Affective labour at work: automation, technological precarities and airport workers’ responses to workplace change

Rapid successions of technological inventions have threatened to upend existing structures of work, prompting a need to rethink labour geography in the twenty-first century. In particular, the pressures that automation brings to workers raise some interesting questions about how feelings toward work are evolving, and how active appropriation and dispensation of personal affects may be needed for workers, especially blue-collar workers long caught up in technological revolutions, to get through increasingly precarious work. Deploying the concept of affective labour and drawing on semi-structured interviews with 38 male airport workers, this paper aims to understand how working-class employees in one particular sector of aviation—baggage-and-cargo handling—precisely respond to these automative encroachments with these affective resources. It explores the potentiality of affective labour as a personal or group strategy, where people choose to make their bodies, dispositions and feelings matter more to legitimize their presence. We articulate these ideas through three different affective registers—expressed as sociability, tactility and responsibility—that the airport workers enact in the workplace. The paper seeks to make a departure from current debates on the utility of emotions and affects at work, by arguing that affective labour may sometimes serve less as a display of service or one’s craft, than a malleable resource that is used to hedge against times of precarity, especially among the working class.