The specific job includes customer service. It's what they are being paid for. Employees who do the job poorly are at greater risk for replacement by replacement hires. This is why many companies ask customers to rate individual service providers.

I would never rate a customer service employee poorly because they aren’t cheerful.

What sort of mad world do we live in where that’s even expected of minimum wage employees?

Because human beings are not coin operated robots?

So they should do unpaid emotional labour for free?

If you equate smiling at someone, or just being generally courteous, with "emotional labor," you need to make an emergency appointment with your therapist.

Being a good human being more often than not (occasional bad moods notwithstanding) should be a non-functional requirement for any job where you interact with other people. I have no problem with anyone, in any role, getting fired simply for being an asshole. The world would be a happier and better place for it.

> If you equate smiling at someone, or just being generally courteous, with "emotional labor," you need to make an emergency appointment with your therapist.

This entire conversation started based on an example that smiling brought economic benefits, not that you should do it because of socializing benefits. Answering in economic terms only makes sense.

Since when is not smiling at people being an arsehole?

I don’t want a bus driver to fake cheerfulness. He’s there to get me from a to b, not to pretend to be my friend.

I didn't say not smiling makes you an asshole, I'm making two separate points. The first was that expecting people to be generally courteous to other people, whether they're explicitly paid to or not, is something we should expect from everyone. It's called just being a human being. And again, everyone's allowed to have bad moods now and then. But in general, if you go through life with a scowl on your face and approach things from a standpoint of "I'm not being paid for this so I don't care, I'm not doing 'unpaid emotional labor,'" you're just kind of a jerk. That's the context of the last couple comments in this thread so it's important to keep the "I'm not being paid to smile so I'm not going to smile because that's labor" thing in mind.

The second point, which is related but I think still separate, is that I wish just being an asshole was enough to get fired. I sort of had it in my head but didn't really articulate that I was thinking of being an asshole as a more extreme version of what we're talking about, what I refer to above as just being kind of a jerk. Maybe on a scale of 1-10 being a jerk is a 3 but being an asshole is a 7 or 8.

You keep confusing being polite (something rightfully expected from an employee) with being fake and with real emotional labor.

This are 3 different things.

Smiling is not pretending to be someone's friend. Seriously, if this all sounds like alien talk, you should see a counselor or therapist.

Many types of emotional interaction are meaningful and true only when they are unpaid. Some big examples: friendship and love.

For employees not to be rude to customers as part of basic work requirements.

But putting on a false smile and feigning warmth to get a tip is a very different thing.

It's quite common and accepted in the US. But also seen as soulless and emotionally manipulative in many other cultures.