just fyi, i know nothing about any authors or researchers who see this labor as edgy, but there's a long tradition of studying service work and affective labor in u.s. sociology, especially feminist sociology, with the classic being Arlie Hochschild's The Managed Heart. The reason they were interested in because no one gave a shit about studying it for a long time, preferring to study conventional "male" occupations as somehow far more important and central to understanding the world of work than to study waitresses, stewardesses, copy machine jockeys at kinkos, avon sales reps, and mcdonald's workers.
I don't get the impression that any of these folks are uninterested in labor unions, though they are largely uninterested in conventional economic analysis (of the non-heterodox kind that is), being sociologists and, worse (!), ethnographers, they are interested in people, affect, feelings, emotions, and the identities shaped by doing certain kinds of work day in and day out.
what impact their finding shave on this concept of "immaterial labor"... I don't know. I tried reading Empire. no joy. I tried reading Commonwealth. Couldn't get past the extreme abstraction. This tendency people have to speak of this or that thing happening, this or that idea that someone else holds, without giving any concrete examples, quotes, etc which seems common in the world of political theorists of this persuasion, is offputting.
However, since it appears that they are reviled for their association with OWS, Iwill give it another go!