Via iFunny Brazil
“Women are fed up because we’ve realized we can’t clock out. Emotional labor is expected from us no matter where we turn. We are fed up with the ongoing demand to be the primary providers of emotional labor in all arenas of life because it is taxing, it is time consuming, and it is holding us back.”
-Gemma Hartley, Fed Up, Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward
Why is there dirt on my leeks?
One of the constants of working at a startup is a never ending parade of euphemisms that flatten complicated emotional experiences into cute little sayings. A job with more than one person’s workload, poorly scoped responsibilities, and constantly changing priorities from leadership becomes “wearing many hats.” I’ve always found this phrase particularly odd because few people look good in hats, much less many hats. Less glamorous still is the reality of actually wearing many hats in a workplace, which in my experience is defined by an exhausted, anxious, reactive roller coaster for your nervous system most days and weeks. But the hats have to be worn, the plates have to be spun, the flaming chainsaws have to be juggled, one Slack message and Zoom meeting at a time.
At Imperfect Produce, the customer care team was the shock absorbers of the company. They were the first and last to feel any major changes that happened, and the people that felt them most intensely. One week, due to a batch of Facebook ads performing astoundingly well, our customer base outgrew our customer care team’s ability to respond to tickets. They were underwater in a matter of 24 hours, “in the weeds,” as they say in restaurants. So the rest of the office jumped in to help bail them out.
This is how I found myself responding to a woman from LA who was outraged that the organic leeks she’d ordered came with some dirt on the roots. Her incensed message claimed that there had been so much mud clinging to the base of one of the leeks that it had made a mess of her kitchen and ruined her day. If it was even possible for a seasonal allium to turn her marble counter top with a tasteful backsplash into kitchen equivalent of the Battle of the Somme was, for now, beside the point. I had to holster my befuddlement, be nice, and quickly write a response. As I bashed out some platitudes on my keyboard I had two questions slithering around my brain like indignant cobras.
The first was:
Was she aware that leeks, like all vegetables, are grown in dirt?
The second question was:
How on earth did the customer care team put up with people like this all day without losing their minds?
via u/icecoldchris09 at r/MemeTemplatesOfficial
What is emotional labor?
If you’ve ever worked a hospitality, retail, or service job of any kind, you’ve had to put up with nonsense like this and likely worse. They’re frustrating experiences that over time crystallize into great stories. One of my favorite parts of working the salad station at Mission Chinese Food was my proximity to the front of house, my station a sort of blood brain barrier between the dining room and the wok room. Whenever there was a drunk, obnoxious, or hilarious table causing havoc, I’d get the gossip from Heather or Julia firsthand via legendary vent sessions. Their emotional labor reliably produced gems to discuss over our beers later.
First coined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her breakout book The Managed Heart, emotional labor describes a job that requires you to manage your own emotions as part of achieving success for the business. A server at a restaurant must smile, be polite, and accommodate guests to the best of their ability, even if a guest is rude and confrontational. Hochschild also explores how, conversely, bill collectors must be impatient and aggressive towards their clients, even if that’s not their natural disposition.
Emotional labor is not inherently a bad thing. Like most sociological concepts, the devil and the relevance are in the details. It’s the messy nuances of how it exists outside of the pages of a book that make it most fascinating and valuable.
For Hochschild, one of the biggest downsides of emotional labor is how over time it estranges you from your own emotions. Because you’re being paid, though often not very much, to suppress how you really feel, your relationship with your feelings suffers over time, alienating you from a key part of your interior life. This may sound exceedingly academic, so instead ponder the all-too-familiar feeling of being at the end of your rope when you arrive home after a tough day at work. Emotional regulation, like focus, is a finite mental resource that takes time to replenish. Even vanilla office jobs can be taxing emotionally, so a worker who has a long day of emotional labor is even more likely to regularly arrive home depleted. They may understandably shut down, lash out, or dissociate from whatever they encounter on the home front. This is challenging for them personally, their family unit, and sense of work life balance. Put more bluntly, emotional labor is often the carpool lane on the road to burnout.
The challenging duality of emotional labor is that on the one hand you’re being paid to put up with difficult people, but on the other hand, managing your emotions and other people’s emotions is never your only job; you always have to manage them on top of also doing your job. Since emotional labor jobs are usually in service or hospitality, they inevitably require the dreaded “wearing many hats.” You’re juggling a few different types of work in addition to freelancing as a therapist, kindergarten teacher, and drill instructor. The flight attendant is expected to know the all of safety protocols of the aircraft, be able to serve drinks and snacks, help the pilots and each other load and unload the plane in a timely manner, while having to put up with passengers who’ve had too much to drink on their flight home from Miami. It’s a recipe for managed chaos on a good day and burnout or worse on a bad day.
via knowyourmeme.com
Is emotional labor getting more difficult?
The state of modern emotional labor seems to be getting more precarious by the day. This is firstly a matter of demographics and economics. As our economy has moved away from agriculture and manufacturing towards service and retail jobs, more and more people are now required to do emotional labor as part of their day to day life.
Simultaneously, corporate cost cutting measures are working to outsource or eliminate these jobs all together. With the rise of AI, many companies are now trying to automate the type of work that requires the most emotional labor like customer support roles. One day a large language model will explain that leeks have some dirt on them but we’re so sorry they messed up your counter.
This raises the tricky question: is a menial and draining job answering phone calls and emails from angry and impatient shoppers better than no job at all? This question isn’t just for would-be service workers, either. Dealing with a human being is still widely seen as preferable to an interminable phone call with a robotic flowchart, hellish bureaucracy embodied. Most of us would rather force a human to do emotional labor for us than have a robot help, as evidenced by the popularity of sites like Get Human. Even as we abuse and resent emotional service workers, we are all still oddly dependent on them to help us figure out what happened to our checked luggage or when our online order will arrive. As service jobs become more stressful, outsourced, or automated, what’s left is a dwindling, increasingly overextended workforce facing customers who are more impatient and frustrated than ever.
Emotional labor intersects with thorny gender issues, too. Since women are overrepresented in service jobs like flight attendants, customer service, and front of house restaurant work, it’s largely women that society is relying on to perform emotional labor for us. Worse still, the gender pay gap means that women are not only dealing with challenging emotional labor but they are also being paid less than men to do so. If that wasn’t bad enough, women are also expected to do most of the very real labor, emotional and otherwise, entailed by raising a family and keeping the house together. So women are expected to perform emotional labor on and off the clock, making an already wobbly social dynamic even more unstable. This insane lasagna of injustices explains the rise in feminist nonfiction books with understandably livid titles like Fed Up, All the Rage, Essential Labor, Emotional Labor, and Labor of Love, and most recently Mom Rage. All of these candidly voice how frustrating and limiting these inequities are for women.
Is the term Karen inherently sexist?
Our society never misses a chance to be sexist—even the backlash to the backlash to the grind of emotional labor has also hit women hardest. It’s baked into the very language we use to describe this situation. As the memes I’ve used to punctuate this post illustrate, the shorthand for a customer that’s being horrible to service workers is a Karen. She is always depicted as a middle-aged white woman with a bob haircut and a penchant for asking for the manager. Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast episode on Karens paints her as an “affluent white suburban mom narcissistically ensconced in her own privilege.” While the name Karen may have originated in a Dane Cook (remember him?) sketch about “the friend nobody likes,” today it’s evolved into a shorthand for obnoxious white women everywhere.
Beckys and weaponized white femininity
A discussion of Karens must also cover an older stereotype, the Becky. In the Karen podcast, Decoder Ring describes the Becky as a well established trope in the Black community of a white woman whose presence is a threat to Black safety. While Karens are rude to CVS cashiers, Beckys call the cops on Black people for existing in their space in ways falsely perceived to be threatening.
I bring this up because real life examples of Karens don’t just involve abusing service workers; they often take on an ugly, racist angle. Our caricature of Karen may be funny, but real world examples of this behavior like “Barbecue Becky” or “Central Park Karen” are quite bleak. These white women who infamously called the police on a Lake Merritt barbecue and a Central Park birdwatcher have gotten justifiably criticized for their bad behavior. Women like these are held up as examples of white privilege and weaponized femininity.
As we acknowledge the racial angle of the Karen and the Becky, it’s also worth acknowledging that middle aged white women are far from the only people abusing service workers. For every Barbecue Becky there’s a belligerent white dude getting saran wrapped to his seat so he’ll stop groping and fighting the poor Frontier flight attendants. My ten cents is that it’s not fair to expect women to do most of the emotional labor in our society while also assuming that the trend of abusing service workers is entirely a female problem. It’s reductive, sexist, and ultimately unhelpful for all of us.
No matter what you call abusive customers, however, it’s hard to deny is that the conditions emotional laborers face have gotten surreal and apocalyptic lately. We saw some of the worst offenders on parade during COVID. From Walmart employees being yelled at by livid customers who didn’t want to wear a mask to airline flight attendants having to physically restrain belligerently drunk passengers, it’s tougher than ever to have to deal with the public in any capacity these days.
Why did air travel become a hellscape for emotional labor?
No environment seems to capture the precarious state of modern emotional labor quite like being a flight attendant. It’s easy to try to pin this on the stress of flying or alcohol, but the better explanations I’ve seen go deeper than this. A good starting point is income inequality. UNC psychology professor Keith Payne told us his favorite Bong Joon-ho movie was Snowpiercer without naming the director once by putting it this way:
“Airplanes are the physical embodiment of a status hierarchy. They are a social ladder made of aluminum and upholstery in which the rungs are represented by rows of boarding groups and seating classes.”
Others want to paint this as a justified passenger rebellion, blaming the airlines for making traveling more stressful and degrading than ever. One New York Times commenter voiced their frustration this way:
“Ignore legitimate air traveler complaints, overbook flights, delay and cancel flights, lose luggage, and provide next to no services, and don't be surprised when the passengers revolt. Those of us who can remember flying before it was deregulated into the winner take all capitalism hellhole it has become, can tell you - it didn't used to be this way.”
The Onion certainly agrees, according to this smattering of on-the-money headlines: “American Airlines Now Charging Fees To Non-Passengers,” “Southwest Airlines Now Taking Passengers To Destinations By Shuttle Bus,” and “Spirit Airlines Begins Offering $45 Directions To Nearest Greyhound Bus Station.”
I think there’s a grain of truth to all of this, even and especially The Onion headlines. The most compelling theory I can assemble that both explains the rise of the Karen and the fall of empathetic air travel is that capitalism is indeed to blame (who knew?!). Due to income inequality and the chronic stresses of modern life, more and more people are going through their days feeling wronged ignored, and trampled on by the world. However, the real villains are too far away and well insulated to lash out against. So the only option is to take your frustration out on your server, flight attendant, or hotel employee. They likely aren’t responsible for your food being late, your flight being cancelled, or your room being double booked, but are merely the closest human embodiment of the exploitative system that screwed you over. This allows for a slightly more empathetic explanation of the Karen. Perhaps she too is feeling fed up with the amount of literal and emotional labor she has to do 24/7 as a modern woman, causing her to unproductively take out her anger on an unsuspecting teenage service worker. While this doesn’t excuse her or anyone else’s bad behavior, it does a whole lot more to explain it.
As a sociological problem, the volatile state of emotional labor requires that we look at the social conditions surrounding it as well. There we see how in our alienating, individualistic society whose sole unifying force is neither democracy nor Christianity but consumerism, retail and customer service settings are now one of the few places where we’re required to interact with strangers, the last “commons” we have to venture into. This was especially true coming out of COVID, when we all retreated to our apartments and had to relearn how to share space with other humans. Yet, saliently, the power dynamics in these customer service settings are always asymmetrical. Service workers have to be nice to us and we have all been told since birth that the customer is always right. The result is that customer service settings are some of the only places where anyone, regardless of class or income level feels literally entitled to be “served,” a shallow proxy for being treated like you’re upper class, at least for a few minutes. Meanwhile, cost cutting and profit maximizing measures have resulted in the actual goods and services available these days being worse than ever. The result is a predictable and sick drama emblematic of a predictable and sick society. Retail stores, restaurants, and airplanes have become the stages for disgruntled and alienated people to exercise their worst impulses, dumping on others the suffering they feel is being unjustly imposed on them.
Season 1 of The White Lotus is understandably overshadowed by it’s Sicilian sequel, but I think its biggest triumph was hilariously and devastatingly confronting us with why the dynamics of emotional labor are so pervasive, exploitative, and insidious. As palm fronds wave over Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s deeply unsettling score, we witness wealthy white people slowly waging a passive aggressive war on those serving them, depriving them of their very humanity just so their vacation can be slightly more indulgent. This season shows us how emotional labor, like any kind of labor, is always inextricable from the inequalities of race, class, and power tied up in it. The outcomes are asymmetrical because the set up is, too. That’s why we’d all do well to remember how that season of The White Lotus ends. The asshole guest goes on to the next stop on his honeymoon while someone else goes home in a coffin.
I want to hear your thoughts on the state of service work, emotional labor, and Karens.
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This may be tagging to the wrong article- intended to be on "Cultural Capital".
"You’re often told to not peak in high school because stereotypically the coolest kids in your high school end up in dead end jobs and failed relationships later. I’d argue that cultural capital is how savvy individuals quietly convert the currency of social status into tangible success."
---> This is a major pet peeve of mine, that you comfort the "nerds/outcasts" with "you'll win in the end and they'll never be as cool as they were in High School." There are certainly cherry pickable examples in any direction, but on the whole, being able to understand/control/lead social groups and situations is perhaps the most valuable skill there is, and one that will continue to benefit across a lifetime of different spheres. Far more so than testing really well at a given subject.
If someone has a ton of social capital in high school literally solely because they can throw a football real good, then sure, that may drop off... but are you sure they don't have other attributes too that contribute? Have they learned leadership and engagement styles that will continue to benefit them as a result of that role for 4 years? etc.