Holiday travel season is here, and most of us are gearing up for stress of one kind or another. It’s not just the stress of the dreaded political arguments at the dinner table—it’s the process of getting there in the first place that has become a source of anxiety.

Though snarled highways and crumbling train infrastructure are certainly problems, air travel has become its own special kind of hell. In between the horror stories that make headlines, like the tale of the United Airlines passenger who was physically dragged from his seat, there’s a whole lot of everyday unpleasantness: being nickel-and-dimed for baggage fees, invasive security procedures and long lines, shrinking seat sizes, and the joyous experience of being reminded how rich you aren’t while waiting for first-class passengers to board. By the time the average airline passenger gets to their seat, they’re hardly in a good mood.

Now imagine that it’s your job to take care of a plane full of stressed-out customers without letting your smile flag. It’s perhaps not so hard to understand why JetBlue flight attendants want a union.

The flight attendants have filed for a union election with the National Mediation Board, looking to become members of the Transport Workers Union. TWU president John Samuelsen told me that the “overwhelming majority of flight attendants,” led by an organizing committee of the rank-and-file, have signed union cards. “JetBlue flight attendants are really the face of the airline,” Samuelsen argued. “They deserve to have their economic security looked after and the company’s not doing that.”

The sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her landmark 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, coined the term “emotional labor” while studying flight attendants. The flight attendant’s smile, she noted, “is groomed to reflect the company’s disposition—its confidence that its planes will not crash, its reassurance that departures and arrivals will be on time, its welcome and its invitation to return.” That smile is part of the job of being a flight attendant, and it requires work to produce—the work of suppressing her own true feelings to make passengers feel safe and cared for. “[J]obs that place a burden on feelings are common in all classes, which is one reason why work is defined as work and not play,” Hochschild wrote. “But emotional labor occurs only in jobs that require personal contact with the public, the production of a state of mind in others, and ... the monitoring of emotional labor by supervisors.”