I worked at a restaurant for three months during a too-hot summer in Brooklyn. It was the summer after my first year of college, and I had returned home part-adult, part-child. I knew the restaurant and owner from growing up a block away, the staff knew my parent’s names and our orders without asking. The place was familiar and comfortable. I asked for a job, I got one. I had a brief phone call with the owner, who harped on my conversation skills and asked me to come in the next day.
The restaurant has since shut down, but for the purpose of clarity and relative discretion I will refer to it as: Fort. Initially, Fort hired me as a food runner – akin to a busser – the most entry-level front-of-house (customer-facing service) position in a restaurant.
“The primary front-of-the-house positions are those of servers and bartenders. “Support” workers, such as bussers and food runners, also operate in the dining room, assisting servers and bartenders in the task of serving guests and keeping dining room areas clean. That said, tasks that are commonly handled by support workers involve little to no face-to-face communication with customers (bussing tables, polishing glassware, dropping off plates of food)”
Wilson, Eli Revelle Yano, ‘Introduction’, Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers. New York, NY, 2020; online edn, NYU Press Scholarship Online, 2021.
I did not think, upon accepting the job, that 2 years later I would be sitting in a 300-level sociology seminar discussing an ethnography of the position. In the 6th week of our seminar, we began to read Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers, by Eli Revelle Yano Wilson. The book is a critical ethnography of labor in Los Angeles restaurants. The book explores the reproduction of social inequality within the restaurant as a workplace. Wilson analyzes everyday relations among different types of workers in the two sections of restaurant labor: front and back of house. Wilson traces the compounded forces that pull workers into divided worlds of work: class-privileged white workers to the front of house and working-class Latino workers to the back. Eli Revelle Yano Wilson defines the two poles of restaurant work:
“The primary front-of-the-house positions are those of servers and bartenders. “Support” workers, such as bussers and food runners, also operate in the dining room, assisting servers and bartenders in the task of serving guests and keeping dining room areas clean. That said, tasks that are commonly handled by support workers involve little to no face-to-face communication with customers (bussing tables, polishing glassware, dropping off plates of food)”
Food runners often hold a less visible status in the restaurant environment. As a food runner, the goal is to be as indiscernible to the customer as possible. Slip up and away from their table as quickly, efficiently, and quietly as possible. The position flits between the front and back of the house the most, although still minimally. You bring the dishes to the dishwasher and pick up food at the pass, repeat. The kitchen will tell you where the food is going, what table number, and to which seat.
Two weeks later I was put on the schedule as an official server, my first promotion. That was fast, I thought. I felt both validated and nervous. I joined the rest of the serving staff as their equal; they ranged from three to fifteen years older than me, most of them white or white-passing and college-educated. Some of them grew up in New York City, like I did, and others moved at some point post-grad. We shared a similar vocabulary, cultural reference points, and experiences on the job. One of them became a sort-of friend, and the rest were just a rotation of familiar-ish faces on the schedule.
Before approaching my first table, I was told to refrain from introducing myself – to never lead with my name. The goal was to create an environment of simulated familiarity wherein you were part-person, mostly character. The key was to balance a level of intimacy with the customers so that they felt comfortable and held, but allow little to no attention to yourself in return.
The theater of the job – the entire apparatus of the restaurant – really interested me. First, there was pre-shift: where each member of the serving staff set each table the same, adjusting the cutlery to the right angle, lighting the candles and waiting for the audience to trickle in. Second: You practice your lines, you know the script, altering your performance based on directions from the audience and your manager. Third, your costume: wrap your apron around your waist to the just-right tightness, clip your hair up and out of your face, put on a bit of lip balm and smile. On my first day serving, I was told not to introduce myself – to never lead with my name.
The whole business felt like a show, a performance. A racist one at that: the socially-acceptable – white – actors were in the front, performing, and those deemed unsuitable for the spotlight or stage, – people of color – were hidden in the wings; the kitchen. As a performer, I wasn’t myself, I was a persona, an extra in every customer’s story. I didn’t know this feeling had a name. This job was specific and highly-social, yet completely de-personalized. It left you tired and entirely empty. There is a term for this: emotional labor.
Granted, most people working service jobs aren’t constantly aware of the way their labor is contributing to sociological phenomena, but my summer of restaurant work was bookended by my second year as an undergraduate studying social sciences and humanities.
Around week 7 of my seminar, my professor introduced the term emotional labor as an offhanded citation to ethnographer Arlie Russell Hochschild in The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling. Hochschild coined the term as: “Emotional labor” does not refer to (as it is currently colloquially understood) the mental work of the tasks we do to make others happy, or retain positive relationships with our friends, family, and partners. Emotional labor is not listening to someone talk about why their day was hard, for example).
“Emotional labor”
“Emotional labor” is Hochschild’s post-Marxian term to define the labor of regulating or managing one’s emotional expressions in order to create or facilitate an emotional experience for others in a workplace environment. Karl Marx is a point of reference because of his understanding of factory laborers: that, in order to survive in their jobs, they must detach themselves (their bodies) from the physical labor. In the service realm, and Hochschild’s focus, the service worker must detach their own feelings from the emotional labor. Feeling or emotion can be harder to define than physical labor, but Hochschild describes it as when general bodily sensations are joined with what we see or imagine, and emotion communicates information. It is from feeling, Hochschild argues, that we discover our own viewpoint of the world. Hochschild also suggests that feelings are not stored inside of us, and that they are often externalized. Additionally, they are not “independent of acts of management” (Hochschild, 17). Meaning that in ‘managing’ feeling, we are contributing to the creation of it. And that acts of emotional management are not simply private, but they are used in social exchanges (under the guidance of “feeling rules” – the standards used in emotional conversation to determine what is emotionally “owed” from each party. These rules often reflect inherent inequalities in social dynamics). Hochschild also notes that emotional management is often a gendered dynamic; that people socialized as women often have a better understanding of emotional management and are required to use it more.
Additionally, returning to the inequalities that emotional management underscore, Hochschild notes that in general: “lower-class and working-class people tend to work more with things, and middle-class and upper-class people tend to work with people. More working women than men deal with people as a job. Thus, there are both gender patterns and class patterns to the civic and commercial use of human feeling.” (Hochschild, 21).
Though I was not aware of it at the time, I was caught in the middle of the exact dynamic Arlie Russel Hochschild was studying in 1983. Though, simultaneously a beneficiary of my class privilege, I was working a customer-facing position that required me to take on the gendered nature of emotional labor. By contorting and squishing down my personal emotional landscape, I was working to create and facilitate the emotional experience of the customers.
Hochschild’s concept pertains that individuals who work in customer service have to train and manage their feelings. In this act of labor, you are required to portray an acceptable facial and bodily display or reaction to the public. You are selling an emotional experience and undermining your own emotional landscape to ensure a client experience.
There is little to no means of self-expression in service, despite that service interactions can seem entirely genuine to the customer. Wilson identifies this form as “Proximal Service,” where there is a manufactured casualness and the server may feel like your friend. Whereas there is also “Profession Service,”, wherein servers and customers keep a respectful distance and there is a hard line drawn between them.
I was operating in a service model that was somewhere in between the two. As aforementioned, on my first day I was told to never introduce myself unless prompted, and move as swiftly and discreetly as possible throughout the dining room. My manager’s goal was to anticipate every need of the customers, to leave no water glass less than ¾ full, and to display an aesthetically cohesive, knowledgeable, and articulate wait staff that never showed too much of their personality. At the same time, they promoted a family, small-town-yet-urban vibe that favored regular customers and neighbors to the restaurant. The management team walked a fine line.
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“What happens every day within restaurants is also about social inequality. It is a kind of inequality that, when compared to more overt displays of power and exploitation, often falls below the radar of scrutiny. It is too ordinary, too taken-for-granted to register as alarming to much of the dining public.”
Wilson, Eli Revelle Yano, Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers. New York, NY, 2020; online edn, NYU Press Scholarship Online, 2021. p. 3
I, in the summer of 2022, found myself (retrospectively) at the center of yet another site of sociological study. That is not to say I was wholly blind to the social, racial, class, and labor dynamics that were at play, moreso, it wasn’t until I read “Front of the House, Back of the House” that I didn’t realized people were writing their dissertations on my place of work.
What did front-of-the-house employment offer me? And what, in accordance with Wilson’s findings, does it say about how social inequality works in restaurants?
My time in the front-of-house (food running, serving, hosting, and barbacking) provided me with a highly lucrative summer job that offered a blend of social resources with my labor conditions. I was able to access the position without any restaurant experience, I was hired based on my conversation skills, my vocabulary, my whiteness, and the fact that I was from the neighborhood, I was easily hired.
While Wilson draws attention to the important intersections of race and class in restaurants, and restaurant work, he lacks a sufficient exploration into the landscape of emotion and labor in the same setting. Hochschild works to diagnose the development and use of human emotion (feeling) through its private to commercial use. Rather than restaurant work, Hoschchild uses the example of flight attendants as the subject of her study, but her observations are broadly applicable to the service industry and the social-emotional dynamics within it. Hochschild finds evidence of how personality and emotional transactions have become a form of capital.
My retrospective understanding of my time in the restaurant there was not remarkably different from now, although I lacked the literary and theoretical frame of reference that I have since acquired. To be clear: I had a love-hate relationship with my time there. I also had the privilege of it being more than a job. Working at Fort went beyond a source of income, it turned into a space for me to reflect on my social position, age, and identity. It was confusing and exhausting, but I felt more adult and capable than I had ever been. I was learning at a rapid pace, but I didn’t feel particularly human. Though I was in many ways I was treated as more human than other (back-of-house) members of the staff. I am caught in a strange self-reflective position. One where I am readily aware of my class and racial privilege, along with my feminized experience of labor.
