Read on Twitter
Incidentally, one of the reasons retail is so bad is because the biggest part of the job is extremely high-impact emotional labour
Most of what people think of & #39;as retail& #39; is not actually the job. Swiping things in front of a scanner, putting things on shelves, that& #39;s not the work. That& #39;s the easy stuff.
It& #39;s being required to be an immediate sudden emotional respondant to people both above and below you
It& #39;s being required to be an immediate sudden emotional respondant to people both above and below you
With a customer you have a tenth of a second to absorb their state and you have ten seconds to make the best positive spin on their emotional state you can, within the confines of the job you& #39;ve been given. Fuck it up, you can get in trouble. All day.
Lots of working class jobs have enormous emotional labour components that we just don& #39;t reward or incentivise, but do punish their absence
Imagine a retail store that& #39;s 100% automated, just vending machines or tokens or stuff like that. The official jobs of the people are handled by an automation. Easy. That can be done by a machine.
What do you do when a kid gets lost in there
What do you do when a kid gets lost in there
Incidentally, as a uni tutor, I know I& #39;m not doing & #39;Working Class& #39; shit, but a lot of what I need to do isn& #39;t dump facts on my students but helping them find the context of the work they can catch. That involves understanding how they think and feel about things.
Btw, that automation/lost kid example isn& #39;t mine, that comes from a guy called David Graeber, who also is the dude who first framed retail work as emotional work in a way that clicked for me.
