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TWOCan Emotional Labor Be Fun?

In his 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith describes the hapless worker in a London pin factory standing for hours measuring pin after pin. In the 1867 first volume of Das Capital, Karl Marx takes us into the grueling twelve-hour day of a worker spinning, weaving, and dyeing wool in a Manchester cotton mill. For both authors, the iconic laborer was a man doing physical labor in a dreary factory. For Marx, the grim nineteenth-century factory—with its poor lighting, long hours, and low pay—oppressed the manual worker, whose focus on one tiny part of a larger process of production made him feel alienated from the things he made and from himself. For Smith, the pin-maker’s tedious task was the downside of a division of labor that nonetheless benefited the whole world. The Highland sheep-herder, living far from city factories, mastered many more skills and more greatly enjoyed his work than the city pin-maker, Smith noted, but he lived in a poorer world.

Neither Smith, who extolled the virtues of capitalism, nor Marx, its most powerful critic, could have envisioned the new iconic worker: a female service worker doing emotional labor. Nanny, childcare worker, nursing home attendant, call center employee, waitress, teacher, nurse—all such workers maintain voice-to-voice or face-to-face contact with clients and, in the course of doing so, perform emotional labor. This is the work of trying to feel the appropriate feeling for a job either by evoking or suppressing feelings—a task we accomplish through bodily or mental acts.¹

Service jobs vary. For the psychotherapist, emotional labor requires years of training, a formal degree, and is central to the job; for the hairdresser, manicurist, physical trainer, wedding planner, or bartender—emotional labor requires no training or degree and is largely optional.² One married mother of two in California told me in an interview I conducted for The Outsourced Self, “I have three mothers: my physical trainer, my masseuse and my psychotherapist. I’ll be going to them all until I die or they do.” In confessing a strong attraction to an older male colleague, she appealed to them all for advice: “My physical trainer is telling me, ‘He’s trying to seem cool because he’s so into you.’ My masseuse is telling me to take a vacation, and my therapist is helping me examine my marriage.”³

Some workers are superb natural therapists, while others do it poorly. Some manage emotion workers (head nurses, for example), while others are those managed by them (the nurses under supervision). Some work in teams; others alone. But for all of them, the same question comes up: Can emotional labor be fun? Or in a deeper sense, can it be meaningful?⁴

One can enjoy emotional labor immensely, I think, provided one has an affinity for it and a workplace that supports that affinity. Of the American childcare and eldercare workers I’ve interviewed, most expressed an affinity for the work they did. One nanny told me, “I’m a kid person. I climb right into the sandbox. I couldn’t handle working with the elderly.” I also heard eldercare workers express a special affinity for work with the elderly. “The lady I take care of reminds me a lot of my grandma,” one worker declared, “and I’m not one for kids.” Other workers were first drawn to their job on pragmatic grounds—the pay, the commute, the hours, or the availability of work—but later came to enjoy it.

But by itself, affinity does not tell us how much a worker loves her job. That is because we bring to work a certain idea about what it would take to love the job. Contained in that idea is what aspect of ourselves we wish to have affirmed, and people differ in what that aspect is. One person may be most gratified by the ability to provide for her family (a pragmatic source of meaning), or to serve God (devotional), or to seek opportunity (entrepreneurial), to overcome challenges (self-challenging), to exhibit great skill (professional pride), or to demonstrate one’s character as trustworthy, reliable, and helpful (to be a good person).⁵ Most of all, many care workers feel gratified by the pleasure they give others.⁶

A meaningful job is one thing; an easy job is another. A child erupts in a wild tantrum. A patient glares in a flash of paranoia. A confused client delivers a slap in anger. In such cases, work is not easy. But skilled emotion workers develop the art of appraising unwelcome events and know when and how to detach themselves from the display while remaining attached to the client. Indeed, many take special pride in handling really tough clients. A tantrum winds down. A paranoid flash subsides. An elderly person is soothed. The caregiver feels gratified in accomplishing these ends.

Some discover a yet deeper source of gratification. In an eight-city study, the sociologist John Baugher asked hospice workers how they decided to work with the dying and what effect it had on them. They spoke of the surprising joy they found in the experience of dropping social convention. Little things—conversational pleasantries, the time of day, disarray on a bedside table—ceased to matter. In the presence of a dying person, they felt welcomed, accepted, and trusted. Rather than feeling strained, many workers—Christian, Buddhist, atheist—felt a sense of peace and awe that they had stood by a person’s side at his or her passing. For them, emotional labor opened up a channel for the experience of awe in the face of the ultimate in human vulnerability.⁷

Satisfaction did not depend on having the perfect client. “A lot of my co-workers want to avoid Alzheimer’s patients,” one eldercare worker explained, “but I like working with them. I work with one man who doesn’t remember a thing that happened yesterday. He lives in a just-now world. But when I fixed him a steak today, he loved it. I’ve learned to enjoy him in a just-now way.”

An emotion worker is obliged to attune herself to a client’s needs, to empathize with the client, and to manage her own emotions in the course of doing so. She may get bad news from home: a child falls ill, a house is robbed. Or she may become aware of her client’s unpleasant bodily odor, or be jarred by his or her erratic behavior. Often the care worker makes herself into what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott has called “a holding environment”—an ambience sealed against disturbing leakage of anxiety, anger, envy, or sadness, for these might make the patient feel agitated, threatened, or unsafe.⁸ Emotional labor implies directionality, intention, and effort; it is, in that sense, real work.⁹ Just as a professional singer takes pride in her highly trained voice or an actor in a moving performance on stage, so the care worker often takes pride in cultivating warm, trusting, and resilient relationships with clients.

EMOTIONAL LABOR AND ITS DISCONTENTS

So what can get in the way of the gratifications of emotional labor? A number of things, first among them being low pay and low respect. In an age of public budget cuts, layoffs, high turnover, and public criticism of the public sector and its workers, it can be hard to enjoy doing emotional labor. As one California childcare center attendant told me,

I love the two- and three-year-olds I work with. But we only get $8.50 an hour [in 2000]. So a lot of my coworkers are quitting to get paid more as secretaries or bank clerks. The kids get attached to one worker only to have her replaced by another and another. They get upset. One little boy, Matthew, is getting very anxious that I may leave. I can’t live on $8.50 an hour, but I hate to leave him in the lurch.

In the United States, most eldercare is provided by lightly regulated, for-profit nursing homes, and many care workers are assigned too many patients. One study of for-profit nursing homes in western New York State found that 98 percent of them fell below the standard set by a federal study for the optimum patient-staff ratio of five to one.¹⁰ In some homes, nurse’s aides had to try to feed, wash, and assist thirty or more patients.¹¹ As Russell Reynolds, a former nursing aide at a for-profit suburban New York nursing home recounted, “Some nights we’d have four aides trying to take care of more than 300 people. . . . You might have to spend a half-hour helping somebody get to the bathroom. In that time, two other residents might fall down and need help.”¹²

When a care system breaks down, one sign is that the three-way relationship between the manager, the emotional laborer, and the client becomes frayed. A manager overextends the idea of efficiency or profit making, trying to “get more work out” of workers. They cease to be a team. The worker rushes about. She skimps. She spends too much time with one patient and neglects another. She cannot give her best; she does a broken job. She may unconsciously side with the malfunctioning system against its patients, whom she sees as “too demanding.” Or she may identify with the patients whom she feels she has failed, absorbing the shame of the system as her own: “I’ve been too callous. I’ve hurt the clients’ feelings.” Either way, the broken system has prevented her from feeling proud of her work. It has forced her to manage her feelings about doing her job in a broken care system.

HYPER-BUREAUCRATIZED, GLOBALIZED, AND DEVALUED CARE

Even when staff are well paid, have long-standing coworkers, and work in pleasant surroundings, the work may be rigidly rule bound or technology-driven. In one nursing home in Maine, in which my elderly aunt lived for a while, electrical cords were routinely attached to chairs in patients’ rooms so that every time my aunt rose from her chair, a loud buzzer, audible down a long corridor, rang in the nursing station. It alerted an attendant to come help her walk to the bathroom. It prevented falls, broken hips, and lawsuits, but it greatly demoralized my aunt as well as the other residents who were seated in the same kind of chairs. The attendants themselves responded as if the buzzer, not the person, had called them.

At a Maine-based home-care agency, eldercare workers are forbidden from socializing with their clients outside of work hours. As one care worker recounted to me, “I work for an agency that sends me out to care for a variety of elderly people in their homes. I became fond of one lame man and would drop by to bring him flowers on my way home from work. Well, my supervisor found out and told me that was forbidden. They don’t want clients hiring us directly, because then the agency would lose its cut of the money. I had to sneak behind the agency’s back to bring him flowers.”

Even if the hospital, nursing home, or childcare center is humanely run, a care system can be broken in a hidden place—at home. American nannies who put in shifts of nine, ten, and even twelve hours and return exhausted to their own neglected homes are working in broken care systems, too. But at least the children of such workers share residency with their mothers, unlike the children of immigrant caregivers who are cared for by relatives and local nannies back in Mexico, the Philippines, or elsewhere. Such immigrant working mothers suffer an accumulating sense of loss as the separation stretches to two, five, ten, or more years. And a higher proportion of migrant mothers are leaving their children behind than in the past; more that 80 percent of immigrant children now living in the United States had been separated from their parents prior to migration.¹³ In her study of the children of female migrant workers left behind in the Philippines, Rhacel Parreñas found that such children were often abandoned by their fathers. Taking their wives’ departure as a “divorce,” some fathers left the care of their children in the hands of their ex-mother-in-law or aunt, moved away from the natal village, and moved in with a new woman to start a new family.¹⁴

Still, the strained economies of the South have sent an ever larger stream of young and middle-aged mothers to jobs in the Global North. They travel along one of several corridors. From Central and South America to the United States and Canada, from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, from South Asia to the oil-rich Persian Gulf, from South Asia to the Asian north of Hong Kong and Japan, and from North Africa to Europe, emotional laborers travel from poor to rich countries.¹⁵ However much a migrant worker wants to migrate, she often experiences a sense of loss and loneliness as she daily feeds, bathes, and plays with her client’s children while living half a world away from her own (see chapters 10,11, and 12).

Finally, child and eldercare workers often speak of feeling that they, like the nature of their work, are unseen and underappreciated, which makes it all the harder to do. Care work is a hot potato job. Many husbands turn over care of the young and old to their wives. Wives, if they can afford to, often turn it over to childcare and eldercare workers. In turn, many immigrant nannies hire nannies back home to help care for the children that they have left behind, forming a care chain.¹⁶

Underlying this gender/class/national transfer is the devaluation of care. This is based on the idea that care work is “easy,” “natural,” and—like parenting—not quite real work. Part of what makes care work invisible is that the people the worker cares for—children, the elderly, the disabled—are themselves somewhat invisible.¹⁷ Strangers entering a room may tend to ignore or “talk over” the very young and old.

The childcare worker who loved to “jump in the sandbox” with her 3-year-old charges—and who had to comfort them when coworkers left for better-paying jobs—found that the value of her work was invisible even to her husband. As she explained, “My husband is a carpenter and has unsteady work. So some of the time we rely on my pay, which is low. One night he told me, ‘Honey, why don’t you quit childcare? The pay is lousy. We’ll have our own kids—you can give your love to them. You could get a real job.’”¹⁸

This all means that many emotional laborers face a great paradox. Though they may come to work hoping to take pride in a job well done, low pay, understaffing, rigid rules, and devaluation can set up circumstances which prevent that. Sadly, their main job becomes protecting patients from the harm of life in a broken, globalized, over-bureaucratized, or profit-hungry system. A tragic cycle is set in motion. The more broken the system, the more disheartened its emotional laborers. The more disheartened they become, the more detached they are from their work, the higher the turnover rates, and the more broken the system.

The alternative to accepting this is to fix the broken system. That starts with recognizing the extraordinary emotional labor it takes to maintain a thriving childcare center, nursing home, hospital, or family. It would also call for a bold nationwide care movement to improve the conditions of care workers. If these efforts were successful, people would work in systems that were themselves well tended. In such a world, jobs requiring emotional labor could still be tough, but they would be meaningful—and even fun.