Hi I'm Alex Lu and I'm presenting our paper emotional labor in everyday
resilience, class-based experience of navigating unemployment amid the COVID-19
pandemic in the United States During the COVID-19 pandemic,
unemployment rates rose.
In the labor-market slowdown,
jobseekers face a shrinking number of jobs available in the wake of this health crisis.
Institutions,
policymakers and academics have called for building and practicing resilience on
individual organizational and societal levels.
This embrace of resilience often highlights a positive image of strength and ability
in achieving favorable outcomes during the hardships.
Under this rhetoric of resilience,
one is expected to adapt to cope with and eventually bounce back from adversity and
disruptions.
In this paper we dive deeper into the notion of resilience Instead of focusing on the social
science perspective of resilience.
That assumes resilience has informed systematic and well operationalized.
The notion of everyday resilience attends to the mundane practices and negotiations that
are often spontaneous and situational aligning with the notion of
everyday resilience CSCW scholars to explore the ways that technologies can
be designed and used to support individuals and communities resilience in different contexts.
Yet against this backdrop is the critique of the neoliberal appropriation of the notion of
resilience.
Critics have cautioned us of how the discourse of resilience risks
emphasizing individual responsibilities and their moral obligations in bouncing
back from disruptions and the crisis through self development and self
reengineering.
Building on these sensabilities,
our work joins the discussion of everyday resilience in CSCW focusing on
jobseekers'
navigation of unemployment during the COVID-19.
Specifically we asked 1) what challenges were faced by job
seekers during the pandemic? And 2) what resilience practices the job
seekers adopt to navigate the disruptions brought about by unemployment and the
pandemic?
Building on a nationwide survey with 429 job seekers conducted at the beginning of
the COVID-19,
we conducted 23 in-depth interviews in the summer of 2020.
To address this research questions among those 23 participants,
12 were working-class job seekers with an annual income lower than
$40,000 and education lower than a college degree.
There last jobs included General labor,
retail,
fast food customer services and more.
Another 11 participants were considered upper middle class job seekers with annual
income higher than $90,000 and a college degree and
higher.
In contrast to working-class job seekers,
there last jobs included tech tech managers,
analysts,
administration attorney and more.
Our comparative analysis identified for salient sociotechnical practices
that jobseekers adopted to navigate their unemployment during the covid 19,
all these practices were shared across the social classes.
Working class job seekers were more precarious compared to their upper middle class peers
in their everyday life.
First networking,
upper-middle-class job seekers discuss the benefits of networking with professional
connections such as past recruiters and co-workers.
To identify potential job opportunities on Linkedin,
whereas working-class job seekers had to rely on personal social media platforms
like Facebook.
This sudden transition to online job searching on Facebook blurred the line between the
professional and the personal for working-class job seekers.
The navigation of managing work-life boundaries and self-presentation on Facebook was
especially emotionally draining for working-class job seekers,
especially for those who were new to online job searching.
Second reflecting, reskilling, and upskilling.
Upkeeping with the mentality of remaining competitive and relying on
their existing resources.
Our upper-middle-class job seekers discuss relying on this disrupted time
as the opportunity to participate in ongoing education and skill development in
order to prepare for future higher skill jobs.
In comparison,
no working-class job seekers have done the same and consider self-upgrading as a
privilege
during this uncertain time. Compared to the upper-middle-class job seekers' resilience
practices that until preparing for the future,
working-class job seekers have to focus on addressing their president immediate
needs.
Third seeking emotional support for upper-middle-class job seekers,
it was common to seeking emotional support and inventing frustration of social media,
which helped them to identify connections with shared experiences.
However,
no working-class participants reported seeking or receiving emotional support via
online platforms instead of they feel more comfortable with traditional ways of
communication,
such as phone calls.
Because the online support was perceived as impersonal and less direct. Compared to
the upper-middle-class individuals,
working-class people had to rely on their close family and friends and,
oftentimes they themselves, to digest and navigate their emotional distress.
Finally,
finding unconventional ways to work. For upper-middle-class job seekers,
they started seeking unconventional jobs with lower salaries and lower skill requirement
compared to their past jobs. For working class participants,
some of them relied on work word of mouth and turned to some local paid get
works in the community here and there,
such as helping a neighbor move.
We highlight two key contributions of our work in theorizing everyday resilience in
CSCW. First,
every resilience is a process of becoming resilience.
This process is conditioned by one's ongoing adjustment to a negotiation with every
shifting social environments and relationships.
Thus,
resilience is beyond the binary state of being resilient and not resilient.
Seeing every resilience as a practical achievement,
directs our attention to how the meaning of resilience is produced in the process of ongoing
negotiation going forward.
Our the questions we should collectively reflect on in designing for resilience should
be redirected from outcomes of resilience to the process of how
resilience comes into being.
The critical questions we should ask in the design thus become 1) what
resilience means when we designed for resilience and 2) how we can
better support the day-to-day negotiation and judgment involved in becoming
resilient. Teasing out
this process allows us to foreground everyday labor in negotiating the meaning of
resilience.
Our work uncovers that the process of becoming resilient is permeated with precarity,
vulnerability, and feelings of frustration.
Everyday resilience is effective emotional.
The common sentiment of "I'll get back up to doing it" required all job
seekers to undertake labor emotion management and remain professional to
continue participating in the precarious labor market.
If the ongoing negotiation with one situations and surroundings constitutes everyday
resilience,
then we must recognize that emotional and invisible work is indispensable to such
negotiation.
In addition,
when we compare the emotional labor undertaken by participants from different social classes,
we will also see the promise of resilience is unevenly distributed among
different social groups and among class lines.
With a growing interest in designing for resilience in our field,
we propose that future designers and technologies move toward designing to
support individuals' agency in resilience while attending to the opportunities
to interrogate the broader historical structure constructs. Recognizing this class
based distribution of emotional labor in building resilience also cautions us
from romanticizing resilience and further exploiting the working class people in
designing for resilience.
The questions we should critically address in CSCW
thus become:
How can we reimagine the labor market and support alternative working methods
while better supporting the negotiation and judgment activities embedded and job seekers'
everyday resilience in the existing labor market.
Please refer to our paper for more details and a detailed discussion of these
questions.
Thank you!