ABSTRACT
Emotional labor is done in the presence of other human beings: sales worker with customers, counselors with clients, nurses with patients, wardens with prisoners, performers with audiences, teachers with students, 911 call-handlers with frightened citizens, undertakers with the bereaved, and priests with parishioners. While emotional labor can be mutually enriching, it also contains the highest potential for abuse; of clients by workers and workers by clients. Compared to manual labor and mental labor, the special feature of emotional labor is that its "object" is not mundane material or mental abstractions. Emotional labor cannot be scripted without risk of presenting a robotic impression and destroying the persuasive capability of "deep-acting", therefore individual testimony to the Commission matters. The sheer number of emotional laborers, the fact that we are their clients and that their conditions of work affect their ability to affect us properly, mean that they matter very much.
