4 ms·

It's not about "talking to the proletarians". It's about the emotional work involved with talking to a bunch of people, organizing those discussions, comparing

It's not about "talking to the proletarians". It's about the emotional work involved with talking to a bunch of people, organizing those discussions, comparing the results, etc. As a generally introverted person, just thinking about discussing the details with 3 or more people makes me feel exhausted. And that doesn't even count the planning, review, time off of work, etc.

Spivak 9y ago
Nomenclature question, why are we calling the work involved securing a vendor emotional labor? In any office this would just be called labor.
- BarkingChicken 9y ago
  Its just the common term for it. Is it the most correct term? Probably not. But its this invisible labor that many people don't even recognize exists, so to lump it in with regular physical labor pretty much to ignore it.
- Mz 9y ago
  Basically, the term emotional labor gets used a lot to mean "women's work" and especially to refer to the largely invisible parts of what women are expected to do. I don't like that usage, but I usually don't bother to nitpick it. I do understand why this is kind of a hot topic and why the term emotional labor gets applied to it. I don't have a better solution. It seems like there simply isn't a good way to talk about these issues. (FWIW: I'm a woman.)
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    To steal words from your post, maybe invisible labor? Does that express what you're trying to say?
    - Mz 9y ago
      I didn't write the piece. Another issue writers run into is that if you aren't using any of the hot catch phrases, no one will read your piece. I wrestle with this fact a lot. I blog at times about such issues. I try to be evenhanded and sympathetic to both sides. I really struggle with titling stuff and my writing gets damn little traffic. My refusal to use the standard catch phrases, because of their frequently toxic framing, is a barrier to being heard at all. And I sometimes wonder which is worse: Putting out a fucked up message in hopes of some partial solution emerging or simply howling into the void and going entirely unheard. Making any progress is incredibly challenging. This piece was published in a major publication. If it didn't use a popular catch phrase, they probably would not have published it at all. Those popular catch phrases are important hooks for titling things and for communicating with the public. On my own personal blogs, I have the luxury of refusing to use phrases I don't like. You generally don't have that luxury when trying to get published by an organization that needs to hit certain traffic targets to survive and keep their doors open. The part of this that genuinely is an issue of emotional labor is her desire for her husband to actually be considerate. That is the crux of the issue here. The article perhaps is not as clear as it could be about that fact.
  - Kluny 9y ago
    I think the economic term would by "economic externalities". That's used as well when, for example, a coal plant dumps sewage into a town's water source, and the town is then forced to clean it up. Someone has to pay for that, but the coal plant avoids the responsibility. We're starting to get past that as a society now, with coal plants being required to pay for the environmental damage they do, and it might be time to start noticing that "women's work" - childraising and housekeeping - is an unaccounted externality as well, that someone has to pay for.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    It does seem kind of confusing. The first time I encountered the term "emotional labor" it referred to aspects of customer service work (like responding politely to abusive customers, being performatively cheerful, etc) and it was intuitive to me what it meant. Using the term to mean unpaid, typically female labor seems less intuitive.
    - Mz 9y ago
      Emotional labor is a real thing and a large part of what women are expected to do is rooted in catering to the feelings of other people. But, yeah, it gets used kind of sloppily. Just about anything women want to complain about gets lumped in with it and the writing frequently fails to make it crystal clear how x, y and z actually relate to or are rooted in the expectation that women cater to everyone's feelings.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  I don't know, this is the first time I've really ever heard this term. If I had heard the term outside of this context, I would imagine it to mean "interactive/inter-communicative/social" work, instead of physical work, but it feels like there's some kind of historical/feminist context here that I'm not aware of.
  - Kluny 9y ago
    It depends where you're reading, I guess. I've been hearing it a lot lately.

Spivak 9y ago

Nomenclature question, why are we calling the work involved securing a vendor emotional labor? In any office this would just be called labor.

BarkingChicken 9y ago
Its just the common term for it. Is it the most correct term? Probably not. But its this invisible labor that many people don't even recognize exists, so to lump it in with regular physical labor pretty much to ignore it.
Mz 9y ago
Basically, the term emotional labor gets used a lot to mean "women's work" and especially to refer to the largely invisible parts of what women are expected to do. I don't like that usage, but I usually don't bother to nitpick it. I do understand why this is kind of a hot topic and why the term emotional labor gets applied to it. I don't have a better solution. It seems like there simply isn't a good way to talk about these issues. (FWIW: I'm a woman.)
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  To steal words from your post, maybe invisible labor? Does that express what you're trying to say?
  - Mz 9y ago
    I didn't write the piece. Another issue writers run into is that if you aren't using any of the hot catch phrases, no one will read your piece. I wrestle with this fact a lot. I blog at times about such issues. I try to be evenhanded and sympathetic to both sides. I really struggle with titling stuff and my writing gets damn little traffic. My refusal to use the standard catch phrases, because of their frequently toxic framing, is a barrier to being heard at all. And I sometimes wonder which is worse: Putting out a fucked up message in hopes of some partial solution emerging or simply howling into the void and going entirely unheard. Making any progress is incredibly challenging. This piece was published in a major publication. If it didn't use a popular catch phrase, they probably would not have published it at all. Those popular catch phrases are important hooks for titling things and for communicating with the public. On my own personal blogs, I have the luxury of refusing to use phrases I don't like. You generally don't have that luxury when trying to get published by an organization that needs to hit certain traffic targets to survive and keep their doors open. The part of this that genuinely is an issue of emotional labor is her desire for her husband to actually be considerate. That is the crux of the issue here. The article perhaps is not as clear as it could be about that fact.
- Kluny 9y ago
  I think the economic term would by "economic externalities". That's used as well when, for example, a coal plant dumps sewage into a town's water source, and the town is then forced to clean it up. Someone has to pay for that, but the coal plant avoids the responsibility. We're starting to get past that as a society now, with coal plants being required to pay for the environmental damage they do, and it might be time to start noticing that "women's work" - childraising and housekeeping - is an unaccounted externality as well, that someone has to pay for.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  It does seem kind of confusing. The first time I encountered the term "emotional labor" it referred to aspects of customer service work (like responding politely to abusive customers, being performatively cheerful, etc) and it was intuitive to me what it meant. Using the term to mean unpaid, typically female labor seems less intuitive.
  - Mz 9y ago
    Emotional labor is a real thing and a large part of what women are expected to do is rooted in catering to the feelings of other people. But, yeah, it gets used kind of sloppily. Just about anything women want to complain about gets lumped in with it and the writing frequently fails to make it crystal clear how x, y and z actually relate to or are rooted in the expectation that women cater to everyone's feelings.
CaptSpify 9y ago
I don't know, this is the first time I've really ever heard this term. If I had heard the term outside of this context, I would imagine it to mean "interactive/inter-communicative/social" work, instead of physical work, but it feels like there's some kind of historical/feminist context here that I'm not aware of.
- Kluny 9y ago
  It depends where you're reading, I guess. I've been hearing it a lot lately.