The work of the future will require emotional efforts from a person. Today such work is underestimated and poorly paid, but it is invaluable.
At the beginning of last year, a document was circulated at the World Economic Forum stating that technological change was about to fundamentally change the global economy. To fill the vacancies of tomorrow, the authors argue, measures such as retraining and advanced training of today's workers will be extremely important. Around the same time, President Obama announced the introduction of a universal computer science curriculum in primary and secondary schools in the United States. “We must make sure that all our children are prepared for the work of the future. This means that they must not only be able to use a computer, but also have the skills of analysis and coding in order to propel our innovative economy forward,”he said.
But in truth, only a tiny percentage of people in the postindustrial world will be involved in software development, biotechnology, and new manufacturing technologies. The giant machine tools that were the fruit of the Industrial Revolution reduced the need for human physical strength. Likewise, the information revolution will give us additional freedom when we complement the technical competence of computers, rather than compete with them. Many of the most important jobs of the future will require us to have interpersonal skills rather than advanced mathematics.
In 1983, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild coined the term "emotional labor" to describe the processes involved in managing emotions that work conditions require. She learned the methods that flight attendants use to maintain a friendly disposition towards moody and violent passengers. These are deep breaths, a silent reminder to ourselves of the need to maintain restraint and calmness, as well as the ability to put yourself in the place of a wayward passenger. “I try to remind myself that if he drinks too much, then he’s probably afraid to fly,” said one flight attendant. “I think to myself: he’s just like a little child.”
Today, industrial jobs are rapidly dwindling, which will require most of us to engage in work that requires emotional skills, whether it be working directly with clients or working as a team on a project. In 2015, David Deming, an education economist at Harvard, found that nearly all jobs that emerged in the United States between 1980 and 2012 are in a field that requires highly communicative skills. And Rosemary Haefner, who is the senior HR inspector at the CareerBuilder job site, told Bloomberg BNA in January that these skills will be valued much higher in corporate hiring this year than in previous years of economic recovery. … Communication skills,- she said, - they can very much distinguish an outstanding employee from an employee who just sits out.
Across the economy, technology is pushing workers toward more emotional activities. In retail, Amazon and its copycats are rapidly taking over the everyday shopping market. But in many cases, real stores are surviving because some people choose to talk to a salesperson rather than clicking a key. There is already talk about the need to preserve rural post offices, which will be less involved in the provision of postal services, which are provided today mainly via the Internet, and more will become centers of local social life.
We have long ignored the overwhelming importance of emotional work to the detriment of the workers in the industry and the people they serve. According to New York-based sociologist George T Patterson, who consulted at police stations, police officers devote 80% of their time to work that is only indirectly related to their functional duties. They visit families every day to settle disputes and resolve mental health problems. But police training in the United States focuses on the use of weapons, defensive tactics and criminal law. It is quite predictable and quite often there are reports that people turn to the police for help in order to help out a confused family member who wanders aimlessly among cars on the street, but in the end it turns out,that the police shoot their loved one right in front of them.
In the field of medicine, one of the most difficult moments in a doctor's work is to observe how a diagnosis given to a patient completely changes his life. No equipment can cope with such work - unlike surgery, where independent robots learn to perform various operations with superhuman precision. Today, as artificial intelligence becomes a diagnostic tool, doctors are starting to wonder how to supplement these automated skills. A 2013 strategy report for the UK NHS says: “NHS can recruit hundreds of thousands of professionals with the right technical skills, but without compassion and care, we cannot meet the needs of our patients.”
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The growing demand for workers who can empathize and win over others requires major changes in attitudes and concepts. We must abandon the exclusive focus on learning outcomes, which today are considered the path to success. More respect and pay should be given to those workers who are too often underestimated as “unskilled labor”. It is also necessary to value more the skills and abilities that women of the working class more often possess than men with excellent education.
The easiest way to bring about such changes in medicine is where the conditions in health care in general are changing. It is necessary to involve more often people whose work skills are mostly emotional. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the number of jobs for doctors and surgeons will increase by 14% between 2014 and 2024, while the number of vacancies in three specialties directly related to patient care will increase by 26%. These are home health workers, home health workers and nurses. All these positions do not require a university diploma, and in aggregate they are currently occupied by more than five million people, while there are 708 thousand doctors in the country.
Caring for people is essentially emotional work. Of course, such work often requires physical effort (helping a person with a disability to wash or get out of bed, for example). She also needs certain medical knowledge. But as Inge Bates, an educational scientist at the University of Sheffield who conducted an ethnographic study of caregivers, discovered in 2007, skills are needed above all to cope with unsanitary conditions, violence and death.
Bates conducted a study on a group of 16-year-old girls who were undergoing vocational training to prepare to work in nursing homes. Previously, they hoped to work with children, in retail or in the office, and therefore they were often horrified by the very thought of working with old people. According to these girls, it was extremely unpleasant for them to work with decrepit and stupid patients, to see death, to prepare the dead for burial and to face human excrement. One student recalled finding an old woman playing with her own feces. “I had to wash her hands and nails, take off her nightgown and everything else. I sat her down and said: sit here, and I will go for clothes. And when I returned, I saw that she again went under herself and again played with her own stool. You know, it's unpleasantwhen they throw themselves at you, you know what, and when you have to avoid it."
Nevertheless, in the process of studying, many began to take pride in their work, considering it necessary and knowing that not everyone could cope with it. “By the second year, most were already very eager to become elderly care workers, and when someone got such a job, it became an excuse for a holiday, for going to a bar or even for a party,” Bates wrote.
Scientists are beginning to realize that working-class people have better emotional skills than people who are rich and educated. In 2016, psychologists from New York University Pia Dietze and Eric Knowles conducted a study and found that people from the upper strata of society look less at passers-by on the street than less privileged participants in the experiment. In an online experiment, high society participants were less likely to notice small changes in images of human faces.
In a 2007 study, Bates concluded that parenting also has to do with how well girls do their jobs. Those who succeeded had skills acquired as children in working-class families, where they did housework, care for children and elderly relatives, learned to endure hardships and hardships, and also meet stringent requirements. “It is clear that working-class girls by the age of 16 were quite accustomed to such things as household chores, helping others, the need to deny themselves something (say, regular sleep at night or rest on Sundays).
Caring for other people is difficult and low-paying. But as Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says, these workers get a different kind of compensation when they see they are doing something worthwhile and necessary. After all, we traditionally believe that women should do such work for free - out of a sense of mercy and love for their neighbor. We must admit that such expectations are very harmful, but the joy women feel is very real. Walking up to a crying baby in a crib or washing an Alzheimer patient is both a difficult and life-affirming experience.
It can be difficult to admit that emotional work is real work. When it comes to the hardest and lowest paid work, such as caring for dying or incontinent people, this misunderstanding may be due to the fact that we, not faced with the need to do this work, do not want to think about how important and difficult it is. really. In addition, we often simply do not have a professional language in which to speak about the emotional work we do. Smiling and nodding to a client who tells a long and incoherent story, we sometimes get him to sign a major contract. But no one includes a clause in the resume that the job seeker "patiently treats unceremonious bores." Very often emotional work is not perceived as work at all. It is also not hard to understand that well-educated people, mostly men, who formulate and analyze economic policy, have large gaps in the skills found mostly in working-class women.
Another problem is that when we ask the question of how to help low-paid social workers earn more, the answer is invariably the same: "Give them a good education." Policy makers talk a lot about the “professionalization” of care work, proposing ideas for “advanced training” for those caring for diabetics and seniors. Recently, it was decided in Washington that childcare workers should have a bachelor's degree. One district education official said in this regard, "We need to raise the profession and put our young children on a positive trajectory of learning and development." Of course, people who work with the elderly, the disabled and young children can greatly benefit from studying research material on the specific needs of these groups.and affordable higher education is a very good idea for reasons beyond vocational training. However, there is a deep disrespect for the solid but completely unscientific skills of those who have to calm down a frightened child or maintain composure when an older woman plays with her feces in the assumption that extra class is the key to improving the quality of work.
The American economists W Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson call the view that additional education solves all labor problems "preaching education." At a conference in 2005, Grubb noted that additional study helps people find better jobs, but for this reason education is by no means a good economic strategy. He said that 30-40 percent of workers in developed countries have a higher education level than their job requires.
To date, the best-known and most well-studied attempt to instill emotional skills in people is the work of developing a sympathetic attitude of doctors towards patients. Over the past decade, medical faculties and hospitals have increasingly taken note of the plethora of literature that shows that when a doctor can put himself in the patient's shoes, it increases treatment outcomes, increases patient satisfaction, and leads to fewer disenchantments with the profession. There is evidence that empathy can be taught. A 2014 survey found that communication skills training and role play increased empathy among students and doctors. This is supported by the results of eight out of 10 highly professional studies.
The need to instill emotional skills in high-paid professionals in prestigious professions seems self-evident. However, as for everyone else, doubts may arise here. But one of the signs of progress in this matter was the increased attention to the "social and emotional learning" of schoolchildren (SEL - social and emotional learning program).
Through these programs, American students are taught to empathize with, work with, and manage their emotions. Children are taught to communicate positively with each other, they formulate classroom rules together and consciously try to understand their own thinking processes. Scientists conclude that such programs help students to be more sympathetic to each other and behave accordingly. Many school districts have already introduced social and emotional learning programs, and last year eight US states announced they were working together to create regional SEL standards.
But the conversations around this program show how low we value emotional skills. Often these programs are presented only as a way to reduce violence and cruelty, and not as a methodology for the formation of essential human qualities. And in a learning environment where exam load and back-to-basics statements often crowd out less vivid and visible topics, these programs are attractive only in the sense that they push children towards self-control and discipline in long lessons.
There is one more thing. While formal training in emotional skills is valuable, it does not provide success for people in emotional work. Hochschild noted that "shallow acting", which creates the appearance of a particular emotion, is less effective than "deep acting", when the employee actually shows the desired feelings. And the spontaneous expression of genuine feelings and emotions appropriate to the occasion seems to be even better. In 2013, British sandwich chain company Pret A Manger was criticized for using mystery shoppers to keep its staff looking friendly and cheerful. Of course, the service worker needs to be customer friendly. But the secret control system of Pret A Manger,with which the company sought from its employees inexhaustible gaiety, depriving them in punishment of wages and working conditions that would cause them a natural, rather than feigned, cheerfulness, was called cynical and hypocritical. In addition, when you have to portray an emotional connection, it sometimes feels much more like exploitation than the hardest physical labor.
David Scales, a physician at Cambridge Health Alliance, notes that teaching physicians to empathize overlooks "the egregious deficiencies of the working environment that are causing the physician's natural compassion to disappear." Faced with an endless stream of patients, the need to minimize the patient's visit time for financial reasons, and working 80 hours a week, the doctor cannot really put himself in the place of the patient sitting in front of him. Skales sees a tension between meeting the most pressing needs of sick people and the need to work as quickly as possible in an overloaded system when a doctor cannot truly care for them. One of the key points in ensuring the effectiveness of emotional work is a certain measure of independence, the ability to treat a person decently and not constantly experience excessive stress.
We have colossal new opportunities as robots and algorithms free humans from cognitive work. As a society, we can make a choice and begin to devote more funds to improve human resources, increase wages and reduce working hours for social workers who do the most emotionally difficult work, while receiving the lowest wages. At the same time, we can transform other areas of the economy, help police officers, postal workers and everyone else properly communicate with the people who turn to them.
But our economic system is not ready to do this, since it judges the quality of work by its contribution to GDP. Some economists are concerned that we are not doing enough to improve the "productivity" of services, say, elderly care, as opposed to other sectors, such as the automotive industry. Probably, emotional work will never be a good source of income. But the question is whether our society is ready to allocate more resources for it, despite its low economic return.
The efficiency provided by technology has achieved a lot. People in developed countries have achieved a very high standard of living, and most of them no longer need to grow food and make items that they use. But when we apply performance metrics to the expanding realm of emotional work, we are missing out on the important hope that technological advances give us - to free humans from monotonous physical and cognitive labor, and to create opportunities for the work of the future when people really care. about each other.
Livia Gershon is a freelance reporter writing about the intersection of economics, politics, and everyday life. Her work has been published by Salon, LA Weekly and The Progressive.