Emotional labour is often required of employees by employers to provide customers with a specific environment and company image. For instance, an airline aims to provide quality flight experience, thus needing flight attendants to have constant pleasant demeanour towards passengers.

Assuming that employees know of the job nature upon applying to work for a certain company, emotional labour may not appear to be an ethical issue.  However, this is not always the case.

Call centre workers in India serving U.S. customers must perform emotional labour involving “national identity management”. To better identify with customers, they are to act American through usage of American colloquialisms and familiarity with American popular culture, and to mask their location in India.

Regardless of workers’ acceptance of such requirements and the success achieved in satisfying American customers as a result, is it not unethical for the company to demand such from its employees? Racism is promoted in that employees must adopt American behaviour in order to satisfy an American market, implying inability and inferiority of Indian citizens in international business.  Employees are denied a basic human right: their ethnic identity.

The ethics of emotional labour thus lie in the extremity of expectations imposed by employers.

Source: Chong, Patricia. “Servitude with a Smile: An Anti-Oppression Analysis of Emotional Labour.” Global Labour University Working Papers. March 2009. <http://www.global-labour-university.org/fileadmin/GLU_Working_Papers/GLU_WP_ No.7.pdf>.

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