I was recently in Stansted Airport, queueing in a low-ceilinged, quasi-temporary structure to enter the departure area for a Ryanair flight. There were two queues; the ‘priority queue’ which passengers had paid extra to join, and the ordinary one, but just one airport employee covering both, toggling stressfully between two irritated groups. Each time she switched, she left a line of people to wait. As I neared the front of the ordinary queue, she told a man with a wheelie case that he’d have to pay extra as his bag was too big. He objected and put it into the measuring frame. It fit easily, but the check-in woman refused to accept this, and demanded an extra £40. The man objected again and asked why the rules weren’t being followed, but ultimately paid up as he had no choice. He was clearly upset, but never raised his voice, used insulting or abusive language or made threatening gestures. He simply didn’t supply the meekness the very stressed out airport employee desired. As he moved into the boarding area, she called after him that she could have him taken off the plane, but it was very full and noisy, and he either ignored this or didn’t hear it and took a seat near the door. Both lines were now even longer, and she was dealing with the 200-odd passengers alone.
While dealing with the next passenger, and then me and the two women behind me, she began to cry. She carried on working but must have pressed a button for help, because a few minutes later, several security guards arrived. Within minutes, five or six security men arrived. The woman pointed to the passenger who had upset her, but there were too many people in between for her to directly identify him. Later still, another employee arrived to relieve her and check the rest of the passengers through. The two women and I who had witnessed the incident all sat on a window sill near the check-through desk the security guards were now clustered at, as we were worried the man would be wrongly denied boarding. When we heard the guards say they would go and find the man, we approached them to say we had seen the incident from the front of the queue and that it may have been different from what they’d been told.
We were all white and middle-aged, and while we’d been quite voluble amongst ourselves, we were each careful to speak in soft, unthreatening and really quite feminised ways to the young rent-a-cops who now outnumbered the passport and ticket-checker by a ratio of five or six to one. The main guard thanked us but didn’t ask any follow-up questions, and we stayed nearby, implicitly ready to intervene. In the noisy disarray of the boarding area, the passenger managed to be one of the first onto the plane. As we boarded, a couple more security guards had joined the initial cluster and moved onto the tarmac, so there were now seven or eight. Walking past, we heard them say the man was already on the plane. They seemed to have decided it wasn’t worth the effort to have him taken off. As I climbed the steps of the plane, it was striking just how many security guards were now milling aimlessly around, compared to the lone and stressed out employee who’d summoned them in the first place.
A tiny and inadequate amount of resources was routinely being put into the core work of the airport and airline; getting passengers safely and efficiently onto the plane. It was left to a single employee working in a determinedly difficult and unpleasant situation – designed to extract more money from passengers for a ‘premium’ service. She was operating in a work culture that clearly despises the customers and pressures employees to squeeze them for yet more money when they can be claimed to have disobeyed luggage rules. She was clearly overwhelmed by the task, and left to deal with the emotional as well as practical consequences of Ryanair and Stansted’s decisions. I’m not surprised that a merely irritated and resistant passenger was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Her only agency in the situation, and the only acceptable reason to request help, was to cast the passenger as abusive or even dangerous. She couldn’t ask for help to do her actual job, difficult or near-impossible thought it was. It was designed to be that way. However, she could press an alarm button that brought security men almost immediately to deal with a situation wholly produced by her impossible working conditions.
The resources the airline and airport put into care, that is, providing the actual service they’d been paid for, were purposely minimal. The resources available for coercion, that is, the enforcement of compliance by the people ostensibly in receipt of the service, outweighed those for care by at least five to one, going on the number of security guards who turned up. If even one more person had been assigned to check through the two lines of passengers, there would have been no upset employee, no unfair threats to remove a passenger from a flight, and no further delay to all the passengers while the situation was resolved. But the systemic resourcing decisions of Stansted and Ryanair clearly prioritised coercion over care, even when minimal care standards weren’t met, resulting in a disturbance to everyone. I think the widespread coercion to care ration really is as simple as there being person to provide a dismally inadequate service, and between five and seven people to intervene forcefully to ensure customer compliance when the service broke down.
And this is an airport, not a detention centre, welfare office or academy school. Even in this setting where passengers are paying customers, a passenger who complies outwardly with the arbitrary application of fines, but whose emotional affect is not sufficiently compliant, risks serious punishment. Objection or insolence can be unacceptable, depending on the emotional state of the airport staff. Compliance isn’t sufficient. Something closer to obeisance is advisable, just to be on the safe side. The airport staff member was powerless to improve her working situation. She will likely have been close to minimum wage, and certainly on a precarious, arms-length contract. The only power she had was to kick down, and she did. You don’t have to be Foucault to notice the chronically stressful and highly charged situation is contrived to elicit the kind of unpredictable emotional response from the employee that it did. The arbitrariness and unpredictability of near-powerless enforcers is a key part of how order is maintained with low manpower. These situations encourage everyone nearby to ‘mind their own business’, i.e. ignore what’s happening or risk being labelled disruptive themselves. There is a strong interest of other passengers not simply to comply and ignore, but to blame the person who’s been singled out.
The only thing that (may have) saved the passenger from being kicked off the flight and added to a watchlist for the crime of speaking in an unpleasing tone, was that three other passengers decided to very gently intervene. Having gone through to the boarding area I and the two other women – strangers to each other – each positioned ourselves close to the desk where we could keep an eye on the security guards. Then, when they appeared undecided about what to do, we gently approached to ask if they would like to know more about the incident. At each stage, and without ever talking tactics, we played the nice-white-lady card of inoffensively suggesting things had not been quite as clear-cut as presented. We offered our names if any further inquiries were to happen, subtly making it clear that we might persevere. Above all, we offered, suggested and did not proclaim. We didn’t confront, object or contradict. We didn’t even describe the incident as we’d seen it, just offered to, with the implication that the half dozen young guys now all fired up and unsure of what to do must of course be the right people to adjudicate it. That removed just enough heat and momentum for the situation to gradually deflate in an entropic pattern of clumps of security guys standing around talking each other out of disrupting the plane’s departure. It’s sickening, really, but without ever making a tactical plan, without even raising a complicit eyebrow, each woman knew almost to a cellular level the precise method of confusion and de-escalation the situation required.
The overwhelmed airport employee never got the support she needed to do her job well, though perhaps at least she felt that when she called for the cavalry it would come running. As far as anyone official was concerned, the incident probably just proved you need more security guys than counter-staff. For some deeply human reason, the systems we currently build are unquenchingly thirsty for coercive resources to punish tiny acts of resistance to the inadequate and failing services they provide. One extra person working to care for passengers would negate the need for half a dozen punishers kept mostly on standby, but that doesn’t even seem to be an option the airport and airline consider. This small incident seems emblematic of so much of life in the UK, and perhaps more broadly.
It’s irrational and costly, and spreading everywhere, this 4:1 or 5:1 ratio of coercion to care. Witness the recent decision of a US school district to replace libraries with ‘discipline centers’, or the UK Tory politician Robert Jenrick’s purely sadistic instruction for a child refugee centre to paint over the cartoons on the wall. Or indeed, the appetite of the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, to target £8 billion in ‘fraud’, when £20-30 billion of welfare that people need and deserve goes unpaid each year because its systems are so user-hostile. There’s something pathological about how coercion sucks in vast resources when care is more economical, not to mention humane, but is nonetheless starved and derided. This pattern is so obvious and ubiquitous that you’ll have noticed it too. I point it out because although it is everywhere, and supported by both UK political parties, it is not sensible, and nor is it inevitable.
From Crooked Timber, here.