There are jobs at every socioeconomic level that place emo­tional burdens on the worker, but these burdens may have little to do with the performance of emotional labor. Among the lower classes, where work is often deskilled and boring and the work process beyond the worker’s control, the emotional task is often to suppress feelings […]

To insure that you as a valued customer receive proper cour­tesy and service we have reviewed our courtesy and service pro­grams with all employees. Some of the basic courtesy and ser­vice elements you should expect to receive on each visit to a Winn-Dixie store are: 1. Sincere greeting when you are being checked out. 2. […]

Between the extremes of flight attendant and bill collector lie many jobs that call for emotional labor. Jobs of this type have three characteristics in common. First, they require face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public. Sec­ond, they require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person —gratitude or fear, for example. Third, […]

In some ways the jobs of the bill collector and the flight at­tendant are similar. Each represents an opposite pole of emotional labor. In a work-a-day sense, each job expands and contracts in response to economic conditions, though inversely: when times are bad the flight attendant has fewer passengers to cope with, but the bill […]

Jobs and Emotional Labor “Know Your Prices. Keep Smiling.” — Sign in back hall, Italian restaurant “Create Alarm." — Sign in back room, collection agency The corporate world has a toe and a heel, and each per­forms a different function: one delivers a service, the other collects payment for it. When an organization seeks to […]

A person who does emotional labor for a living must face three hard questions that do not confront others, the an­swers to which will determine how she defines her “self.” The first one is this: How can I feel really identified with my work role and with the company without being fused with them? This […]

The slowdown is a venerable tactic in the wars between in­dustrial labor and management. Those whose work is to of­fer “personalized service” may also stage a slowdown, but in a necessarily different way. Since their job is to act upon a commercial stage, under managerial directors, their protest may take the form of rebelling against […]

When an industry speed-up drastically shortens the time available for contact between flight attendants and passen­gers, it can become virtually impossible to deliver emotional labor. In that event, the transmutation of emotion work, feeling rules, and social exchange will fail. Company claims about offering a smile “from the inside out” (Delta) will be­come untenable. The […]

To the extent that emotion management actually works—so that Bloody Marys do not spill “by accident” on white pants suits, and blowups occur in backstage offices instead of in airplane aisles —something like alchemy occurs. Civility and a general sense of well-being have been enhanced and emo­tional “pollution” controlled. Even when people are paid to […]

The lines of company control determine who fears whom. For flight attendants, the fear hierarchy works indirectly through passengers and back again through their own imme­diate supervisors* As someone put it, “Whoever invented the system of passenger letter writing must be a vice-president by now.” Any letter from a passenger—whether an “onion” letter complaining about […]