Читать книгу Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives - Madeleine Bunting - Страница 15

The two ways of measuring the demands of a job which we have considered – time and effort – have defined industrial relations since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but a third is a phenomenon of the last few decades: emotional labour. It’s not just your physical stamina and analytical capabilities which are required to do a good job, but your personality and emotional skills as well. From a customer services representative in a call centre to a teacher or manager, the emotional demands of the job have immeasurably increased. Emotional labour has become one of the hardest parts of many jobs. So just why is your employer after your heart?

The demand for emotional labour is driven firstly by the growth of the service economy. Companies are increasingly competing to provide a certain type of emotional experience along with their product, be it a mobile phone or an insurance policy. Where once muscle-power was crucial to the employment contract for millions of manual workers, its modern-day equivalent is emotional empathy and the ability to strike up a rapport with another human being quickly. Employers believe customers will stay loyal, and will sometimes pay a premium, for a certain kind of interaction – they want to be treated as individuals, with a personalised service in a mass consumer market driven by technology. The standards are exacting: employees are instructed to provide service with personality, ‘naturalness’, spontaneity and warmth; qualities which they must, paradoxically, provide consistently.

Another kind of emotional labour is also in increasing demand. It is a response to the changing structure of organisations. The clearly denned hierarchical bureaucracies which served industrial society well in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been outstripped by the pace of change; only much flatter, more fluid organisations can adapt and continuously re-adapt in different formulations of networks. But as the lines of authority become less clear, much more falls to the individual employee to negotiate, influence and persuade. This is often called the ‘relationship economy’, and what makes it particularly hard work is that it requires skills of empathy, intuition, persuasion, even manipulation, for which there is little preparation in an educational system focused exclusively on analytical rather than emotional skills.