Emotional Labor in Everyday Resilience: Class-Based Experiences of Navigating Unemployment Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic in the U.S.

Video

DOI

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global health crisis, institutions, policymakers, and academics alike have called for practicing resilience to overcome its ongoing disruptions. This paper contributes a comparative study of the job search experiences of working-class and upper-middle-class job seekers, particularly in relation to their resilience practices during the pandemic. We draw from interviews with 12 working-class and 11 upper-middle-class job seekers in the U.S. We unpack challenges resulting from both the pandemic and unemployment and job seekers' novel practices of navigating these challenges in their everyday disrupted life, highlighting the similarities and differences across classes. Job seekers' ongoing negotiation with their resources, situations, and surroundings gives practical meanings to building everyday resilience, which we conceptualize as an ongoing process of becoming resilient. We found that job seekers across classes experienced similar challenges. However, working-class job seekers took on additional emotional labor in their everyday resilience due to their limited experience in the digital job search space, competition with higher-degree holding job seekers applying for the same jobs, limited social support networks, and at times, isolation. By foregrounding the uneven distribution of emotional labor in realizing the promise of resilience along class lines, this work cautions against the romanticization of resilience and calls for a more critical understanding of resilience in CSCW.