Emotional Labour

All jobs, in the simple sense of activity you do in return for payment, are inescapably power relations. What distinguishes work from barter is that one party must exchange their labour, and it is invariably that party who is at a disadvantage in terms of power. An argument against the simplistic model of work as a transaction tending towards equilibrium, in which resources are optimised by matching demand through the mechanisms of market and price, is that there is always a deadweight cost associated with masking the reality of the power relation. This largely falls on the worker, who must often contribute additional emotional labour (suppressing your irritation in the face of a frustrating customer, for example, or laughing at your boss's crap jokes), which subtracts from their actual labour by wasting time (there are other thiefs of time, of course, but ceteris paribus). One way in which the power relation operates is by increasing that emotional labour at the expense of productive labour.

Though this waste can be rationalised at the microeconomic level as simply another preference on the part of the buyer of labour (I am paying you to tug your forelock because that maximises my utility in terms of self-esteem), at the macroeconomic level it is clearly a deadweight loss to society in a similar manner to the "old Spanish practices" that lower efficiency on the shopfloor. A further loss can potentially arise when the employer feels obliged to invest some of their own time justifying the power relation and resisting claims that it is exploitative. This can be a necessary investment if negative publicity leads to commercial loss, but for most buyers of labour it is neither public relations nor emotional labour but simply the curation of their own ego. Whether that in turn constitutes a deadweight loss to society depends on whether the employer might otherwise be productively using that time and energy. A further complication arises when the buyer of labour is also a worker: they might be forgoing time that they would otherwise use for earning.

Well, that's enough theory. Let's now turn to the working week of Sarah Ditum, one of the many soi-disant radical feminists in the media whose political centrism (or even steady drift to the right) usually entails a "gender critical" perspective. Despite not employing a domestic cleaner herself, Ditum chose to berate Owen Jones for his suggestion that those who do employ cleaners should simply pay them to stay at home during lockdown and so avoid putting them at risk of infection. The motivation on Ditum's part seems to have been simply her ongoing resentment of Jones, the two being on opposite sides of the TERF war, though she also appears to sympathise with the original claim by Theo Usherwood, the Political editor of LBC, that the most supportive thing you can do for "households that might not be financially viable without work" (i.e. the poor) is to let them labour in the homes of middle-class professionals. 

This culminated in her writing a piece for the Spectator on 'The underlying sexism of the conversation about cleaners and Covid' in which she made plain her target: "the righteous left ... that insists ‘blow jobs are real jobs’ decries the woman who hires another woman to scrub limescale out of the bathtub". It's worth repeating again that Ditum does not herself employ a cleaner, so you have to wonder why she is suddenly an expert on the subject. A cynic would point out that articles that trash the left, and Owen Jones in particular, are always going to find a buyer in the Tory press: just ask Nick Cohen and David Aaronovich (for the record, Ditum was supported on Twitter by Hadley Freeman, David Baddiel and Janice Turner, the latter even managing some homophobic snidery about Jones's lack of children). But what I want to focus on here is not the question of her credentials, which would be playing the TERF/SWERF game, but her implied hierarchy of work: the idea that cleaning and sex-work are categorically different.

Earlier in the article she says: "There’s an old linguistic slippage that has made the words ‘dirty woman’ become, over time, ‘sexually available woman’. And though standards of propriety have changed, the association between cleanliness and feminine morality has not. A woman who declines to do housework, or who simply points out that doing it is labour, is a bad woman". There is obviously an association of dirt with poverty, and of poverty with prostitution, but this doesn't explain the particular place of domestic servants in the history of sexuality. The contemporary association of cleaners with sexual availability (it's an established porn trope) has nothing to do with the morality of the female (or sometimes male) workers. It has to do with the ability of employers (mainly, but not always male) to coerce them into sex. It is an odd blindspot in an ostensibly feminist article on cleaners that workplace sexual harassment isn't even mentioned.

This brings us back to the issue of the power relation, but it also highlights the extent to which the ego-curation of employers depends on selective blindness (the irony here is that as someone who doesn't employ a cleaner, Ditum has mimiced the ego-curation of those who do and parlayed that into paid work). Another example of this is found in the way that the corporate classes distinguish between "working at home" and "working from home". The first is mildly shameful, if you're not an independent professional, because you get little done but also realise how little the job requires anyway. The second is a privilege that only makes sense in the context of an office-based norm. A key part of that privilege is that it reduces the amount of emotional labour demanded (which normally accounts for a lot of the office-based inefficiency). But even this distinction, which has been made more salient for many by the Covid-19 lockdown, occludes those for whom "working at someone else's home" is how they make a living. 

Will Davies has made the point that under neoliberalism workers have been divided into capital and labour; that is, the modern conception of human capital versus the traditional conception of unindividuated labour. This division is popularly described through the concept of skill: human capital is high skill, manual labour is low-skill (you'll note we rarely talk about mid-level skills though these obviously exist and actually account for most workers in formal sociological terms). The issue of skill has come to the fore during lockdown because the topical definition of "key-workers" includes people who were previously considered to be at either ends of the skill spectrum: doctors and carers. This has made the divorce between actual social esteem (our respect for those who help us) and presumed social esteem (the valuation of human capital reflected by pay) even more acute. The defence of the status quo in the face of this cognitive dissonance is an appeal to sentimentality, hence the weekly clap for the NHS.

Esteem goes back to the origins of society and predates its appropriation by hierarchy. A more modern idea, which emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, is that of self-actualisation. Though it has a broad definition, it too was appropriated by hierarchy, specifically the hierarchy of work. Doing a fulfilling job became the epitome of self-actualisation. The defence proferred by middle-class professionals who hire domestic cleaners has sought both to appeal to our belief that many jobs are mis-labelled in terms of skill and to insist that self-actualisation is a motivator at all skill levels. Thus Sarah Ditum pays cleaners a backhanded compliment by insisting she isn't up to the job, or at least the level of the "skilled" ("I am not a clean person. Maybe a six out of ten on the clean scale"), while David Baddiel suggests his cleaner, who he is currently paying to stay at home, wants to work because she is bored, thereby failing to appreciate that telling him she is bored and keen to return to work (in response to his enquiry) is emotional labour. And so the circle closes.