And I learned something new: emotional labor.
Also interesting to note:
In past, emotional labor demands and display rules were viewed as a characteristics of particular occupations, such as restaurant workers, cashiers, hospital workers, bill collectors, counselors, secretaries, and nurses. However, display rules have been conceptualized not only as role requirements of particular occupational groups, but also as interpersonal job demands, which are shared by many kinds of occupations.[13]
All jobs that predominantly women are employed in. …Funny that.
Not only that, but these are lower class occupations. The lower one’s class status, the more emotional labor one is expected to perform as a function of their job. This has the effect of insulating the middle and upper classes from having to see lower class people as emotionally whole individuals, so that when we do display our honest emotions instead of performing emotional labor, we are seen as being out of line, rebellious, and in need of checking or suppression.
I wish I could remember the name of the article about this we read in my soc of inequality class. It focused mostly on restaurant workers, whose employers usually only pay $2-$3 an hour, meaning they have to rely on tips from customers, which means constantly appearing upbeat and enthusiastic, and being excruciatingly polite even when customers are being assholes. If they don’t do those things, they can risk making less in a year than they would working at federal minimum wage.
As someone that has worked the last seven years in food service/fast food industry, this shit pisses me off. I’m expected to be continuously cheerful and will routinely be scolded by my customers for not “smiling enough.” In fact, not being cheerful enough is grounds for firing. Just last week my manager talked to me because he received a complaint from a customer that I “appeared to be having a rough day.” Fuck everything about that.
I don’t have it as bad as my cis-female co-workers who are expected to be happy and cheerful and well done up and flirt back when customers do.
Pretty much all retail/service sector jobs require you to never, ever, ever be actually human. All details of personality and mood are to be subsumed into a persona, a facade, that must be highly-polished and on display at all times, or you risk your job. I made the mistake, at my last retail job, of actually admitting in the course of a casual conversation to one of my associates that I didn’t see myself doing retail for more than a year or two while I got my own business up and running, and that I didn’t really like it all that much. I wasn’t really negative about it, but I admitted I didn’t think it was really *my thing*. She apparently told the store manager about that conversation, and I got written up for “talking below the line” – I’m serious, that’s the exact “offense” on the form, and I have no idea wtf it’s supposed to mean aside from “Generic title we slap on a write-up when we don’t like your tone about something” – for the sin of seeing myself doing something else with my future and admitting I wasn’t in love with working for minimum wage at a badly-managed corporate chain store.
I mean I joke about my lack of self-awareness on some things that have seemed obvious in hindsight, but considering I expend so much emotional labor every day at work (mainly in absorbing and deflecting other people’s intense emotions and helping to mitigate them) is it any surprise that I’m so exhausted at the end of the week that I have none of that emotional energy left for myself?
I spent all of my high school years working on and off at a local cafe. The Only thing I was good at was dishwashing. I worked for only a couple of months at Subway, and I was bad at that. I’m terrible at emotional labor. I can do all that stuff for friends when necessary, but probably largely in part because I know I don’t have. I’m also a generally content person and even when I am in a bad mood, I’m not even often sure how to express it, but emotional labor is just a beast of a different sort. It is Not easy. It is Not innate. Women simply Have to learn it to successfully navigate the world around us. Not implying men don’t have to do it—obviously they do when working these things. I just imagine there’s an extra level. My family has never been rich, but only with that Subway job was my stability on the line. I’ve been fortunate there, that I have the privilege to be bad at emotional labor.
Thoughtfulfangirling 