation flights, the working hours per shift were extended and labour division was re-organised. This reorganisation of labour raises health and safety concerns that go far beyond the hazard of the spreading virus. Resistance to corporate policies that seek to expand the labouring body’s physical, emotional, and mental boundaries has been organised collectively. It so has the challenge of dealing with the pandemic without protocol or extra safety measures (Paula, Argentina, 2020). During the pandemic outbreak, the aviation sector and the respective governments found fertile ground to increase labour casualisation further. In Argentina, the merge of Aerolineas Argentinas and Austral, two airlines with separate structures that belonged to Aerolíneas Argentinas Group. For Austral workers, this meant the loss of many conquered rights. This austerity plan was implemented with almost no opposition from the union leadership. At the same time, rank-and-file organisations and delegates of some sectors, like technicians and casualised land operators, engaged in more articulated criticism and action against these processes. They faced union persecution of shop stewards and dismissals, combined with internal trade union harassment in some cases (Cufré and Miguel 2021). In November 2020, when flight operations slowly re-started, a presidential decree opened the legal procedure that enabled the National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) to set up changes in the regulation of working hours (ANAC 2020). Unlike the previous attempt to implement longer shifts in 2012, reversed by union action at the company level, this modification affected all companies, and more troublingly, it found less resistance. Ultimately, it was implemented through a national degree by the Alberto Fernández government on the 24th of December 2021.

Until 2020, TAP increased staff members in Portugal. However, just like in Argentina, the management and the government could turn the tides around with the pandemic. Trade unions and cabin crews entered a defensive situation. From May 2020, when the pandemic and the economic crisis were officially declared, until November 2021, about 25% (2339 workers) of the 9143 TAP employees were made redundant or left the company (Villalobos 2021).

In February 2021, the pilots’ unions and the cabin crews’ union voted for an emergency contract negotiated with the government. The pilots agreed to a pay cut of 50% to keep 305 pilots in the occupation (RTP 2021). However, three months later, it was revealed that pilots were asked to fly on their free days (off-duty) to fill existing vacancies. The trade union estimates that about 895 pilot vacancies will develop by 2024. Pilots still in the occupation must fill the growing gap by sacrificing their break times (Lusa 2021)

The cabin crews agreed to accept a wage reduction of 25% until 2024 in exchange for a lower dismissal of ‘only’ 166 instead of the initially planned 746 lay-offs (Villalobos 2021). This agreement is not just a form of solidarity between the workers, who are willing to sacrifice wages to keep their colleagues in occupation. It also shows the immense pressure of workers who prefer to work on a lower salary than with lesser staff, suffering congestion. However, despite this agreement, the government announced another lay-off in July 2021 with 124 more workers. This practice breaches the collective democratic agreement of most workers, who voted for the emergency contract at the beginning of the year. Although the emergency contract was negotiated with the government and management, the latter ignored the regulations (Martins and Villalobos 2021). Since the workload in the sector will re-grow after the crisis, the impact of fewer staff will be physically and mentally experienced by the remaining crew members. Similar to the case of Argentina, the Portuguese government used the emergency situation to rapidly introduce a programme which effectively dismissed workers and lowered wages and distributed the remaining tasks among fewer workers. Meanwhile, the airline is already recovering and catching up with flights but with fewer personnel (Villalobos 2021).

In the European “post”-pandemic Summer season in the Global North of 2022, it became apparent that these two airlines and many others saw the consequences of such an excessive labour policy, forcing them to cancel thousands of flights. In sum, during the ‘pandemic flights, cabin crews used all their knowledge, energy, empathy, and solidarity to bring home national citizens during a very vague and unsafe situation. The same state for whom they made those sacrifices now confronts them with attacks on their jobs and labour conditions. However, this led to workers suffering and turning their back on the industry, causing a severe labour shortage.

6 Conclusion

This paper aimed to show that the intensified exploitation of workers and their bodies can be understood as a political process driven and implemented by transnational corporations. Neoliberal policies challenged production and social reproduction on different local, national, and international scales across the aviation infrastructure and the state apparatuses. Since aviation crosses borders and uses the seemingly ‘ungoverned’ sky to convey passengers and freight, transnational apparatuses are involved in regulations, standardisations and the creation of norms.

We argued that the renationalisation processes of the flag-ship airlines AR and TAP impacted workers’ health and safety, showing that the neoliberal core of those now state-owned companies remained. Using the body lens, we could disclose the often invisible and silenced forms of conflict and resistance like rejecting tasks, wearing flat shoes instead of high heels, or taking naps agreed in shifts with co-workers.

In so doing, the paper shows not only the centrality of labour conflicts and the significance of a labour perspective with reference to the body as the subject and site of negotiation to approach those conflicts. This specific perspective—the labouring body lens—in conjunction with the proactive consideration of the state, seeks to contribute to the role of TNCs in shaping labour policies across national borders and beyond their direct areas of activity. The “Ryanairisation” process deploys a global trend that pushes the state-owned companies to further labour intensification that workers resist in their everyday lives. That process creates social and labour conflicts, albeit in an often more invisible form, still impacting people’s physical integrity. And in this way, strikes, but also the sole refusal to execute certain tasks, can also be read as a form of “civil conflict management” (Gulowski and Weller 2017), yet on a far smaller scale than geostrategic conflicts.

The process of “Ryanairisation”, understood as undermining the working conditions, increasing the workload and expanding the limits of the labouring body towards intensified exploitation, remained a part of the flagship airlines in our two cases. The body lens allowed us to show that the nationalised airlines in Argentina and Portugal are not an exception to this global trend of a race to the bottom. The renationalisation of TAP and AR relies on extending working hours, reducing staff, and increasing the workload to minimise labour costs. The governments in Argentina and Portugal used the solidarity and contradictory relationship of workers and trade unions to ‘their’ companies to deepen the Ryanarisation of the flagship airlines. We aimed at highlighting the importance to look at less visible forms of conflict in the area of social power relations which we were able to do via the lens of the body. At the same time, we could see forms of resistance to it that would not be observable without discussing the coporal dimension of labour conflict. This allowed us to identify the some individual strategies like negotiations with crew chiefs and other workplace action with co-workers. When analysing the organised trade union open confrontations to AR and TAP labour policies we recognise the strong struggle traditions in defence of public-owned airlines and the contradictions this represents. Workers were engaged to contribute to the airlines’ recovery while experiencing the intensification in multiple but interconnected ways. Constant aches, exhaustion and tiredness that are not always categorised as ‘occupational diseases’ portray their daily experiences in this contradictory relationship to ‘their’ company. Thus, the symbolic weight of the flagship carriers plays a double role in limiting and triggering labour conflict: it can limit workers’ resistance when they feel responsible for the company image; on the other hand, it legitimates industrial action to prevent progressive governments in further pushing labour intensification, as the past era of private management. Nevertheless, Covid-19 created fertile grounds to accelerate it. Before the pandemic, the increased flight frecuencies demanded more working hours and involved more tasks. Then, the repatriation flights and the state of emergency served as a laboratory to access workers’ knowledge and test the limits of their physical and mental capacities. As in the “post-pandemic” Summer of the Global North, we saw many workers either leaving the sector or turning to strike actions, unseen in their history, before. The way the conflicts were and are taking place is a subject of further research.