A great many things annoy me. Perhaps the most annoying is when someone
is disrespectful of service workers. They make shitty pay and are told they
have to smile and be nice in order to do their jobs. Once, I cussed a man out
on the street for telling me to smile while I was on break from a service job.
Because for those thirty minutes, I would be damned if I was going to have to
smile at some dude because he felt I should. I still mean that fuck you buddy
with hand gesture.
Sarah
Jaffe had a great piece for In These
Times on Monday. It epically begins with Jaffe explaining women in service
work aren’t that into you. She then references articles written by John
Eidelson and Timothy Noah (for The Nation
and The New Republic) that some
low-wage employers require more than “service with a smile.”
Eidelson’s report featured the Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz requiring
baristas to write “come together” on cups to support bipartisan deficit
fear-mongering. This stems from wealthy ideologues who demand spending cuts on
the social safety net to reduce the national debt. *bullshit*
Noah tells a tale about how he was convinced that an employee at Pret A
Manger was in love with him. Process that. Ok. However, then Noah read an
article about how the Pret was pushing employees to go above and beyond which
included living up to a list of behaviors that including having “presence” and
touching coworkers publicly.
Then Ned Resnikoff for MSNBC mentioned the rise of emotional labor citing
both Noah and Eidelson.
These guys are great, and their pieces were great, but as Jaffe points
out they are missing a key piece to all this: gendered labor. Additionally, the
behaviors are rooted in behavior that is expected of women in and outside of
the workplace.
The term “emotional labor” is credited to Arlie Russel Hochschild who
wrote for decades on the role of labor in the lives of workers, specifically
women workers. Read the book Global Woman
co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich. This book looked at the roles of women in
the “new economy” exploring how women’s skill with emotional labor leads to
their exploitation. You don’t say?
So we know women have been doing emotional labor for what feels like
always. Noah notes that is it harder for men to perform the emotional labor
required in the American workplace now. Of course women make up 60% of the fast
food work force and 73% of the tipped workforce, but female restaurant workers make
83 cents to a male’s dollar.
Jaffe then points to Walmart as an example of exploiting women’s “talent”
for service work. Also noting that even in caring professions, like teaching,
nursing, and domestic work, women are paid less. Domestic workers who cook make
less than a chef or an elementary teacher makes less than a college professor.
Andrew O’Connell at the Harvard Business
Review looked at the actual pay rated for emotional labor in 2010. He found
that if a man moves into a job that requires increased cognitive labor he
received an 8.8% wage boost, but then a man takes a position with high
emotional labor demands he rakes a 5.7% pay cut. Women share a similar story;
they get no financial reward for greater emotional labor, but they don’t get a
penalty instead their wages stay flat. The feminists won, right?
At this point Jaffe shares her experience as a waitress, and points out
the stagnant wages for tipped restaurant workers ($2.13 an hour) hasn’t changed
in 22 years. She also mentions Chelsea Welch, the Applebee’s waitress fired
after an idiot customer complained Welch posted her lack of tip online.
Here Jaffe begins discussing the “pretty girl jobs” which aren’t
outright sex work, but there are sexual overtones to the jobs like being told
to dress sexy and such. Jaffe points out that frequently in sex work, the women
performing the work are perceived to be “faking it” thus they aren’t really
happy thus sex work should be abolished. Now, Jaffe doesn’t actually believe
this, though the first comment on her post was made by an idiot bro who really
likes sex work. Jaffe asserts the same logic if valid for sex work abolition can
be employed here. Service workers are miserable, we must save them from this
work. Jaffe argues “It’s time to stop pretending that enjoyment of the job is
its own reward…”
I have a strange love/hate/really hate relationship with service work. I
should begin by stating I usually put traditional retail and food service work
in with domestic labor and sex work, i.e. waged work that has been performed in
the home unwaged. Some of my favorite memories come from working at Borders in
Beachwood as an undergrad. There was the Sunday morning where an African
American man wandered around looking for someone to help him, and then
approached R, another African American man who was merchandising books. Man A
asks R, “Do you work here?” R, raises his name tag to eye level and says, “Yeah,
I’m another black man with a job.” Or another Sunday morning, where we were
opening and several people walked right past D and R to get me to help them.
Some even waited till I was done with another customer. I asked R and D what
the hell was going on, and D says, “R’s a black man, and I’m a lesbian with
visible lesbianish tattoos.” She suggested I tattoo feminist or atheist on my forehead
to see what happens. Then there was the time a dude followed me back into a
deserted corner of the store, grabbed my hand and kissed it (I know this could
have been worse). I wiped my hand down side of pants in front of the dude and walked
really fast away. D yelled at the dude. I should probably mention R, D, and I
weren’t managers. We just worked together for a long time.
I mention this last one because I had no idea what to do. D did. She
laughed about it and said he did the same thing to her before (well, guess I
wasn’t special and what we get for being faking being nice) and that management also just laughed about it. Because you
know, staff members being uncomfortable because of sexual overtures is perfectly ok. What I think is
missing from Jaffe’s piece is a description of the emotional labor service
workers provide for each other. Service work requires long physically stressful
hours before the emotional labor. The emotional labor can make men cry…I’ve
seen it. It has been my experience that the other service workers provide a
sort of buffer for each other. I am in no way saying this happens everywhere
some companies foster an environment of competition to keep employees from
organizing. But there was many a day where I listen to coworkers complain or
worse cry over something that happened, and likewise I had coworkers do the
same for me. For example that cussing story from the beginning of this post,
afterwards, I cried for like twenty minutes. I was so upset that I had
overreached and yelled at some bystander on the street (because I'm that girl now). I was just really unhappy at that time, and on generic birth
control that made me certifiably insane. Dear feminist A rubbed circles on my
back asking if there was anything he could get for me. To which, I responded in
the most ladylike fashion if that lady was a sailor.
Finally, I follow Sarah Jaffe on Twitter as everyone should
(@sarahljaffe). On Tuesday there seems to have been some discussion the low-minimum
wage tipped workers received and how tipping can go either way. You can make
better money than minimum wage workers some nights, but minimum wage isn’t a
living wage. I’m pretty sure Jaffe is arguing for an overhaul of the system or
a possible deconstruction of the current system or maybe that’s just me. I have
a sister who refuses to quit her shitty waitress/bar tending job. It is completely
toxic for her, and she should be focusing the career she actually wants. But
this job is easy and her friends are there (see comradery building above). But she’s right
sometimes she can make a lot of money, I’ve seen her come in with $500 in tips
from an evening (she has a shiner personality than me). But they don’t provide
health insurance or paid time off.
I’ve never read a comprehensive study on waitresses that monitor wages
and tips (adjusting for inflation) over time. I think this would be an
interesting study. My assumption is that as a waitress/waiter gets older their
tips will generally go down over time even when skill level goes up. I’m
speculating that attractive young people are more profitable than their older
counterparts.
