A meaningful job is one thing; an easy job is another. A child erupts in a wild tantrum. A patient glares in a flash of paranoia. A confused client delivers a slap in anger. In such cases, work is not easy. But skilled emotion workers develop the art of appraising unwelcome events and know when and how to detach themselves from the display while remaining attached to the client. Indeed, many take special pride in handling really tough clients. A tantrum winds down. A paranoid flash subsides. An elderly person is soothed. The caregiver feels gratified in accomplishing these ends.
Some discover a yet deeper source of gratification. In an eight-city study, the sociologist John Baugher asked hospice workers how they decided to work with the dying and what effect it had on them. They spoke of the surprising joy they found in the experience of dropping social convention. Little things—conversational pleasantries, the time of day, disarray on a bedside table—ceased to matter. In the presence of a dying person, they felt welcomed, accepted, and trusted. Rather than feeling strained, many workers—Christian, Buddhist, atheist—felt a sense of peace and awe that they had stood by a person’s side at his or her passing. For them, emotional labor opened up a channel for the experience of awe in the face of the ultimate in human vulnerability.7
Satisfaction did not depend on having the perfect client. “A lot of my co-workers want to avoid Alzheimer’s patients,” one eldercare worker explained, “but I like working with them. I work with one man who doesn’t remember a thing that happened yesterday. He lives in a just-now world. But when I fixed him a steak today, he loved it. I’ve learned to enjoy him in a just-now way.”
An emotion worker is obliged to attune herself to a client’s needs, to empathize with the client, and to manage her own emotions in the course of doing so. She may get bad news from home: a child falls ill, a house is robbed. Or she may become aware of her client’s unpleasant bodily odor, or be jarred by his or her erratic behavior. Often the care worker makes herself into what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott has called “a holding environment”—an ambience sealed against disturbing leakage of anxiety, anger, envy, or sadness, for these might make the patient feel agitated, threatened, or unsafe.8 Emotional labor implies directionality, intention, and effort; it is, in that sense, real work.9 Just as a professional singer takes pride in her highly trained voice or an actor in a moving performance on stage, so the care worker often takes pride in cultivating 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
