← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam.
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Saint gonna change.
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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children, those looming down the road. This is a new year. We're about to have a new government. And that introduces all kinds of uncertainties into an already troubled picture of, of an economy in decline. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. As I often do at the beginning of a month, I like to invite all of you, no matter where you are, in the event that you might be in the New York City area at the middle of the month, I want to remind you all and invite you to come and join me at a very historic place here in New York City. It's called the Judson Memorial Church, located on historic Washington Square in downtown Manhattan. The second Wednesday of every month. And so in January, that'll be the 11th of January. At 7:30 in the evening, I give a public talk on the economy and where it's going. It's a chance for me to meet you and vice versa. It's a chance for me to expand on some of the major themes that we don't have time to go into in the length that I would like on a radio show. So if you're in New York, if you're from the New York area, if you're visiting, think about joining us. Wednesday, January 11, 7:30pm Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park. Okay, let's jump right in to the new things that are happening in the global economy and in the United States as well. I want to start with a law that went into effect in France on the 1st of January, 2017. It was one of a group of laws passed last May with much opposition from working people across France, because many of the laws that were passed give employers a greater chance to fire workers than they had before without as much reason as they had to provide before, and so on. It was one of the many ironies of a Socialist government, which is what France has pushing through a law that was good for employers and bad for employees. And it had something to do with the fact that the Socialist Party collapsed in terms of its support in the French countryside. So much so that Monsieur Hollande, the prime minister, the President, excuse me, will not run for reelection since his popularity is at a level that would make even folks like George Bush, who left under a cloud, look good by comparison. One law that was not objected to by the working class in France went into effect on January 1st and I thought you would be interested. The new law is as in any enterprise that has more than 50 employees, there has to be a charter of good conduct prepared by the company. And what in particular that charter has to do is enable workers to disconnect from the employer in the hours that they're not working. And the point and purpose of this law was the French workers have been complaining that with modern technology, smartphones, they are getting and being expected to reply to emails at all hours of the day and night, that employers are simply extending the length of the working day without acknowledging it and without paying the workers a nickel more. And the workers don't like it and they want there to be rules governing what they are and are not required to do. And many of these charters are now being written so that workers will be officially allowed not to respond to emails that come after working hours and cannot be penalized for not doing so. It is a way of protecting the effective length of the working day. And I wanted to make that point not only because most workers in most other countries do not have any such protection. It's not just that. It's a way of illustrating what happens when a working class has strong unions and political parties that advance its interests, if not all the time, at least some of the time. So, for example, there is a right to disconnect occasionally in other places. For example, the Daimler Motor Company, the company in Germany that makes the Mercedes Benz line of automobiles a couple of years ago, gave their workers the option, that's all it was, of choosing to not respond to emails when they're beyond working hours, when they're not working with an out of office reply, automatic instead, the company said it was fair to their workers that they could choose instead of an automatic reply, to have all incoming emails that come after working hours be automatically deleted. And therefore there'd be no responsibility on the workers part to have to deal with them, at least not unless they were resent during working hours, the next day, etc. Daimler did that, but other German companies haven't done it and are not required to do it. What's different about France is they're not leaving it up to this or that company. They're making it a rule to protect all working people across the country from doing that. And it's a sign of the power of the working class. Even now, as it shrinks, there is that power that history built up that can't be overthrown anytime soon. So the French Workers are getting the right to disconnect to the envy of workers in most other countries. But then again, that isn't new. In 2000, that's 17 years ago, the law was passed that reduced the working week in France to 35 hours. That law is still in effect. If a worker is asked to work beyond that, he doesn't have to and he or she will have to get paid extra for the time beyond 35 hours. And by the way, the rationale for for both the old law about 35 hours and this new one about the right to disconnect is in order to achieve an appropriate work life balance. That's how it's called in France. It is something that workers in all countries strive for, a work life balance. The difference is if you have working class organizations, you can actually do something about the work life balance beyond complaining about how hard it is to achieve such a balance, which I know many of us do almost every day. Next update. Well, years ago I had a friend and a student and he has gone on to be quite a success and I'm proud of him. And he's a very thoughtful economist. His name is Jomo Kwame Sundaram and he was until recently the United Nations Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development. He has won many prizes for his economic work as well as achieving a very powerful position in terms of economic development. And one of the things he has specialized in is the economics of food, the production of the food we all have to eat to survive and how that affects us. And he recently wrote an article carried by the Inter Press Service and dated. I want to give you the exact date, December 27, 2016, so you can find it on the IPS news agency under his name, Sundaram and S U N D A R A M. And one of the parts of his work that I'm interested in is a discussion of American junk food. And I wanted to give you just the bare results of his research. And again, this is the United Nations Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development. Three quarters, he begins, three quarters of the US Population is considered overweight or obese. And a major part of this epidemic problem, which by the way, exists in other countries too. But it is stunning here in the United States, a major part of the problem is junk food, which are the largest source of calories in the American diet. And here he lists the items that make this true. And I thought you would be interested. Sweet desserts, bread, pizza, pasta and sweetened drinks are the major culprits. And now here's his these Foods are largely products of seven basic food items that are heavily subsidized by the United States government. And I'm going to give you the list of these seven basic foods whose production on farms is subsidized heavily by the US Government. Here we go. Corn, wheat, rice, soy, sorghum, milk and meat. And here's his point. Because they're so heavily subsidized, these items are plentiful and cheap in terms of their prices at the market. Between 1995 and 2010, the United States government paid out 170 billion, that's with a B in agricultural subsidies to produce these seven basic foods. While such foods are not in themselves inherently unhealthy, the very few of them are eaten simply as they are produced. Most of these are used as feed for livestock or processed into cheap products such as sweeteners, industrial oils, processed meats, refined carbohydrates and other processed foods. And then he reaches his conclusion. The same US Government that subsidizes the the production of cheap, readily accessible food in these forms that contribute to obesity, the same US Government that does that is constantly urging the people to eat less of those foods and more fruits and vegetables, et cetera, et cetera, yet it doesn't begin to subsidize the kinds of small local farms that can produce fruits and vegetables near to the markets where they are consumed. The subsidies go to big agribusiness that has the political muscle to get the subsidies. And so the government is in the peculiar position of being pressurized by big business to subsidize them in ways that lead to overweight and obesity, while another part of the same government lamely tells us we shouldn't be doing what the big subsidies are constantly doing. Making us do it is a contradiction in the way the government works. And the end result is an epidemic of overweight and obesity. And a key part of it is the profit driven power of agribusiness. Enormous mega corporations. Third item for today, universal basic income. It's in the news more and more as a number of countries around the world and I've reported on this, are making experiments to see how it works. If you say to people who are unemployed, people who are poor, people who are getting various kinds of government welfare, let's stop all of the playing around with details and let's just give everybody a minimum basic income, called a universal basic income ubi, as a way of taking care of folks, which might in the end be simpler and cheaper for everybody than the crazy quilt of programs and administrators of programs that we have now. And to this idea, a great cry of opposition has arisen. And it goes something bizarrely like, gee, it wouldn't be good to have some people who work for a living and other people who earn a living without working for it, because that kind of difference would create tensions, envies, animosities, and so on. And clearly this criticism has a point. There are real questions about the appropriateness of having some people required to work for an income and other people not required to work for an income. And of course, it would be even worse, wouldn't it, if the income you get if you work were less than the income you got from not working? I understand those are significant questions that I share in questioning the notion of a universal basic income. But I want to protest the notion that to give poor people a basic income without working would be something new, something revolutionary, something different. It isn't. Capitalism is a system that has always done that. And let me explain. Every day across America and indeed most other countries, the following event happens. A person. Typically a person in the top 10% rich people in the country, and particularly in the top 1%. Every day, some of those folks do the they open the front door of their home. They walk down the lawn, on the sidewalk, to the mailbox. The they open the mailbox, and in there they find a check. And they tear open the envelope that contains the check, and they pull out the check and they say, oh, wonderful. This is a check for. And typically, if they're wealthy, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is a check called a dividend. It is sent to the owner of shares of stock in a company. It is income for that owner that has nothing to do with any work that person did. That person does not work in any of the factories, offices, or stores operated by the company in which he or she owns shares. The only work they did for the $10,000 check they got was walking to the mailbox and tearing open the envelope. And if you want to call that work, that's right. In a capitalist system, there are two ways to earn income. One is by working and getting paid a wage or a salary. Most of you are quite familiar with that way. But there's a second way you can own something. Land, a factory, a bunch of money, machinery, that kind of thing, shares of stock. And if you own them, you can get an income even though you don't do any work at all. In fact, most of the richest people in America today earn most of their income from property, not from labor. Moreover, capitalism doesn't care how you got the property. Did you inherit it from your grandmother? Maybe she did some work, but you didn't. Maybe you stole it. Maybe it's the result of a corporation that avoided paying taxes by some legal or illegal gimmick and gave you the money instead as a dividend on a share of stock. We don't care. In capitalism, if you own the property and you put it into the hands of a business, you get a cut of the income generated by that business. So I don't want to hear people say to me, giving poor folk a universal basic income. Giving poor folk or unemployed folk income without working is some revolutionary new idea. It isn't what the universal basic income does, which is why half the people who oppose it do so, is to say, hey, why are the only people we give income to without working ones who are already rich, the people with the highest salaries? You guessed it, they're the ones with the most property too. We distribute income without working to the people who don't need it. And the UBI campaign is at least courageous enough to say, mightn't it be better, mightn't it be more consistent with our values if we have them, to distribute the benefit of income without work to those who need it most, rather than in the capitalist system, to those who need it least? Next item. This is a story I'm loving to present to you. It's about a community located in a place I had never heard of called Fridley F R I D L E Y Fridley, Minnesota. And my source for this is a program on National Public Radio produced and hosted by Daniel Zwerdling. Those of you who listen to NPR are familiar. It was a program he did for the Daily show they call All Things Considered. Well, what happened in Fridley, Minnesota is a lesson, and so I want to convey it. In Fridley, Minnesota, there is a mobile home community called the Park Plaza neighborhood. Don't get carried away with the word Park Plaza. I think most of you know what a mobile home community mostly is close to an important downtown area in Minnesota, I believe Minneapolis. Fridley in any case is a suburb and people who work are able to afford the low cost housing that a mobile home park enables. Here's how that works. A capitalist enterprise buys some land and probably buys a whole bunch of trailers, locates them on the land, hooks them up to water and electricity and so on, and then proceeds to sell the individual mobile homes to individual families at a relatively low price. They having gotten them for a low price and then charges the folks a hefty fee for all the services that the company provides. The company that owns the land and set this whole thing up is a profit making enterprise, which means they try to deliver the fewest possible services they can while getting the income from all the rentals, all the fees paid by those occupying the mobile homes. And so what you often get, and by the way, often 8 million people live in mobile home communities in America. So we're not talking a rare phenomenon, hardly, but these are people who have a hard time making ends meet. That's why they live in a mobile home community like this. And often they are neglected because the profit driven owner operator of the enterprise runs it that way, charges as much as he can and delivers as little as he can get away with. The people in Fridley, Minnesota were disgusted by what the conditions were. Potholes in their streets, yards that were not maintained, grass that was not cut, you can imagine. So they got together and, and here's what they did. They discovered that they were all angry and there were lots of them. And they got together and they created a cooperative. And I want to tell the story. They discovered that there are helps in Minnesota, as there are, by the way, in many states, for people in such a situation to get technical help and financial support. And to make a long story short, the people in this mobile home park got together, all of them. They had meetings, they had discussions, and they got together and they arranged a loan from a bank that enabled them to buy out the company to get rid of the capitalist enterprise that was running their mobile home park and run it themselves. A cooperative. Well, what does that mean? It means they were all jointly co op owners. They owned the cooperative themselves. They were the company, they themselves that provided the service to themselves as individual homeowners within the property. It's an owner's cooperative. In that way. It's not so different from food co ops around the country where where the customers who buy the food from the store become the owners of the store. And it's a way of making sure that instead of the whole operation working to the benefit of a tiny number of people who own the business, the whole operation works to the benefit of the whole community that depends on it. The next step, which they're starting with in Fridley, Minnesota is to realize that the benefits of a cooperative ownership, the mobile home community can be extended to make the benefits of a cooperative work process in maintaining the property. The same benefits come from having the workers who mow the lawns and clean the things and maintain them. Have that be done cooperatively rather than for the profit of another operation. That the notion of co op ownership can become co op work organization. And that is an important lesson because we have in America many, many thousands of what we call ESOPs, ESOP Employee Stock Ownership Plan. These are companies where the workers within them have bought the company. But what often happens is that the process of co op stops there. They cooperativize the ownership but they think they have to leave the operations of the enterprise to in the hands of a handful of people who are the board of directors and who run it in a typical capitalist profit maximizing way. They slowly then discover what the folks in Fridley are already ahead of them on. Namely that the same benefits that come from cooperative ownership are available from cooperative operation of the enterprise. Okay, next economic update that we have time for and we're pressed. Well, it's about Denmark. Denmark is an important country. It provides an extraordinary service that I wanted to tell you all about because that service is in Trouble. Here's the 98% of children and we're talking very young children are in daycare in Denmark. It has an unbelievable. It's very rare to find a young child that's not in daycare. And one of the reasons is that the government massively subsidizes daycare a month of all day daycare, if you wish to take advantage of it, costs about $200. The rest of the cost is borne by the government. So an individual family pays $200. And that's why for example, a huge portion of women in Denmark are working full time or part time because they have a first class care under the current pressures in Denmark, which are like those in England and America. They are pushing to lower taxes on wealthy people, therefore to bankrupt the government, therefore to take this benefit away. And that fight is happening in Denmark. But we'll be watching it because it's the fight of a mass of the population which has come to value greatly the services they get and putting them in a very different position from working people elsewhere. We've come to the end of our first half of the program. I want to remind you of course of the two websites where you can go to find out more and to communicate with us. As we always remind you, rdwolff with two Fs com and democracyork.in fox. Please make use of them. Thank you very much for being with us this first half hour. I think you will find the interview that comes in the second half hour fascinating. Please stay with us. We will be right back.
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It's I did a sick, sick thing to my love My lack of loyalty had swallowed her up and she cooked me food she squirmed and turned like a skeleton key she left a man attended to me. Don't call me that, don't claim you love me Cause you know that ain't true.
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Welcome back, friends, to the second half of this edition of Economic Update. As I have told you, the first program of each month will be devoted to a conversation in the second half of the program between myself and Dr. Harriet Fraad, who's with us again today. She will be doing this again in February. And indeed, I wanted to mention, for those of you that are especially interested, which we know you are because of the flow of emails that we get after each of these experiences, the program for February, the first week in February will feature another conversation with Dr. Fraad, but that one will be about sex work. Today we're going to be talking about the economics of emotional labor. And we'll get to that in a moment. So first of all, let me welcome Harriet to the program. Thank you for being here at the beginning of this month.
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Thank you. Glad to be here.
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Harriet Fraud, for those of you who do not know from past experiences on this program, is a mental health counselor and hypnotherapist in private practice in New York City, which she has been for many years. She also writes extensively about the interaction between, between economics and psychology, between the economy and our psychology, with special emphasis on that interaction in the United States. Well, we often talk about labor, as all economists do, and one of the fruits of Harriet Fraad's work in the past has been to make us more and more aware. And she's not the only one. But it's still quite rare that there is a kind of labor we don't seem to talk about a lot, and we don't understand and work into our understandings of the economy. The labor we do talk about is the labor that results in a good or a service, the hamburger that's prepared, the software program that is crafted, the railway travel that Amtrak provides us. These are, we might say, physical labor, labor where the brains and the muscles of a person produce an object or a service. But there's another kind of labor that Harriet Fraad wants to talk with us about today, and that which, once you understand it, is just as important for how an economy works and how our society works as that physical labor, and we call it, or Dr. Fraad calls it emotional labor. So I want to start by Asking her, give us an idea. What is emotional labor and how is it different from the other kinds of labor we talk about?
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Well, emotional labor is an effort of brain and muscle and emotion to try to figure out the emotional needs of another and to provide for those needs. So if I am in a personal relationship, if I'm, let's say, a wife, if my husband comes home upset and looking, you know, doing things, crashing things down and cursing a bit, and I will do the emotional labor of trying to figure out what's happening, I may ask if he wants to talk. I may just start doing little convenient things, ask him for a cup of tea, go over and put my hand on his shoulder, do things that would meet the need of a ruffled, upset human being. As a therapist, I not only find out what's wrong as a way of finding out how to deal with it, but I extend a genuine interest and kindness in another human being to let him or her know that he or she is really welcomed here, that I want to hear, that I want to help. It even is there in the form of a restaurant. If you go to a restaurant and someone who's waiting on you shows bored indifference, shoving the food at you and not paying attention, they won't get a tip. Because a tip is, I appreciate the emotional labor that you are putting in to try to at least pretend that you enjoy serving me, that this is a pleasure rather than another day, another dollar, and you're in the way and shut up and eat. You know, it's a different experience. It's even there in, let's say, in a department of a university. One of the ways that the French go on strike, which is very clever, since they don't lose money if they are in the technical work department or in the staff of a university, they will do only what's on their job description. They won't try to please. So most of what you do in a job where you're taking care of something for someone in a department is not on the job description.
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It's this emotional labor.
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It's that you try to figure out what the. It's an emotional component of your labor, trying to figure out what's needed, going beyond what's needed to show you that you're eager to learn, that you imagine something else that might be needed, that you go ahead and do it, that you make the administrative job easy because you're extending. Well, you may need this or you may need that. It's just like if you ask someone directions, you say, how do you get from, you know, 42nd to 59th, lots of ways, and then you leave. There's no emotional labor. Well, you could take the D train, or you could take the two and three, or you could. And here's where you wait, and here's what you do. You're extending yourself emotionally, so it runs the gamut. And of course, emotional labor, like all other labor, can be used for constructive or destructive ends. In something like sales work, you psych out the emotional need of the potential buyer in order to persuade that person to buy what you're selling, whether they need it or not. They may not need a hot tub when they're already poor, but you're doing emotional, emotional labor. But you are doing emotional labor to show them that this will meet their needs, this will soothe them, this will unite the family in the happy hot tub. Or do whatever you feel that person needs in order to really exploit that person's neediness to sell something.
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So am I right? It's an extension of yourself. It's using your energy, your muscles, your brain, your emotion to make someone else.
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Feel good, to meet someone's emotional needs.
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So am I right to say that the point you're making is that human beings extend themselves? They dispense energy. They use energy and muscles and brain power to make someone else feel better. For whatever the reason, it is an output of effort, of labor to affect an emotional result. And that's part of what the labor is that human beings do, even if it's for a variety of reasons.
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That's right.
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So when we talk about labor, we ought to be talking about emotional labor too.
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We ought to, because it's a component of many kinds of labor. And those kinds of labor are usually devalued. Not so much sales, which fits with a capitalist model, but the labor in a home of trying to make people feel good, of trying to extend yourself, of trying to anticipate someone's needs, has been invisible labor. And why has it been invisible? It's been invisible because it was described and it was ascribed as a genetic outgrowth of femaleness. Just the way picking cotton was assumed to be the preference for darker people. And it's just as bizarre and so that they didn't have to count it as labor and didn't have to see what it cost the people giving it and how it benefited the people receiving it. And so women labor was not valued, and it still is not valued because the most, in many ways, it's very labor intensive. Emotional labor intensive. Intensive to take care of children in a Daycare center. Two or three year old children or in the family?
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Either.
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Or in a family. Well, in a family it's interesting, it's honored in terms of the right wing populism of country music. There's a song, you know, a mother saying for all the hugs, I gave you no charge for the cookies when you wanted them, no charge, and so on and so forth. And that's a very sentimentalized labor, but it's never considered anything to compensate.
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It's actually an admission that this is a kind of labor that never gets charged, that is not recognized in the way that we recognize the other kinds of labor.
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That's right. Even if that same service was provided outside the family. But in a luncheonette, you'd give the waitress a tip if she was solicitous of your needs and seemed to be deceive you.
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But even say she's a low pay person, but it's devalued. Instead of being part of her job description that you recognize she puts out emotional labor and that's part of why she's paid a salary. You make it into a different category and she puts it out. You are at your liberty to pay.
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Her or not to pay her or not. Exactly.
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It's a clear ranking.
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It keeps it invisible. And because of that, nurturing labor, which is emotional labor, is the least well paid of all. So that.
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Give us some examples.
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Yeah. Daycare workers are paid less than parking lot attendants. So to watch a car is considered more valuable than to extend yourself and meet the needs of young children.
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Even though the ability to meet the emotional needs of young children, as everyone who's ever studied the subject knows, is crucial to, to how they develop into adults, to their productivity in life thereafter, to their citizenship, all of it to.
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Their basic brain formation in the early years. But the younger children, the younger the children are you care for in a daycare, the less well you're paid. So a professor in college is paid a lot more than a daycare worker who's paid less than a first grade teacher. And you still have burnout among those people. One of the things you do to really cheat children out of quality childcare is that you disrupt the attachment of children to their caregivers because they're paid so little that people get burnt out and need a more lucrative job.
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So then is your point that the teacher, for example, in a daycare center who leaves after two or three years because she or he is pouring out emotional labor, not only teaching the little kids how to read and write and all of that, but also being the ersatz parent, the mother during the day, the support in all the emotional. All that emotional labor is neither paid for nor recognized. It's not the enormous importance socially it has and that you might not get this turnover if we understood and recognized the emotional labor as part of what these teachers are doing.
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That's true. Now, there are other societies. I don't know Denmark well, but I do know they pay better. And I know in France they pay the way school teachers get paid, which is much better and have benefits, but they still don't recognize emotional labor as a component of labor and as a very valuable component of labor. If you're in a daycare center, one of the things you do is socialize people's children. You teach children to respect one another, to take turns, to be kind to one another. When I worked in early childhood education, one of the things that I would do with children who were timid and couldn't speak up when other children grabbed their stuff was to help them by bringing the child who was the grabber over and crouching behind the little child who didn't have a voice and saying, I don't like that. You can't grab my toys. And then encouraging the little kid who couldn't have a voice by being there and touching his shoulders or her shoulders to have that voice. That's emotional labor. That's me trying to figure out, what does this child need to muster the courage to hold on to his toy, and why.
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And I know this is a difficult question. Why have we as a culture devalued this obvious important in just the ways you point out and real labor? Because you have to move your body and you have to think about it, and you have to strain to figure out how to be a useful helper to someone else in their emotional life and their emotional. Why has that been devalued when it is as obvious a real output of energy and a really socially valuable activity?
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Well, if we look at our capitalist culture, where it doesn't pay to hire someone unless you're making a lot more money off that person than you give them, which is a kind of theft. If you really have compassion for your workers, it would be harder to lay them off. It would be harder to demand degrading work if you say that they are just the same as a gear in a machine, but not a person who's working to make things better. If you don't see their humanity, if you don't connect to their emotional life, it's much More easy to treat them badly and to scrimp on them in order to enrich yourself. You don't see yourself as a continuum of humanity all connected, but as these are, in Hillary's words, the basket of deplorables, these are the people you don't have to care about. They're just there as invisible agents to improve your life. I remember once my son helped to carry the little refrigerator upstairs for a person from a very elite, one of the elites from a foreign country he helped at college the first day to carry her little refrigerator up. When he got up the three flights of stairs, the mother of this student said to our son, carry on, and turned her back. Because these are the people who perform labor who are invisible. And you don't have to see their humanity.
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And so you don't have to accept that. Thank you.
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That was so kind of you to do me that service. These are invisible services because you've learned to separate yourself out from connection with the people serving you. And that is an enabler of capitalism. And although you may spend a whole lot of money on some consultant about teamwork, team building and connection, on that level, you want to be very careful that people do not feel connected to the people they're treating. It won't work well. It's also a way of, for generations, for centuries, keeping women in their place. They don't have to be rewarded. They weren't doing anything because you don't see the emotional labor, because the emotional labor is invisible. So women can go back to work, having been home, building a home, creating a reasonable human relationship, making things easier for everyone in life through cooking and cleaning and ordering and comforting, and they can go back to work. And in society's eyes, what have you been doing? Nothing. So that you devalue an enormous amount of labor. And there are arguments now, why don't women go to break the glass ceiling? And one of the arguments is their priorities are a little different. Because if you're taught to nurture, you're not necessarily just going to want to get more as an end in life. You want to spend life being connected and compassionate, at least in one part of your life, in friendship and family, even though you've divorced your concern for from other people on the shop floor. And so that it's a way of devaluing what women's work has always been.
- [47:49]
A
Let me take this into an example. Let me throw it at you and get your reaction, because I find it fascinating to explore what the results are of making emotional labor either invisible excuse Me or devalued. And the argument here goes something like this. Starting back in the 1970s, the wages, as we have discussed before, of male workers in this country, United States, stopped rising. They'd been rising for a long time. They basically stopped and they've never really resumed. And as a result, the American dream, which kept becoming more and more expensive, having a car, having a home, sending your kids to college, having a real vacation once a year and so on, in order to have the American dream, which was constantly advertised to you as a standard of what was a successful life, the long and the short of it was women went out to work. Partly there was the women's liberation movement that saw this as a kind of liberation for women. But whether or not it was a liberation, it was necessary if the family unit was to be a successful American family unit. And so the women went out to work. And here comes the invisible emotional labor part. When the women were not in the labor force were at home. And of course, there were always poorer women who had been working in the labor force for a long time, particularly.
- [49:28]
C
A quarter of them.
- [49:29]
A
Yes. So we're talking about mostly white, middle level families. When the woman leaves the household, she. And goes out to work eight hours a day and has to get dressed and travel and all the rest, she can't put out the emotional labor, to use your language in the family that she once did, that is she's tired. And it takes muscle energy and brain power and lots of energy to be the comforter, the healer, the raiser of the children, the carer for the elderly, parent, whatever. So she is less able to do the emotional labor. And at the same time, being a full time worker like her husband, she needs emotional labor from others the way the husband did need it and got it from his wife. So you have a recipe for the explosion of the American family. Because the woman can't give what the family has come to depend on and needs what there's now no one available to give her. And so she is going to become an unhappy camper. And we may begin to understand that as capitalism created the conditions requiring women to go out to work, they were undoing the economy of emotional labor and thereby destroying the family and setting in motion social changes which erupt in 10 different directions, including, for example, the election of Mr. Trump. How do you respond to that way of using the concept of emotional labor?
- [51:16]
C
Well, it's very important because also I should say that one of the directions of the women's liberation movement, which was misguided and very Influenced by the CIA in investing in Gloria Steinem and others, was that it should be a gender only movement. It should not be anti capitalist. It also should not bring men into the full humanity that men deserve. So it did not develop. What do you learn from caring for vulnerable life? What does it give you to provide for people's emotional needs and to be more attuned to your own emotional needs rather than count on somebody else to meet them and be angry if they don't. And so that men weren't trained for that. And that was a great deprivation of men and women. So when women en masse, including women who didn't used to work outside the home, when they had to work outside the home, the men were not prepared to care for their women or their children. Even now, men are loathed. Even though there's much more male than female unemployment and even though women's jobs, the biggest increases are in lower paid health care and food services, Many men refuse to go there because they consider themselves unmanned. They don't want to be nurses aides and nurses and food servers or other things that they cafeteria workers they find degrading to their manhood. So often now that male wages have been flattened since the 70s, men come home wanting more emotional labor from their wives who've been working all day without being conscious of because they're not making as much and they feel devalued, literally. And so they want the woman to compensate because it's been her job over the years to emotionally compensate her man for his injuries to his pride. Well, that isn't happening. And that's one of the reasons that marriage isn't happening. For the first time in our history of taking the senses, the 75% of young men and women aren't married between 18 and 34. They may be cohabiting or whatever, but they're not married. Women aren't married. They don't, you know, and the majority of women are single. It's a bad deal. And that's why people have been denied. One of the reasons that in the recent studies that have been much publicized, people with women doctors live longer than people with male doctors. People in support groups with women in them do better than all male support groups because women have been trained to do emotional labor and men have missed out on that. They have expected it from women.
- [54:29]
A
So it's a question of whether you do it and also a question of whether you value it.
- [54:33]
C
That's true. And the two go together or whether you see it as part of your humanity rather than that's for the other gender. Women have made much more progress in terms of filling male jobs and in terms of being outside the home than men have in terms of doing the emotional labor, which would give them a sense of connection and belonging and also hugely help their parents, not their parents, their children and their partners and help connections between men and women thrive.
- [55:08]
A
So in other words, recognizing emotional labor, what it is, why it's been invisible, why it hasn't been rewarded and recognized would be a. Could be a transformative thing for the whole society and the economy and makes really the point of why it's worth talking about this.
- [55:31]
C
It would influence and change for the better personal life. Also, if you acknowledge the component of labor that is emotional labor, you would have to give an emotional labor wage supplement to the worst paid workers, nurses aides who care for patients, childcare workers, childcare workers, early childhood educators, social workers who sit and talk with you and help you through something. That these things would be recognized. Waiters, waitresses, all of those caregivers who we count on to be caring of us and who we bristle when they're not.
- [56:13]
A
We've come to the end of our time, even though it seems like we barely began. But I think we've made a wonderful introduction to something about which I, as a professional economist, am a bit ashamed that I am a part of a profession which has not recognized this, which doesn't even understand the concept, let alone work it into its way of thinking about the economy and the society. If you're interested in these kinds of conversations, join us again not only next week, but at the first session in February when Harriet Fraad will be back with us. And the topic then will be sex, work and the economics and psychology of that. We've come to the end of the program. I want to remind you all to make use of our website, rdwolff with two Fs com and democracyatwork.info please use them to communicate with us, to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and in general, to be a partner to our effort on this program. The waytruthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis, has been our partner now for years and one that we value. Work with us, extend the reach of this program, and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Gonna be my time, my time babe they ain't gonna change. Thing gonna change yeah Sam.
- [58:20]
B
Sa.