March 23, 2007
Stewardesses II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:50 AM EST I suspect the eroticization of stewardesses in the early decades of the airline industry was not entirely unconnected with the economic environment in which the airline industry was born. Federal regulation of airlines began in 1926 with the passage of the Air Commerce Act, which charged the Department of Commerce with issuing rules, licensing pilots, and certifying aircraft. It was run by the new Aeronautics Branch of the Commerce Department. As the nascent airline industry grew in the 1930s (although it still transported only a tiny fraction of long-distance passengers at the end of that decade), regulation increased. In 1934 the Aeronautics Branch became the Bureau of Air Commerce (bureau, in bureaucratese, is more prestigious than branch). In 1938 the Civil Aeronautics Act took airline regulation out of the Department of Commerce and into a new independent agency, the Civil Aeronautics Authority. Crucially, it also gave the CAA the power both to regulate air fares and to determine which routes the various carriers could serve. (In 1940, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) took over economic regulation, while the Civil Aeronautics Administration (later the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA) took over the technical regulation.) In other words, the Civil Aeronautics Act created an aviation cartel run by the government. The purpose was to prevent “destructive competition,” exactly the same purpose of the old trusts that had stirred the politics of a generation earlier. The only difference was that these were government-run cartels, not privately run ones. But it is, of course, competition that drives capitalism, forcing companies to constantly look for ways to cut costs and to offer better products. The Civil Aeronautics Act stifled competition by means of price and flight schedules. Since airlines couldn’t compete by offering better aircraft—there being only a very few to choose from—and since in the 1940s and 1950s there was no real way to compete in terms of food and drink, about the only way left to compete was by offering sexier stewardesses to admire in flight. Cartels not only stifle innovation, however, they tend also to foster handsome labor contracts, since the labor costs can always be passed along to the consumers by means of higher prices. This is quite as true of government-run cartels, such as the airline industry, as it is of privately run cartels, such as the American automobile industry in the postwar era. Foreign competition ended the automobile cartel in the 1970s, and the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 mandated the phasing out of economic regulation of the aviation industry. The CAB ceased to exist in 1984. Both industries have never been the same, and the old “legacy” companies, Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler in the case of the automobile industry, United, Delta, American, Eastern, Braniff, TWA, Pan Am, etc., in the case of the airline industry, have been struggling to adapt to the new economic environment ever since, with very limited success. No small part of the problem in doing so has been the labor contracts and work rules from the cartel era that are simply not sustainable in the new competitive environment. The disappearance of the pulchritudinous stewardesses (and the now quite startling ads promising them that Joshua Zeitz quotes) is certainly connected to the modern feminist movement, among other trends. But the fact that the airlines could, after 1978, promise to get passengers where they were going more cheaply and more conveniently than the other guy—a much more powerful sales pitch than leggy stewardesses—probably had much to do with it as well.
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