Work Feelings

Bosses don't care about your feelings, unless they exploit them as emotional labor.

Photo by MARK ADRIANE on Unsplash

I read a great piece by Ashley Frawley, Your boss doesn't care about your feelings, where her thesis is that managers are taking a new tack on employees’ feelings, as a new mechanism to gain more control in the workplace. She wrote:

At the risk of stating the obvious, faceless corporations don’t care about your mental health. And they don’t care about the “stigma” surrounding the expression of feelings. To them, your feelings are just one of many unpredictable variables that must be brought to light, their risks neutralised, managed and controlled.

Remember, scientific management is all about control, at it’s core.

Managerial jabber about breaking down stigmas is a thin veneer for their view of you as a liability. Your unruly emotions are a potential risk to business, institutions, even society as a whole — you could go off sick, you could go on strike, or you could otherwise be unpredictable in ways that hurt the bottom line.

Again, control, and in this case, ‘unruly emotions’.

At the heart of these initiatives lies a concerted effort to cultivate a new mindset among employees and citizens — one where individuals are encouraged to view their thoughts and feelings as risks, who bring their “whole self” to work so that it can be assessed for hazards that can be managed and controlled.

[…]

But what are we supposed to talk about? Here, talking about your feelings is the only safe, neutral territory. Translate material problems into the language of feelings and these can be converted into something safer, something more productive, something less risky and unruly.

I am eliding a great deal of this powerful piece, but the skinny is this sharing of emotions is ultimately a snare: not freedom from concern, but another means to be manipulated.

If those in power cannot solve social problems, they can at least teach fragile subjects to be “resilient” to a world beyond their control. As Christopher Lasch wrote back in the Seventies, modern people don’t seek religious transcendence nor even worldly success so much as “mental health” as the “modern equivalent of salvation”. And as a result, we are being sold our own bureaucratic iron cage as a kind of freedom.

This resonates with other writings, like Kerry McDermott’s piece about Pret A Manger from 2013:

Details have emerged of a regime of 'enforced happiness' at Pret A Manger, where staff earning little more than the minimum wage are monitored to ensure they are relentlessly cheerful behind the counter.

The bizarre 'emotional labour' rules mean employees of the popular sandwich chain are expected to be 'charming', to 'have presence', and to 'care about other people's happiness', and should never be 'moody', or 'just here for the money'.

Mystery shoppers visit branches every week to ensure all staff are displaying 'Pret perfect' behaviour.

[…]

If staff at a Pret branch get a positive report after a visit from a mystery shopper, the whole team gets a bonus. But should the visitor encounter an employee who is insufficiently 'enthusiastic', or worse, 'bad-tempered', everybody misses out.

Collective punishment.

The McDermott piece was triggered by Paul Myerscough’s detailed dissection of Pret’s ‘emotional labor’ economy:

Pret workers aren’t supposed to be unhappy. They are recruited precisely for their ‘personality’, in the sense that a talent show host might use the word. Job candidates must show that they have a natural flair for the ‘Pret Behaviours’ (these are listed on the website too). Among the 17 things they ‘Don’t Want to See’ is that someone is ‘moody or bad-tempered’, ‘annoys people’, ‘overcomplicates ideas’ or ‘is just here for the money’. The sorts of thing they ‘Do Want to See’ are that you can ‘work at pace’, ‘create a sense of fun’ and are ‘genuinely friendly’. The ‘Pret Perfect’ worker, a fully evolved species, ‘never gives up’, ‘goes out of their way to be helpful’ and ‘has presence’. After a day’s trial, your fellow workers vote on how well you fit the profile; if your performance lacks sparkle, you’re sent home with a few quid.

[…]

It isn’t clear which is the more demanding, authenticity or performance, being it or faking it, but in either case it’s difficult to believe that there isn’t something demoralising, for Pret workers perhaps more than most in the high street, not only in having their energies siphoned off by customers, but also in having to sustain the tension between the performance of relentless enthusiasm at work and the experience of straitened material circumstances outside it. ‘Henceforth,’ as Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming put it in their recent jeremiad Dead Man Working (Zero, £9.99), ‘our authenticity is no longer a retreat from the mandatory fakeness’ of the workplace, ‘but the very medium through which work squeezes the life out of us’.

To guard against the possibility of Pret workers allowing themselves to behave even for a moment as if they were ‘just here for the money’, the company maintains a panoptical regime of surveillance and assessment.

Pret A Manger is just a more blatant and exhibitionistic extreme than the everyday case that McDermott sketches in the post-pandemic era, which ‘wellbeing’ has been both raised to the highest good (which I can’t argue with, at all), but then harnessed to exact the control and performance that the company seeks.

Perhaps there is a happy medium in there somewhere, but I am suspicious when management are overtly manipulating emotions, even when it’s hypothetically in our own interests.

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Work Futures is dedicated to changing how work works through the principles of socialist humanism.