Decommodification of labor is another way of saying that labor will not be compensated. We already live in a society in which the vast majority of domestic, reproductive, and emotional labor is decommodified — we more-or-less force women to do it.

Edit of a screenshot from a PDF of a campaign poster

It’s worth noting that there was a campaign against this, a feminist movement that recognized gender as being a labor issue: Wages for housework. Nothing that I’m saying here is terribly original — it’s just usually ignored by men.

Also worth noting that Iceland really did have a women’s strike, and won lasting and major concessions out of it. They didn’t win wages for housework, though.

The current online discourse around the idea that emotional labor could be compensated, and that there might be the expectation that people could choose to defer or say no to doing emotional labor, has echoes of this.

Emotional labor, while not done exclusively by women, is primarily done by them. The idea that labor should be compensated with its full value isn’t crazy. It’s socialism — it is ‘to each according to their contribution’, to paraphrase so very many thinkers.

Look at the thread that started the latest wave of the discourse around emotional labor:

She knows that she is expected to do this:

And she simply thinks that she should be allowed to decide if and/or when she does it, and who for:

That she provoked this much outrage, the majority of which came from men, shows something: that people are well aware that emotional labor is femme-coded, and that they expect women to do that labor without compensation. The idea that they might say ‘not right now’ (not even ‘no’, just ‘not right now’) is shocking.

Photo by Grass America on Unsplash

Her use of the phrase “emotional labor” is also interesting. The term originally comes from Arlie Hochschild — and she used it differently from how it is used now. She used the term “emotional labor” only for actions that were taken within the formal workplace. Analogous actions that were taken in the personal sphere were referred to as “emotional work”.

That these should become conflated into a single-term — and that that single term should be the one used for work, rather than the one used for non-work — is very fitting:

The vulgarized rebirth of the term ‘emotional labor’ is a mass and semi-conscious recognition of this reality, this core insight of Wages for Housework: daily and personal life is a source of exploited value production.

From this perspective, it seems as something like the commodification of emotional labor is good. Commodified work can be compensated, and usually is — partially. Exploitation is ended through the full compensation of all value production. Value is produced both inside and outside the formal workplace. An end to exploitation — i.e., socialism — requires compensation for such value-producing labor, and that very much includes emotional labor/work.

To correct this exploitation, obviously, would be a movement towards socialism.