Automating passenger work: airport labour at the transductive interface

Abstract

Contemporary airport automation often takes the form of self-service interfaces which transform the work tasks of check-in and boarding. In effect, such interfaces redistribute substantive and complex service labour to passengers. This article rethinks contemporary automation through the lens of the interface and examines how such automation constitutes a spatially-extended and more-than-technological assemblage that reconfigures labour across the consumer-worker divide. Rather than drawing clear lines between agential humans and technical things, we examine human elements of the interface as also having technicity within the spatialities of automation. Drawing on interviews with passenger services personnel at the two largest airports in Beijing, China, we find that at self-service interfaces airport workers step out of the way to allow passengers to step up, interfacing directly with ‘back-end’ airport digital infrastructure previously limited to paid personnel. In place of routine transduction, the work of check-in and boarding agents becomes regulatory, i.e. assisting, trouble-shooting and understanding: the work that cannot be automated. This work includes handling those passengers that self-service interfaces exclude: passengers who stray from–or cannot adhere to–the form of the generic, skilled and legible PAX. In closing, we consider this paper’s implications for future research on automation, spatiality and labour.