The Politics of Stress: The Case of Air Traffic Control

Abstract

Analysis of the 1981 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strike suggests that workers who employ the concept of stress to describe undesirable job conditions risk unexpected negative consequences. In deciding not to make subjective claims that can only be addressed in political terms, workers necessarily appeal to outside experts to provide scientific, objective descriptions of job conditions. Unfortunately, different experts define stress in strikingly different ways, allowing for a kind of shell game in which the very existence of stress can become problematical. In addition, the stress experts have been unable to offer more than weak data to support the theories that link difficult working conditions to pathological outcomes. Thus workers are likely to lose labor disputes that depend on the stress discourse. A major reason for such an outcome is that job conditions, as part of the social world, lend themselves poorly to a form of inquiry designed to investigate the physical world.