Customer Violence and Employee Health and Safety

Abstract

This paper seeks to extend current perspectives on occupational health and safety (OHS) by integrating `emotional labour' into OHS debates. We focus on the growing incidence of customer violence in the airline and railway industries and how this intensifies the demands made on employees' emotional labour. We argue that, just as physical labour is considered in terms of volume and intensity, so should emotional labour. Moreover, we argue that high demands on emotional labour may be equally detrimental to employee health. Based on 1173 questionnaire responses, we explore the nature of demands on emotional labour and the related OHS outcomes. We also explore a range of secondary literature which examines the external and internal factors of work organization that have contributed to a rise in customer abuse, where we argue that customer abuse is perpetuated by a range of cost-rational and profit-centred policies. The paper concludes by arguing that, as a factor in OHS, emotional labour is likely to be shown equal disregard to physical labour in terms of management's relative freedom to utilize (exploit) these as far as possible, regardless of possible health and safety implications.