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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

I really, really, really hate it when they refer to things like taking physical care of the elderly as "emotional labor." Caretaking can have a huge emotional component, but this framing has serious inherent problems.

Furthermore, art, fiction and music are things that can do a lot for people emotionally and psychologically, both the makers of such and the consumers. Yet no one ever seems to include those in these ridiculous articles about so-called emotional labor which perhaps should more accurately be termed traditional women's work.

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I believe what the article points to convey about "emotional labour" is that, it is tough to do these jobs because, being in constant company of distress and suffering is emotionally very tough.

Specially in case of elderly or those suffering from terminal diseases, it is much more tough because inherent you are helpless, you want to do so much but inspite of your best efforts, you can't do anything.

that's emotional labour!

What are the "serious inherent problems" in calling it emotional labor?

For one thing, it simultaneously glamorizes and discounts the hard physical labor involved in doing things like cleaning up someone who is playing with their own feces and throwing them at you. For another, it discounts the actual education and intelligence involved in doing a good job of taking proper care of people. For a third, it just reinforces the pink collar ghetto mentality surrounding this kind of work.

Perhaps most importantly, it frames it like this is about the laborer having emotional discipline or something. The reality is that feelings come from somewhere and we routinely mix up "love" the noun that describes a feeling and "love" the verb that describes care-taking that meets a high standard. That feeling in one person typically grows out of the hard labor done by another. The person that inspires the feelings is very often treated pretty abusively. They exist to make other people feel good and to hell with their needs or wants, kind of like the recent story titled "My Family's Slave."

All of that seems to argue pretty strongly in favor of calling it "emotional labor" - caretaking involves a serious trade-off where the caretaker is expending a lot of emotional energy to do work for someone else. Much like physical labor involves expending a lot of physical energy to get stuff done.

I don't see anything either overly demeaning or glamorous about that descriptive term, it seems to describe exactly the value proposition that is on the table with that sort of work.

From the article:

For men and women, paid and unpaid, waking at 3am to care for a crying baby or bathing a distressed Alzheimer’s patient can be gruelling and transcendentally life-affirming all at once.

Lots of people take satisfaction in a job well done. This is pretty universally true, regardless of what kind of work you do. The above framing describes cleaning up other people's literal shit in near religious ecstasy type terms. If that isn't overblown, I don't know what is.

I did the full time mom thing for a lot of years. I raised and homeschooled two special needs kids and was a military wife. Finding good solutions that supposedly did not exist is something that I feel very proud of. But cleaning up literal shit never felt like some sort of joyous nigh religious thing. It was grueling, yes. Transcendental, big fat nope.

I am appalled by this article. You should go look up the recent article called "My Family's Slave."

re: "it frames it like this is about the laborer having emotional discipline"

I thought "emotional" had more to do with the person being helped? They may be going through some kind of crisis (having one of the worst days of their lives). Helping them isn't just an obstacle to doing the job; in medical or teaching professions, it often is the job. That's why it's different from another job that might be equally or more physically demanding, but it's just hard work.

Maybe we could distinguish this from jobs serving the public where ordinary, able-bodied adult customers are being demanding for no good reason. But then again, they are probably serving the young, old, sick, etc. some of the time too. That's what serving the public means; you get all kinds.

Well, it's also highly physical. Cooking and cleaning take up a large chunk of the time and labor, even if you aren't technically required to do so.

Hmm, okay, let's say we compare: - Working in the back of the house in a restaurant - Someone who visits old people and also cooks and cleans for them.

The first one, while requiring skill and being a relatively low-paid job that a lot of people might not want to take, technically doesn't require customer interaction. (And perhaps not even much in the way of English skills, which makes it a more practical job for some immigrants.)

For the home visit, the actual cooking and cleaning, though important, might not actually be the most important reason they're there?

How should we talk about the difference?

I think the difference is that there are two ways to burn out from the job, or the pressure comes from multiple ways, than other jobs.

This is anecdotal, but my mother in law spent a decade paying home visits to disabled vets. This is not senior care, but you see similar situations of people with special needs and an inability to care for themselves fully. Two things that she emphasized were how she was hugely underpaid for the work she actually did (as opposed to the work she was minimally required to do) and how she needed frequent, long spans filling paperwork to recover from the physical and mental duties. I may be wrong, but you don't often see that with jobs that require exertion on a single front unless it's extremely stressful and salaried accordingly (e.g. surgeon).

Clarifying question: are you referring to emotional labor as labor which is emotionally taxing for the producer, or labor which produces a positive emotional effect on the consumer / receiver?

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