Grin and Abhor It: The Truth Behind ‘Service with a Smile’ (Women & 'emotional labor')

[Starry Messenger]

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14535/grin_and_abhor_it_the_truth_behind_service_with_a_smile/

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Ned Resnikoff at MSNBC also commented on the rise of emotional labor, citing Noah and Eidelson's pieces. He wrote:

It may be slightly uncomfortable to be served coffee by someone who clearly hates working long hours for a minimum wage, but it’s unclear that the best way to deal with that discomfort is through escalating worker coercion—especially when employee rudeness or visible unhappiness helps to make their low wages and poor working conditions visible.

What Noah, Eidelson and Resnikoff mostly overlook is that this is deeply gendered labor, and its requirements are based on behavior that is expected of women beyond the workplace.

Feminist sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild is credited in all three pieces with coining the term “emotional labor.” Hochschild has spent decades writing of the role such labor plays in the lives of workers, especially women workers. She co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich the book Global Woman, which looked at the role of women, many of them migrant women, in the “new economy,” exploring the ways in which women's supposed skill at emotional labor leads to their exploitation as low-paid care and service workers.

Much of this work has been women's work for decades, in some cases for hundreds of years. Noah comments that the increasing levels of emotional or affective labor involved in the American workplace is harder for men, but let's not forget that even in service workplaces, men make more than women. Women are 60 percent of the fast-food workforce and 73 percent of the tipped workforce—but women in restaurant work make 83 cents to a man's dollar.

Wal-Mart is perhaps one of the most famous workplaces to exploit women's “talent” for service work; Bethany Moreton, in her book To Serve God and Wal-Mart, explained how the company hired Southern white housewives, catering to their Christian values and offering them low wages in return for work they were considered naturally good at. The caring professions—such as teaching, nursing, and domestic work—were considered to be women's work as well, and correspondingly paid less than their more prestigious cousins. A domestic worker who cooks for the family might well make less than minimum wage while a famous chef commands much more; elementary school teachers start at $30,000 or $40,000 a year while college professors (if they can get a position) are much better compensated, and I don't really need to tell you how much more doctors make than nurses, right?

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