Yesterday, on a local SF bay area radio station, I heard an interview with Martha E. Gimenez, a retired professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The interview centered around her essay in the December 2007 issue of the Monthly Review magazine titled “Self-Sourcing: How Corporations Get Us to Work Without Pay!”. I’d like to preface that I am not endorsing this particular magazine, the radio program on which this interview aired or for that matter the author. I say this because I wouldn’t want the left leaning, pro-labor ideologies that may surround this person or this magazine distract you from the point that I’m wanting to make or for that matter the key points that she tries to make(not to mention that I know very little about this magazine).

We’ve all used self-checkout systems at grocery stores, Homedepot, even airline counters by newcomers like Virgin America. We’ve fumbled through the learning process of scanning our items and prayed that when we’re at the airline ticketing counter that we don’t screw up our flights and that our luggage makes its way safely back home. In the name of cost cutting and getting a “deal” we’ve also bought furniture from places like IKEA, where we’ve had to figure out how to put together furniture. In her article Gimenez defines Self-sourcing as the “intensification of the process of transferring work from the sphere of production, where it is visible and paid, to the sphere of consumption, where it is invisible and unpaid.” In this essay she talks about the erosion of low skill jobs where labor that was previously employed to do this work is now born by us. I actually don’t want to debate her article, but I want to bring to the open this notion of Self-sourcing and it implications. Once we are conscious as to what is truly happening and why it’s happening then we can direct our opinions and energies in the right direction.

Human progress seems to come in many shapes and sizes and sometimes it comes in the form of innovation and what economists refer to as “productivity”. This may well be an instance of that. I’d like to leave you with this question: At the end of the day, are we getting a better product, or better service when we lose our “privilege” as the consumer and find ourselves more and more a part of the production and sales process? What are the true costs or the true savings of this trade-off? Is it any more efficient if in the future every checkout line at a grocery store is a self-checkout line? Aren’t we ultimately helping companies increase their revenues on our unpaid labor? Are we hoping to get a discount in return for our labor(if we’re lucky)? How much further beyond self-check-out machines are we willing to go to get a discount? I don’t know about you but when these self-checkout kiosks appear in stores, they don’t pass the savings on to the consumers. We are initially seduced to thinking that we can save some time by using these self-checkout lines but at the end of the day even these check-out lines get longer and longer. The value back to us is diminished while the company continues to reap the rewards of not having extra staff to help us. As long as consumers feel that they are getting a better deal as a result of self-sourcing, companies will continue to move more and more of their labor intensive processes on to them. Is this a good trend or a bad trend, it’s clearly not a black and white issue and clearly not even on the radar of institutions that are looking at what is meant to be a socially responsible company.

Labor, economic and product/service quality implications aside, is this trend creating a world where we only interact with computers, machines, kiosks and no longer interact with people who are our neighbors or our friends? At a time in human history where we need to connect more, love more, care more, interact more so that we can appreciate each other in our own unique ways in all possible settings, this trend is symptomatic of the erosion of society’s soul … and erosion by definition happens slowly yet steadily.

Here is the link to the article….. in case you can’t get to it, here’s a cached link.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under business, economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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