Workers with disabilities and the challenges of emotional labour

Abstract

This paper explores the implications of emotional labour for workers with disabilities, drawing on qualitative data from interviews with 59 respondents who had disabilities and who worked in service sector occupations. The analysis illustrates that employer demands for emotional labour may prove difficult for workers with a range of disabilities, including psychiatric diagnoses, learning difficulties and physical impairments. Analysis also points to the ways in which the non‐accommodating nature of many workplaces often forces workers with disabilities to engage in ‘extra’ emotion work in the interests of fitting in and concealing/ downplaying their impairments.

Keywords:

• emotional labour
• disability
• impairment
• accommodation
• service work

Notes

1. I use the terms ‘disabled people’ and ‘people with impairments’. The former reflects the collective experience of people dealing with ‘ableist’ social environments, while the latter reflects the diversity of embodied experiences among respondents.

2. This paper is broadly influenced by the scholarship on labour process theory. This literature, which is both Marxist and post‐Marxist in orientation, focuses attention on the labour process – the social organization of human labour power – under different historical conditions or ‘modes of production’ (see Knights and Willmott 1990; O'Doherty and Willmott 2001). The scholarship is concerned both with how workers under capitalism – conceived as an exploitative and alienating mode of production – are controlled by management, as well as the potential for workers to resist organizational imperatives. Emotional labour scholarship has added to this literature by elucidating the emotional demands placed on workers involved in interactive service performances (Steinberg and Figart 1999).

3. Much of this scholarship has focused on the private and public service sectors, although it is important to distinguish between sector and job, since emotional labour could be an important part of some jobs within a manufacturing company (see Steinberg and Figart 1999).