Emotional Labour Drives Burnout

Teachers are burning out not only from long hours and low pay, but from the daily strain of carrying students’ distress without enough support. (lens.monash.edu) Monash University researchers Pamela Patrick and Sun Yee Yip wrote on April 13, 2026 that the issue came into sharper focus after a 35,000-person teachers’ strike in Victoria on March 24. Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported the 24-hour walkout was the first statewide teacher strike there in 13 years and disrupted about 500 public schools. (lens.monash.edu) (abc.net.au) The Monash article says teachers are often the first adults to spot when a child is struggling, and that repeated exposure to student and family crises can produce “compassion fatigue,” a mix of emotional exhaustion, burnout and secondary traumatic stress. The same piece says teachers can also feel “compassion satisfaction” when helping students succeed, and that the balance depends on how they manage emotional connection. (lens.monash.edu) The core idea is emotional labor: the work of managing feelings to meet the job’s expectations. A 2025 systematic review defined teachers’ emotional labor that way and found the research centered on strategies such as “surface acting,” when teachers mask what they feel, and “deep acting,” when they try to reshape those feelings. (files.eric.ed.gov) The Monash researchers say not all empathy works the same way in classrooms. In their reporting on Australian teachers, understanding a student’s perspective was linked to higher job satisfaction and lower burnout, while absorbing a student’s distress was linked to higher burnout and secondary traumatic stress. (lens.monash.edu) A 2025 study of 131 Portuguese teachers reached a similar conclusion from a different angle. It found that difficulties with emotion regulation were tied to higher personal, work-related and student-relationship burnout, with empathic distress helping explain part of that link. (springer.com) The pressure sits on top of already heavy workloads. RAND reported in June 2024 that United States teachers worked an average of 53 hours a week, about nine hours more than similar working adults, while earning about $18,000 less in base pay on average. (rand.org) That same RAND survey found about twice as many teachers as similar working adults reported frequent job-related stress or burnout, and roughly three times as many said they had difficulty coping with that stress. The top reported stressors were managing student behavior, low salaries and administrative work outside teaching. (rand.org) The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is now treating teacher well-being as a system issue tied to shortages, turnover and the profession’s declining appeal. Its framework links teachers’ mental, physical, social and cognitive well-being to stress levels, intentions to leave and classroom quality. (oecd.org) Monash’s takeaway is practical rather than sentimental: teachers who seek support and identify solutions fare better than those who rely on avoidance. The warning in the research is that schools asking teachers to absorb more student hardship without structured ways to process it are also asking them to absorb more burnout. (lens.monash.edu)