From the ArcaMax Publishing, Ellen Goodman Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/ellengoodman/s-379496-849879
BOSTON -- I finally drew the line at a dinner invitation. My husband
wanted to try a much-touted restaurant where they present you with a
platter of raw foods and a hot pot. The prospect of this adventure in
dining didn't exactly thrill me. If I want to cook my own food, I
answered rather testily, I'll eat at home.
Until then, I had drifted along with the do-it-yourself economy. I
bused my own lunch trays. I booked my own movie tickets. I checked
myself in at hotel kiosks. I even succumbed when an upscale seafood
restaurant expected me to swipe my credit card through a handheld
computer as if I were in a supermarket.
But maybe it was the election-year rants about the offshoring of
American jobs from steelworkers to computer programmers that finally
got me. The outsourcing of work to other countries has produced
endless ire. But what about the outsourcing of work to thee and me?
For every task shipped abroad by a corporation, isn't there another
one sloughed off onto that domestic loser, the consumer? For every job
that's going to a low-wage economy, isn't there another going into our
very own no-wage economy?
I'm not just talking about do-it-yourself gas pumping, which is by now
so routine that the memory of an actual person washing your windshield
has receded into the mists of AARP nostalgia. Back when gas cost $2 a
gallon, self-service was offered at a discount. Today, gas is more
than $4, and, in most parts of the country, full-service -- a retronym
if there ever was one -- is available only at a premium.
What's happening on land is happening in air. We are now expected to
book our own itinerary, print our boarding passes and do everything at
the airport except pat ourselves down for liquids.
In this self-service economy, we also serve (ourselves) by having
intimate and endless conversations with voice-recognition machines
simply to refill a prescription drug or check our bank balance. We are
expected to interact with "labor-saving technology" without realizing
that it's labor-transferring technology. The job has not been "saved,"
it's been taken out of the paid sector, where employees have a nasty
habit of expecting salaries, and put into the unpaid sector, where
suckers 'r' us.
I am tempted to say that customer service has gone the way of the
house call but that reminds me that even medicine has been outsourced
to patients who buy do-it-yourself kits to test and track everything
from HIV to blood pressure. The Internet ad for a do-it-yourself eye
surgery kit may be, I pray, a hoax. But in an era when every operation
short of brain surgery is done on an outpatient basis, nursing care
has already been outsourced to family members whose entire medical
training consists of TiVo-ing "Grey's Anatomy."
The axis of this evil isn't really globalization, it's privatization.
Consider all the major jobs that have now become part of our personal
portfolio. We've become our own computer geeks as help lines become
self-help lines. We've become our own pension planners and financial
analysts left to manage our 401(k)s. We are even expected to be health
care analysts, determining which star in the galaxy of drug
prescription plans covers the ever-changing cast of pills in our
medicine cabinet.
All of this is framed in the language of free choice. As opposed to,
say, free time.
An MIT economist assures me cheerily that many Americans are willing
to accept less service for lower cost. In a society built on the value
of self-reliance, I am told, we may even feel virtuous when we put
together our own bookcase or install our own hard drive.
But I have yet to find an economist who has figured out the human cost
of "lower cost" or tallied up the transfer of labor from companies to
customers. I've yet to find a consumer who has added, subtracted or
multiplied the amount of time we are now spending on the second shift
of life management.
Remember back when women were asking "Can We Have It All?" The answer
turned out to be that we could have it all only if we could do it all
... and all by ourselves. Now men and women have both won equal
opportunity in the do-it-all-by-yourself world. We have officially
become our own nonprofit centers.
Welcome to the self-service economy where we are never without work to
be done. Let's celebrate by dining out together. Bring your carrot
peeler.
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Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com