When you think of labor, the first thing that likely comes to mind is manual labor.
This physical labor is often seen in blue-collar jobs, such as construction, farming, landscaping, etc. If physical labor exists, it makes sense that there would also be emotional and mental labor, and even unpaid labor. It leads us to ask the questions, “What is emotional labor?” and “What does unpaid labor look like?” Let’s elaborate because not all labor is created equal.
What is Emotional Labor?
Emotional labor is a term originally coined by sociologist, Arlie Hochschild, in her book The Managed Heart. It centrally involves trying to feel the right feeling for a job for which you are paid. Emotional labor requires you to manage your feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job, which may also mean alienating yourself from your feelings during working hours. This means evoking certain emotions, such as happiness, and suppressing emotions, such as anger or sadness.
Examples of Emotional Labor
To demonstrate emotional labor, let’s think of a barista at Starbucks. Imagine this barista is a recent college graduate struggling to make ends meet and their car breaks down on their way to work. They arrive for their shift frustrated, upset, and on the verge of tears wondering how they’re going to pay for their student loan payments this month, let alone repairs for their car. But wanting to be a good employee, they know they can’t let this feeling affect their workday. So, when a customer comes inside to order a coffee, they smile, make pleasant small talk, and promptly deliver their order. This process repeats for the remaining four hours of their shift. They leave for the day exhausted from suppressing their emotions for the sake of doing their job well that day.
A more extreme example of emotional labor in the workplace is when an employee is forced to bite their tongue about their feelings regarding a sexist or racist comment made by another employee.
The majority of emotional labor falls on employees that work with customers, think restaurant employees, retail workers, flight attendants, doctors, childcare workers, etc. But the term customer can be used in a range of professions. For teachers, their customers are the children they are teaching. For corporate employees, their customers can be the internal departments they are supporting. Based on these examples, it’s clear that the amount of emotional labor required by jobs varies.
What is Mental Labor?
Emotional labor deals with thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Oftentimes when referring to emotional labor, people use the term mental labor interchangeably, but in fact, emotional labor and mental labor are very different.
Mental labor, very simply put, is the labor done by your brain. Every mental list you create, every task you make a mental note to complete, thinking about how to solve a problem at work, planning what meals to make for the week, this is all mental labor.
It’s common in the household for a lot of the mental labor to fall on the women of the house, the household manager if you will. Remembering important dates, making note of what needs to be cleaned or picked up at the store, planning routines and schedules for children, mental labor is the virtually invisible work they do at home. While women can feel overwhelmed and underappreciated, it’s common that partners don’t even know the extent of what the woman of the house does because it cannot be seen. It is mental, invisible work.
This mother describes what it feels like perfectly. “I make note of the rest of the 8,000 things a family of four requires because it falls squarely under the duties of CEO of our household—a position I never interviewed for, yet I rose up through the ranks to find myself in, sometime between the day I got married and the day I popped out a second kid.”
What is Unpaid Labor?
It’s common because of the mental labor carried out by women that they complete a lot of unpaid labor or household work in the home. Unpaid labor is exactly as it sounds, work you complete for which you are not paid. This includes doing the laundry, washing the dishes, childcare, feeding the dogs, sweeping the floors, the list goes on and on. Unpaid labor can also be referred to as wages for housework.
According to The New York Times, in 2019, “If American women earned minimum wage for the unpaid work they do around the house and caring for relatives, they would have made $1.5 trillion last year.” In the United States, that equated to women performing an average of four hours of unpaid labor per day, whereas men completed two and a half hours of unpaid labor a day. Multiply that out and it equals women completing approximately 22 days more days of unpaid labor each year than men.
What is Office Housework?
If you can perform unpaid labor at home, it makes sense that you can also perform unpaid labor in the office. This type of labor is better known as office housework. This type of work can include booking meetings and conference rooms, remembering to buy birthday cards for employees, and ordering office supplies.
Joan Williams and Marina Multhaup wrote in the Harvard Business Review that, “Office housework happens outside of the spotlight. Some is administrative work that keeps things moving forward, like taking notes or finding a time everyone can meet. Some is emotional labor (“He’s upset — fix it.”). Some is work that’s important but undervalued, like initiating new processes or keeping track of contracts. This kind of assignment has to get done by someone, but it isn’t going to make that person’s career.”
How Do These All Relate
Wondering if there’s some overlap between the types of labor? The answer is definitely maybe. It’s highly situational and depends on the emotional impact a household or office task has on you.
Let’s start with emotional labor and unpaid labor. According to Arlie Hochschild, when asked in this 2018 The Atlantic article if it’s emotional labor to remember the household chores and remind people to do them, her response was, “Not in itself. I think that’s mental labor. If there’s some management of anxiety about forgetting something, that’s the emotional-labor part of it.”
The clear differentiator is, rightfully so, whether emotions play a part. So inherently a task may not involve emotional labor, but depending on the situation or the person, it may.
When it comes to office housework and emotional labor, planning social gatherings for the office isn’t emotional labor, it’s mental labor. But it can become emotional labor if the work is somehow disturbing for you.
How Men Can Take on More Emotional Labor
In the workplace, I would argue that men and women are expected to take on similar amounts of emotional labor. As emotional labor involves managing your emotions for a job you are paid to do, men and women fall under similar expectations in the workplace. You would expect both male and female restaurant employees to treat you with the same respect and pleasantries regardless of if they were having a bad day or hold different personal views than you. The same goes for other employees whose jobs require a significant amount of emotional labor.
The place where men can take on more emotional labor is at home. While emotional labor is meant to apply to jobs for which you are paid, one can argue that it can still be present for unpaid labor and mental labor. Emotional labor in relationships is tricky to navigate.
In my opinion, oftentimes mental labor and household work alone are mistaken for emotional labor. Making to-do lists, doing the laundry, or remembering to RSVP to a friend’s party are forms of mental and household labor. Emotional labor comes into play when there are emotions attached to these tasks. If you feel burdened, resentful, or anxious for example, then you are enduring emotional labor. Chores are not emotional labor. But feeling overloaded and overwhelmed because your complete 95% of the household work and your spouse disregards your efforts and makes no efforts to help out, that can lead to emotional labor.
In this Harper's Bazaar article by Gemma Hartley, she recounts an experience with her husband regarding the task of cleaning the bathroom. All she wanted for Mother’s Day was for her husband to share the mental and unpaid labor of researching and hiring a cleaning person to get the job done. In the end, he ultimately made one phone call to a cleaning company and decided it cost too much and he left her to care for their children while he cleaned the bathroom on Mother’s Day. He understood the situation as giving his wife what she wanted when what she had asked for was someone outside of the household to do the job.
“I had to tell him how much I appreciated the bathroom cleaning, but perhaps he could do it another time (like when our kids were in bed). Then I tried to gingerly explain the concept of emotional labor: that I was the manager of the household, and that being manager was a lot of thankless work. Delegating work to other people, i.e. telling him to do something he should instinctively know to do, is exhausting,” Hartley said.
She continued, “My husband is a good man, and a good feminist ally. I could tell, as I walked him through it, that he was trying to grasp what I was getting at. But he didn’t. He said he’d try to do more cleaning around the house to help me out. He restated that all I ever needed to do was ask him for help, but therein lies the problem. I don't want to micromanage housework. I want a partner with equal initiative.”
Many women do their best to keep the peace at home. They carry the load of mental and unpaid labor. The overwhelm and anxiety that can come as a result of this workload can at times be too much to bear. This emotional labor is taxing and can lead to animosity at home.
To share the emotional labor in relationships, we have to first start by talking about it. These uncomfortable, but necessary, conversations are the first step to determine how men and women can split the mental and household work to reduce the emotional labor caused by doing it all.
How We Can Stop Doing it All
You may know from experience that women have become accustomed to getting things done. Be it work in the office or at home, as the saying goes, if you want it done right, do it yourself. But what if we didn’t have to? What if we found a way to stop doing it all?
First of all, it’s exhausting. I mean it is all labor, isn’t it? Taking on all the labor, be it mental, emotional, or physical, is bound to take a toll on you and could even lead to burnout. Second, you don’t have to do it all. Let's repeat that, you don’t have to do it all.
We don’t have one magic answer, but we can give you small tips that can add up some big changes.
Ask for help.
It may seem easier or quicker to do it yourself, but we’re here to tell you it’s OK to ask for help. It’s OK to share the workload at home and at the office. People might even thank you. Think of that new employee who’s been looking for an opportunity to learn more. By asking them to assist in a project and delegating tasks, it’s a win-win situation.
If you’re stuck spinning your wheels on an assignment, ask your boss for a meeting to discuss your questions and how to move forward. I guarantee your boss would rather you ask for help instead of spending your and your company’s valuable time hemming and hawing about what to do next.
At home, it’s likely that your partner or roommates aren’t intentionally avoiding chores (at least most of the time). Try your best to think the best of everyone. Most people don’t wake up with the intent to make your life more difficult by not doing the dishes or forgetting what they need to pick up at the grocery store. It may feel awkward to ask for help at first or it might be a tough conversation, but once you open the lines of communication it’s only going to make your life easier.
Have the tough conversations.
To get to a place where others can help you and you can share the workload, you have to first have the tough conversations. Whether it's a check-in with your boss where you tell them how you’re feeling and what help you need with, or a conversation with your partner about how you can best work together at home to share the unpaid and mental labor, the conversations aren’t easy. But to make progress, they’re conversations that must be had. You may not arrive at a solution right then and there, but at least you’ve opened the lines of communications and have planted a seed that can grow into future discussions.
Work smarter.
It’s 2020 and technology is our friend. There are plenty of little things you can do to take some of the burdens off your shoulders. A few ideas: delegate tasks, set reminders in your phone about important to-dos or must-not-forget items, share your calendar with your partner or friend, or hire someone else to do the task. Your time, efforts, and mental health are valuable assets, so it’s best to optimize how you work and live instead of making it harder than it has to be.
Help yourself before you help others.
Think about when you’re flying on a plane. When the flight attendant is walking through the safety procedures, they always stress the importance of putting on your oxygen mask first before you help others. The same logic applies to labor. If you’re helping others first, then you have less energy to help yourself. Make your needs a priority.
Make a schedule and to-do list, and then prioritize it.
A lot of mental work goes into planning our days and weeks. Think of your work schedule and important deadlines, then add on meal planning, scheduling workouts, and household chores, then add in the fire drills that are bound to come up along the way. It’s a lot.
The best way to mitigate overwhelm and stress is to plan the best you can before the week or day starts. Write down all your to-dos, then prioritize them by what must get done today, what must get done this week, and what’s nice to get done but it doesn’t have to happen right now. Schedule important meetings, dinners, and tasks in your calendar. Even better if you share these with those you live with so you’re setting the stage for what your commitments are and where they can help.
Your schedule will never go 100% as planned, but it’s likely to run smoother and take some of the mental labor off of your shoulders if you do your best to set yourself up for success ahead of time.
Balancing labor is a process. Change won’t happen overnight. But the only way to grow and evolve how we work together is by taking the first step to talk about it.
