The Managed Heart

both instructions are reasonable put side by side they ask for two different things one says perform warmth until it becomes real the other says only real warmth counts the book moves between them as if they were the same instruction and the gap between them is where the most interesting question in it lives Someone mapped that gap almost 30 years earlier.

In The Managed Heart, published in 1983, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild spent time inside the training program of Delta Airlines, watching flight attendants learn to smile for a living.

One pilot told a room of trainees that their smile was their biggest asset.

Hochschild called what those women were doing emotional labor, and she drew a line that Blount never draws.

It has a name.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined emotional labor in 1983 in her book, The Managed Heart.

It means managing your own feelings and everyone else's to meet the demands of a role.

I've watched that idea play out in leadership for years.

What gets left off that list are the kinds of things Sarah took on without question.

Sarah's agency never wrote a policy that said plan the birthdays, absorb the tension, or protect people's feelings before the client relationship.

She built that standard herself out of the same broken playbook Lisa was following back in the very first issue of The Permission Slip.

I told you Lisa's story, the one that taught her that a good leader carries this without being asked.

Three things often not linked together.

[laughs] And your new book caught my interest because it's something I've been thinking about since, oof, probably 2012 actually.

But I have unfortunately stumbled into ex-Twitter debates about whether or not service workers counted as workers, and then did some research myself on the debates around that going all the way back to the 19th century, including some very strange but somewhat interesting letters by Marx where he goes back and forth on what to categorize service workers, including coming up with a second category of lumpenproletariat that he doesn't think is true lumpenproletariat to apply to service workers because in the 19th century they were seasonally precarious and often out of work.

Your current research really [laughs] seems to indicate that we kind of have to update this considering that in- industrial labor is, oh, I don't know, between 8 and 12%, depending on how you categorize it in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of, of the entire workforce, and service work is between, mm, 60 and 80% depending on how you categorize services.

That's a great intro, and I think it's really good for folks to be reminded that although it seems kind of crazy that we would still be having debates about whether service workers are part of the working class or not, w- we are in some spaces, and those are very old debates.

So I think, yeah, so, I mean, one thing that got me interested in this is that it's interesting to see, to hear you say that you've been thinking about this since 2012, 'cause that's about, that's about when I started thinking about it too.

And my first book is about, is about debt and consumer debt, s- consumer credit, and about how with the wage stagnation that happens as a result of deindustrialization, workers end up turning to debt in order to make it possible for them to reproduce themselves and their households and their families, right? And so I think in some ways of this book as, like, sort of the sequel to that book because I'm interested in the ways in which that phenomenon of wage stagnation is related to the rise of the service economy and to the ways that workers increasingly struggle to reproduce themselves in a service-driven economy and the rise of particularly, like, employment formations like gig work as a sort of way to compensate for the fact that workers are not earning enough in their full-time jobs.

So that was partly what got me interested in this.