[malandrew]

I work at a small startup of five people and the emotional labor role is taken care of by a man and the pay is lower than that of the developers (three of us). The reason the pay is lower has nothing to do with the fact that he is performing emotional labor and has everything to do with supply/demand and scaling of emotional labor.

The truth is that there are very few emotional labor jobs in tech and programmers try hard to keep it that way because 90% of costs are people-related, and the number of people qualified from emotional labor and interested in those jobs is high. This is the exact opposite of the situation with developer jobs where the demand for talent is sky-high and the supply of truly capable developers is low.

The other problem with emotional labor is that it doesn't scale. An employee only has so much time in a day to handle emotional labor tasks. It can't really be automatized. Once the emotional laborers you have are at the limits of the emotional labor they are doing, you need to add more emotional laborers. This means that the money allocated for emotional labor gets distributed among more and more people until developers figure out how to automate any work of the emotional laborers so headcount doesn't balloon.