Arthur Hailey As Richard Nixon: Workplace Safety in Airport Christian B

Arthur Hailey as Richard Nixon: Workplace Safety in Airport Christian B. Long Abstract: In his best-selling 1968 novel Airport, Arthur Hailey takes psychological workplace stresses seriously, and he places white-collar workplace safety at the centre of his novel. The disaster narrative in Airport not only lands an airplane against the odds but also shows how important workplace safety is to the safe and continued functioning of the transportation system. In this way, Hailey’s novel narratively and thematically registers changes in contemporary US culture that would soon take legis- lative form, as when Richard Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970. Keywords: Airport, air traffic controllers, Arthur Hailey, best-sellers, Occu- pational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), transportation, workplace safety Re´sume´ : Dans son roman Airport, paru en 1968, Arthur Hailey prend tre`s au se´rieux les diffe´rents stress psychologiques lie´s au milieu de travail, et place la sećurite´ des milieux professionnels au centre de son histoire. Air- port est un rećit de catastrophe qui ne se contente pas de faire atterrir un avion contre toutes attentes, il montre aussi l’importance de la sećurite´ au travail pour le fonctionnement continu et suˆ r du syste`me de transport. Ce faisant, le roman de Hailey prend acte, dans la narration comme dans les the`mes, de changements qui, dans la culture e´tatsunienne contemporaine, allaient bientoˆt trouver leur forme le´gislative avec la ratification, par Ri- chard Nixon, de la loi sur la sante´ et la sećurite´ au travail (Occupational Safety and Health Act), en 1970. Mots cle´s:Airport,controˆleurs ae´riens, Arthur Hailey, bestsellers, Occupa- tional Safety and Health Act (OSHA), transport, sećurite´ en milieu de travail Arthur Hailey’s characters work long hours. Hotel (1965) begins with everyone from the owner to the bell-boys staying late. Wheels (1971) opens with the president of Ford getting up at © Canadian Review of American Studies / Revue canadienne d’études américaines 47, no. 1, 2017 doi:10.3138/cras.2016.006 five a.m., eating breakfast and “alternately reading memoranda (mostly on special blue stationery which Ford vice-presidents used in implementing policy) and dictating crisp instructions into a recording machine . as he accomplished in an hour what would have taken most other executives a day, or more” (10). Overload (1979) begins with an executive staying at the office until midnight and coming back at four in the morning. Not everyone spends all day at work, though: The Moneychangers (1975) restrains its white-collar crime to banker’s hours, more or less. Airport (1968), on the other hand, takes place in a blizzard, which causes airport manager Mel Bakersfield to work for almost three straight days. The back cover to the Pan Books pocket-sized movie tie-in edition of Airport summarizes the novel with a stage- setting passage followed by a series of conflicts that mix the worlds of work and home: From traffic control to customs hall, from airport manager’s office to the lay-over apartments in “Stewardesses Row,” the rooms are peopled with men and women whose private pressures and passions match the fury of the blizzard which sweeps the airfield . For seven suspense-filled hours, a blocked runway . suicide . pickets . an aerial stowaway . pregnancy . smuggling . divorce . mass de- monstrations . and a psychotic with a home-made bomb on board 113 an intercontinental jetliner, build to a nail-biting climax. (Ellipses in Revue canadienne d original) This litany places a series of discrete but interlocking interpersonal problems into the airport space, pushing the shared problem—a massive snow-storm that makes the physical operation of an air- ’ port incredibly difficult—into the background. In a Hailey novel, études américaines 47 (2017) work is represented as the management of problems and people, not as physical labour. Such a conception of work also treats personal problems as tasks to be managed while at (and through) work, thereby increasing efficiency. Hailey’s characters’ offices are climate-controlled, which more or less disconnects their problem- solving, both professional and personal, from material conditions like the cold and snow of a blizzard. For as little as he registers what we might call blue-collar job safety, Hailey quite clearly re- cognizes and advocates for white-collar workplace safety. Safety, for Hailey, begins in the office. However, the logic of a safer workplace applies beyond the manager’s office door to include all workers; Hailey registers this fact obliquely, and contemporary US culture registered it legislatively. In What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960 (2009), Gordon Hutner claims that soon-forgotten best-seller novels are key to the project of literary criticism. Such books constitute “the merely ordinary, that is, the fiction against which academic taste- makers later needed to contradistinguish the best” (1). Arthur Hailey’s novels are not widely read in 2016, replaced as they are by the newest iteration of popular fiction from the likes of Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, and Jodi Picoult. Hailey’s novels, in addition to their generic ordinary style, offer access to another spe- cies of ordinary: their status quo, make-no-waves hegemonic polit- ical thinking, undergirded by their contemporary mass appeal. Airport represents a key document in the history of literature, culture, and labour politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The novel concentrates on white-collar managers and air traffic controllers who find the psychological stresses of their jobs exacer- bated by an emergency. The middle-class, airport-fiction-reading audience for best-sellers like Airport could get behind Hailey’s Canadian Review of American Studies 47 (2017) workplace safety agenda, precisely because it is about them and 114 their psychological well-being, albeit at the safe remove of disaster management. But in making the case for workplace safety that addresses managers’ and professionals’ stresses, Hailey implicitly accepts the importance of workplace expertise and safety for blue- collar labourers as well. In his attention to the stresses of the air traffic controller workplace, Hailey advocates for structures that demand that management operate with worker safety as their guide—first for white-collar workers, but with the potential for blue-collar workers as well. In other words, Arthur Hailey is the Richard Nixon of popular novelists. Even though it shows little interest in the working-class people most likely to benefit from the Act, Airport prepares Hailey’s readers to accept the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) of 1970 as not just legitimate but necessary. Post-Industrial Capitalist Realism In one of Hailey’s rare appearances in academic literary criticism, Peter Mann uses Hailey to make a point about the non-literariness of genre fiction: “Certainly he is a skilled story-teller who com- mands a huge readership, but no literary prizes are likely to go his way” (97). Hailey finds a more appreciative audience, and appears with more frequency, in management-focused journals—in the medical field in Health Care Supervisor and Clinical Research Prac- tices and Drug Regulatory Affairs, and in hospitality in Managing Ser- vice Quality: An International Journal, Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, and Journal of Management Education—and as as- signed reading at the Cornell University School of Hotel Manage- ment (J. Sutherland 54). Hadyn Ingram uses Hailey’s Hotel—“the most seminal book about modern hotels” (“Inns” 32)—as a con- crete example of “the complexity and excitement of hotel life; its cyclical, iterative and multi-functional nature,” and, in more than one article on hotel management, to demonstrate that “[t]here can be few business scenarios where operations systems are so central and pervasive, and where its activities are so little under- stood” (Ingram “Using” 7). Peter Savage’s review of Hailey’s novels—The Final Diagnosis, Hotel, Airport, In High Places, Wheels, and The Moneylenders—pays similar attention to “operations systems,” reading the novels because “one of the most reliable in- dexesofasociety’smentalityabout its organizations lies in its popular fictions” (185). Hotel managers may like Hailey, but if Savage’s review is any indication, public administrators do not. Savage admits that Hailey “is surely knowledgeable about the 115 working of the organizations in which he sets them,” but he ques- Revue canadienne d tions the value of that knowledge, noting that, “in almost bemus- ing profusion, you [readers] are given accounts of things you do not know, or ever thought to ask, as you tangle with our orga- nized world” (186). Savage’s final assessment would not be out of place in a journal dedicated to literary criticism, offering a quite clear indictment of the ideological position that Hailey’s novels ’ études américaines 47 (2017) stake out: [A]t heart, Hailey is an apologist, not an iconoclast. Notwithstanding the incessant preaching, his work is an antiseptic celebration of the organizational world presented in such a way as to have his readers think well of their organizations and be less resistant to their impera- tives. Hailey’s organizational perspectives come straight out of classical management theory. (187) In this terrifically acid appraisal, Savage locates contemporary hegemonic thinking within Hailey’s managerialist novels. In the pro- cess, however, he loses track of the other trend in Hailey studies: socialist realism. Slavoj Zizek begins his essay titled “The Family Myth of Ideology” with his usual upside-down praise, calling Hailey the first great author of “capitalist realism” (whose bestsellers, back in the 1960s—Hotel, Airport, Cars [sic] . .— always focused on a par- ticular site of production or complex organization, mixing a melodra- matic plot with lengthy descriptions of the site’s functions, in an unexpected echo of the Stalinist classics of the late 1920s and 1930s such as [Fyodor] Gladkov’s Cement .

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