Does capitalism need emotional labour?

Hospitality workers taking collective action

In many jobs, workers don’t just have do the job. They also have to act like they really want you to have a nice day.

Arlie Hochschild first analysed this “emotional labour” in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling.

Hochschild starts with Karl Marx’s descriptions of child labourers working in appalling conditions in Victorian factories.

She contrasts this physical labour with the work of a flight attendant in 20th century America. She might have to perform some physical labour, pushing a trolley or lifting bags, but she is also supposed to fake an emotional response.

Hochschild argues that the human cost of performing emotional labour is as harmful to the worker as the physical labour discussed by Marx.

In both cases, “the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self—either the body or the margins of the soul—that is ‘used’ to do the work.”

Emotional labour is “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display.”

Hochschild distinguishes between “emotional work” and “emotional labour”. Emotion work is the emotions we show amongst family and friends.

Emotional labour involves the commercialisation of workers’ feelings which are turned into a package of emotions that is consumed by the customer.

Managers impose “feeling rules” on emotional labourers to ensure the required level of customer service.

This means workers are alienated from their own emotions.

Hochschild argues that these “feeling rules” go further than demanding simple compliance. She calls this “surface acting”. But the rules increasingly demand “deep acting.” This requires a systemic suppression of the real self.

Hochschild understood emotional labour as the product of managerial control in the service sector. She explored how the commodification of emotions intensifies the alienation that shapes all wage labour.

Emotional labourers have no choice but to struggle for a free and dignified sense of themselves against the managers’ demands for better performance.

More recently, feminist writers have developed Hochschild’s analysis in new directions. In They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life, Alva Gotby builds the concept of emotional labour into “emotional reproduction”.

Gotby argues that the commodification of emotions at work is one element of a wider process of emotional reproduction. This is not considered to be real work, but contributes to the well‑being of others.

All reproductive labour, she writes, has an emotional aspect—soothing, caring, intimacy.

It is women who are largely responsible for making others feel good. Gotby wants to make all women’s unpaid work “visible”.

She calls for the “denaturalisation of femininity” and a recognition that capitalism depends on emotional reproduction.

This has been popularised as a “mental load” carried by women who take responsibility for the feelings and well-being of those they care for.

But recognising and redistributing this mental load does not go far enough. All the pressures of the family should be shared equally. But even if they were, the institution of the family would continue to shape women’s lives.

The privatised family socialises women into being self-sacrificing and nurturing, as well as structuring their access to jobs.

The system could not function without the hours of unpaid labour, mostly performed by women, that go into caring for the current and next generations of workers.

Removing emotional labour from the workplace and locating it in the home robs the idea of its power to encourage active resistance.

To free our emotions, we need to replace the private family with collective provision that gives people real freedom.

And that depends on challenging the bosses where we have power—at work.