So How's the Family?. Arlie Russell Hochschild
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warm, trusting, and resilient relationships with clients.
EMOTIONAL LABOR AND ITS DISCONTENTS
So what can get in the way of the gratifications of emotional labor? A number of things, first among them being low pay and low respect. In an age of public budget cuts, layoffs, high turnover, and public criticism of the public sector and its workers, it can be hard to enjoy doing emotional labor. As one California childcare center attendant told me,
I love the two- and three-year-olds I work with. But we only get $8.50 an hour [in 2000]. So a lot of my coworkers are quitting to get paid more as secretaries or bank clerks. The kids get attached to one worker only to have her replaced by another and another. They get upset. One little boy, Matthew, is getting very anxious that I may leave. I can’t live on $8.50 an hour, but I hate to leave him in the lurch.
In the United States, most eldercare is provided by lightly regulated, for-profit nursing homes, and many care workers are assigned too many patients. One study of for-profit nursing homes in western New York State found that 98 percent of them fell below the standard set by a federal study for the optimum patient-staff ratio of five to one.10 In some homes, nurse’s aides had to try to feed, wash, and assist thirty or more patients.11 As Russell Reynolds, a former nursing aide at a for-profit suburban New York nursing home recounted, “Some nights we’d have four aides trying to take care of more than 300 people. . . . You might have to spend a half-hour helping somebody get to the bathroom. In that time, two other residents might fall down and need help.”12
When a care system breaks down, one sign is that the three-way relationship between the manager, the emotional laborer, and the client becomes frayed. A manager overextends the idea of efficiency or profit making, trying to “get more work out” of workers. They cease to be a team. The worker rushes about. She skimps. She spends too much time with one patient and neglects another. She cannot give her best; she does a broken job. She may unconsciously side with the malfunctioning system against its patients, whom she sees as “too demanding.” Or she may identify with the patients whom she feels she has failed, absorbing the shame of the system as her own: “I’ve been too callous. I’ve hurt the clients’ feelings.” Either way, the broken system has prevented her from feeling proud of her work. It has forced her to manage her feelings about doing her job in a broken care system.
HYPER-BUREAUCRATIZED, GLOBALIZED, AND DEVALUED CARE
Even when staff are well paid, have long-standing coworkers, and work in pleasant surroundings, the work may be rigidly rule bound or technology-driven. In one nursing home in Maine, in which my elderly aunt lived for a while, electrical cords were routinely attached to chairs in patients’ rooms so that every time my aunt rose from her chair, a loud buzzer, audible down a long corridor, rang in the nursing station. It alerted an attendant to come help her walk to the bathroom. It prevented falls, broken hips, and lawsuits, but it greatly demoralized my aunt as well as the other residents who were seated in the same kind of chairs. The attendants themselves responded as if the buzzer, not the person, had called them.
At a Maine-based home-care agency, eldercare workers are forbidden from socializing with their clients outside of work hours. As one care worker recounted to me, “I work for an agency that sends me out to care for a variety of elderly people in their homes. I became fond of one lame man and would drop by to bring him flowers on my way home from work. Well, my supervisor found out and told me that was forbidden. They don’t want clients hiring us directly, because then the agency would lose its cut of the money. I had to sneak behind the agency’s back to bring him flowers.”
Even if the hospital, nursing home, or childcare center is humanely run, a care system can be broken in a hidden place—at home. American nannies who put in shifts of nine, ten, and even twelve hours and return exhausted to their own neglected homes are working in broken care systems, too. But at least the children of such workers share residency with their mothers, unlike the children of immigrant caregivers who are cared for by relatives and local nannies back in Mexico, the Philippines, or elsewhere. Such immigrant working mothers suffer an accumulating sense of loss as the separation stretches to two, five, ten, or more years. And a higher proportion of migrant mothers are leaving their children behind than in the past; more that 80 percent of immigrant children now living in the United States had been separated from their parents prior to migration.13 In her study of the children of female migrant workers left behind in the Philippines, Rhacel Parreñas found that such children were often abandoned by their fathers. Taking their wives’ departure as a “divorce,” some fathers left the care of their children in the hands of their ex-mother-in-law or aunt, moved away from the natal village, and moved in with a new woman to start a new family.14
Still, the strained economies of the South have sent an ever larger stream of young and middle-aged mothers to jobs in the Global North. They travel along one of several corridors. From Central and South America to the United States and Canada, from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, from South Asia to the oil-rich Persian Gulf, from South Asia to the Asian north of Hong Kong and Japan, and from North Africa to Europe, emotional laborers travel from poor to rich countries.15 However much a migrant worker wants to migrate, she often experiences a sense of loss and loneliness as she daily feeds, bathes, and plays with her client’s children while living half a world away from her own (see chapters 10,11, and 12).
Finally, child and eldercare workers often speak of feeling that they, like the nature of their work, are unseen and underappreciated, which makes it all the harder to do. Care work is a hot potato job. Many husbands turn over care of the young and old to their wives. Wives, if they can afford to, often turn it over to childcare and eldercare workers. In turn, many immigrant nannies hire nannies back home to help care for the children that they have left behind, forming a care chain.16
Underlying this gender/class/national transfer is the devaluation of care. This is based on the idea that care work is “easy,” “natural,” and—like parenting—not quite real work. Part of what makes care work invisible is that the people the worker cares for—children, the elderly, the disabled—are themselves somewhat invisible.17 Strangers entering a room may tend to ignore or “talk over” the very young and old.
The childcare worker who loved to “jump in the sandbox” with her 3-year-old charges—and who had to comfort them when coworkers left for better-paying jobs—found that the value of her work was invisible even to her husband. As she explained, “My husband is a carpenter and has unsteady work. So some of the time we rely on my pay, which is low. One night he told me, ‘Honey, why don’t you quit childcare? The pay is lousy. We’ll have our own kids—you can give your love to them. You could get a real job.’”18
This all means that many emotional laborers face a great paradox. Though they may come to work hoping to take pride in a job well done, low pay, understaffing, rigid rules, and devaluation can set up circumstances which prevent that. Sadly, their main job becomes protecting patients from the harm of life in a broken, globalized, over-bureaucratized, or profit-hungry system. A tragic cycle is set in motion. The more broken the system, the more disheartened its emotional laborers. The more disheartened they become, the more detached they are from their work, the higher the turnover rates, and the more broken the system.
The alternative to accepting this is to fix the broken system. That starts with recognizing the extraordinary emotional labor it takes to maintain a thriving childcare center, nursing home, hospital, or family. It would also call for a bold nationwide care movement to improve the conditions of care workers. If these efforts were successful, people would work in systems that were themselves well tended. In such a world, jobs requiring emotional labor could still be tough, but they would be meaningful—and even fun.
THREEEmpathy Maps
The world is in a race, Jeremy Rifkin argues in his book The Empathic Civilization. On the “good” team are all the forces pressing each of us to feel empathy for all other people—and indeed all living creatures—on earth.1 On the “bad” team are the forces that accelerate global warming and destabilize the ecosystem on which earthly life depends, causing strife, fear, and a search for