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in a call centre to a teacher or manager, the emotional demands of the job have immeasurably increased. Emotional labour has become one of the hardest parts of many jobs. So just why is your employer after your heart?

      The demand for emotional labour is driven firstly by the growth of the service economy. Companies are increasingly competing to provide a certain type of emotional experience along with their product, be it a mobile phone or an insurance policy. Where once muscle-power was crucial to the employment contract for millions of manual workers, its modern-day equivalent is emotional empathy and the ability to strike up a rapport with another human being quickly. Employers believe customers will stay loyal, and will sometimes pay a premium, for a certain kind of interaction – they want to be treated as individuals, with a personalised service in a mass consumer market driven by technology. The standards are exacting: employees are instructed to provide service with personality, ‘naturalness’, spontaneity and warmth; qualities which they must, paradoxically, provide consistently.

      Another kind of emotional labour is also in increasing demand. It is a response to the changing structure of organisations. The clearly denned hierarchical bureaucracies which served industrial society well in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been outstripped by the pace of change; only much flatter, more fluid organisations can adapt and continuously re-adapt in different formulations of networks. But as the lines of authority become less clear, much more falls to the individual employee to negotiate, influence and persuade. This is often called the ‘relationship economy’, and what makes it particularly hard work is that it requires skills of empathy, intuition, persuasion, even manipulation, for which there is little preparation in an educational system focused exclusively on analytical rather than emotional skills.

      Speak As If You’re Smiling

      The phrase ‘emotional labour’ was first coined in 1983 by the American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her study of how flight attendants were trained to provide their customers with a particular emotional experience.¹ The concept has spawned a large academic literature analysing the emotional demands of the service economy on the workforce. Call centres, one of the fastest-growing sources of employment in Britain, represent perhaps the most intensive form of emotional labour. Nearly half a million employees are handling around 125 million calls a month in centres which have clustered in areas of high unemployment such as around Glasgow, Tyneside, South Wales and South Yorkshire.

      Projecting warmth on the telephone is a skill which Claire and Tracey, in an Orange call centre in North Shields, Tyneside, have perfected. Both in their early twenties, they are paid to talk – all day. My conversation with Claire is punctuated every few sentences by her incantation, ‘Hello, this is Claire, how may I help you?’ She says it with the same tone of friendly helpfulness every time, only to then explain to the customer that the system is down and she can’t do anything. Nothing rattles her, nothing alters her wording or the tone of her voice; it is entirely consistent. Ironically, what is less consistent on this particular afternoon is the technology; but Claire continues to give the cheerful, good-natured emotional interaction which is expected of her.

      They work on the site of an old colliery, but there are few clues to that now. The land has been levelled apart from one hump in the distance which is the last slagheap, now grassed over. The pit was called the ‘Rising Sun’, oddly echoing Orange’s famous slogan, ‘The future’s bright, the future’s Orange’. Both speak to an optimistic aspiration of a dawning new future. In the past it would have been men working here; now over half the workforce is women. They drive in – it’s twenty minutes from Newcastle – to sit at a desk all day answering the phone.

      The key thing, Claire explains, is: ‘You have to take control of the call. A lot of customers go mad if you don’t know what you’re doing, and the calls escalate [have to be referred to the supervisor], so you have to be confident all the time. Some customers can be very patronising, and if you don’t seem like you know what you’re doing, the call will escalate.’

      On Claire’s computer screen, a series of little squares indicate if there are calls waiting, as well as telling her how long she has been on her current call; she usually has no more than eight seconds between calls. If a call has been difficult, there are only eight seconds in which to take a deep breath and compose her voice into the expected tone of friendliness. All the time she’s managing her emotional demeanour, she’s flicking through a wide range of information on the screen, which she uses to answer customer queries. Later, the head of Claire’s section, experienced in call-centre work, acknowledges that it has become much more technically complex than it used to be. It looks very hard work to me, yet Claire much prefers it to working in a shop, her previous job: ‘I don’t mind talking, I could talk all day. Usually I can cut off after a call, I’m very easy-going. But a really complicated call is sometimes still going through my head.’

      The system is down for several hours that afternoon. What is striking is how on the one hand Claire is dealing with very rigid systems set down by company procedure and the vagaries of the computer system, while on the other she is expected to convey a sense of naturalness and her own personality. It’s a tricky combination, and she is frequently apologising for things which are beyond her control. No matter how many times she repeats exactly the same response, she must make it sound ‘warm’, ‘sincere’ and ‘natural’.

      Tom is twenty-four, and has been a customer service representative (CSR) here for two years, which counts as experienced in an industry plagued by high turnover. While I listen in, he answers the call of an elderly gentleman who isn’t sure how to explain what the problem is with his mobile phone. He meanders and frequently goes off on long explanations which appear to have little to do with his query. Tom gently coaxes him back to the point and tries to intuit what he really wants from him. It’s not an easy task, and it requires considerable patience – which Tom seems to have in abundance. His easy manner doesn’t falter for a moment, and gradually he manages to establish what he can do to help. As he talks, he’s flicking through computer screens, bringing up the customer’s account details and information about the products he needs.

      All the while, there’s a ticker board above the CSRs’ heads showing the number of calls waiting to be answered. They are distributed by the ACD – automatic call distributor – a computerised telephone-handling system which identifies the CSR who has been waiting longest and sends the call to his or her workstation. In most call centres, calls are expected to be dealt with in a specified period of time, although Orange is unusually relaxed on this, believing that too tight a target compromises quality. In other call centres, operators are reprimanded for not meeting the target call duration.

      John, another CSR, spends seventeen minutes on one of his calls, advising a customer with great patience and enthusiasm on which mobile phone to buy. Again and again the customer asks questions, and John seems to relish the opportunity to dig out the tiniest detail on the potential purchase. Without a pause, another customer comes through with a complicated enquiry which John also goes out of his way to help answer, only to find that the line has gone dead after he puts her on hold. He calls her back in case she got cut off, but she doesn’t answer her phone. He shrugs it off – he’d been trying to save her money.

      Do the customers ever bother him, I ask. He smiles, then admits, ‘The customer wants the moon on a stick…they treat you like a work monkey.’ It’s as if he’s not supposed to say things like that, but having said it, it comes out with real passion. ‘Customers don’t treat you like you’re a human being. [But] if you see things from their point of view it’s easier, and I’m better than I used to be. You need resilience, but I do get worked up. I do raise my voice.’

      While John admitted that he sometimes gets upset, Claire seemed at some fundamental level disengaged from what she was doing. There was something robotic about her level of fluency as she switched back and forth between talking to me and answering the phone. What makes the job so demanding is that this intensity of emotional labour goes on for several hours, with little let-up. What the call-centre manager wants is a steady stream of work, and technology, in the form of the ACD system, offers them the possibility of achieving that.

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