What 'emotional labor' actually means — and how Starbucks is testing its limits |
What 'emotional labor' actually means — and how Starbucks is testing its limits
Arlie Hochschild coined the term in 1983 to describe a specific workplace cost. Starbucks' Green Apron Service is pushing it further than she imagined
Tommaso Boddi / Getty Images for Vox Media
In 1983, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild studied flight attendants whose job required them to be, as she put it, "nicer than natural." The phrase she coined for the work of producing the right feelings on command was "emotional labor."
Four decades later, such emotional labor has evolved. Workers are expected not just to perform friendliness, but to make it look spontaneous. Starbucks $SBUX' Green Apron Service model directs baristas to write a personal message on a customer's cup, and if it is not sufficiently nice, discipline could follow.
What Hochschild identified was not simply the experience of having a hard day at work or managing a household chore list. It was something more precise — and more corrosive.
What emotional labor actually is
Hochschild defined emotional labor as "the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display" that is "sold for a wage." In her book "The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling," Delta Air Lines flight attendants and bill collectors told her about the ways their employers extracted emotional, physical, and cognitive work. She estimated that one-third of American men and one-half of American women held jobs that called for substantial emotional labor, and in many of them, they were trained........