The labour we really need
Suddenly what used to be classed as unskilled labour has proved in our global emergency to be crucial to modern life; truck drivers, shelf stackers, Amazon warehouse workers are now respected as key workers.
by Lizzie O’Shea
The labour we really need↑
Essential jobs: as Covid-19 spreads, warehouse workers demand better conditions and protective measures
Andrew Harrer · Bloomberg · Getty
The labour we really need↑
Essential jobs: as Covid-19 spreads, warehouse workers demand better conditions and protective measures
Andrew Harrer · Bloomberg · Getty
Working life for a lot of Americans starts at McDonald’s. Former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan claimed flipping burgers was central to his understanding of the American Dream. ‘One of the things that’s really fun about working at McDonald’s is to get really fast at all of this stuff,’ recounted Amazon head Jeff Bezos, who spent time in his younger days at the fastfood giant. ‘[I would] see how many eggs you can crack in a period of time and still not get any shell in them.’ It proved a fitting start for the career of the future billionaire, as the embrace of wage-slave-misery-as-optimised-skill-building has since become a signature of his business strategy.
More than 750,000 people work for Amazon, most picking and packing orders in fulfilment centres for dispatch to customers. McDonald’s used to be the iconic workplace of last resort, but Amazon fulfilment centres now compete for the title. One Amazon worker described his designated centre as an ‘existential shithole’, says writer Emily Guendelsberger.
Retail sales workers, cashiers, fastfood and service workers are some of the most common US occupations. Jobs are low-paid, usually repetitive, considered dead-end, and all classified as ‘unskilled’. Yet the work required of people in such roles is often anything but unskilled.
Jobs classified as unskilled usually require minimal training and do not require a high school or college degree. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that in 2018 the percentage of workers in the US in jobs with no minimum education requirement was 31%; another 40% were only required to have a high school diploma. That leaves many Americans working in jobs classified as unskilled or low-skilled.
More than 750,000 people work for Amazon, most picking and packing orders in fulfilment centres for dispatch to customers. McDonald’s used to be the iconic workplace of last resort, but Amazon fulfilment centres now compete for the title. One Amazon worker described his designated centre as an ‘existential shithole’, says writer Emily Guendelsberger.
Retail sales workers, cashiers, fastfood and service workers are some of the most common US occupations. Jobs are low-paid, usually repetitive, considered dead-end, and all classified as ‘unskilled’. Yet the work required of people in such roles is often anything but unskilled.
Jobs classified as unskilled usually require minimal training and do not require a high school or college degree. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that in 2018 the percentage of workers in the US in jobs with no minimum education requirement was 31%; another 40% were only required to have a high school diploma. That leaves many Americans working in jobs classified as unskilled or low-skilled.
Clearing a table in one trip
Yet waiting on tables, talking on the phone, sorting goods, preparing food and serving customers all require dexterity, strength, memory and stamina, as well as hefty reserves of emotional labour in the customer-facing positions. As Brittany Bronson explained in the New York Times, ‘a skilled server assistant can clear a table in one trip versus two, simply with more careful placement of dishes along his forearm or between his knuckles.’ As an adjunct instructor and restaurant server, her position as a member of both the professional and working classes gives her a unique point of view: ‘The terms unskilled and low-skilled labor contradict the care and precision with which my co-workers, who have a variety of educational backgrounds and language fluencies, execute their tasks.’
My truck driver friend points out that every single thing I get in the supermarket was delivered there by truck. Nothing works without people like himBarbara Ehrenreich
Performing unskilled jobs may demand skills, but it is a different story when it comes to the management of these workers. The rhetoric we often hear about robots eating our jobs usually relates to the low-paid end of the labour market; less common are discussions about the automation of management. This can include things like just-in-time employee scheduling, which is increasingly optimised through technology, and disproportionately affects unskilled work. A BLS report for the period 2017-18 found that, among workers over 25, 31% of those in unskilled jobs knew their schedule less than one week in advance, compared with only 14% of workers with a BA or higher. Such precarity requires people working in unskilled jobs to be organised and resourceful, and manage their personal lives around paid work.
The supervision of unskilled jobs generally combines arbitrary rules with strict consequences, which again requires that workers themselves be skilful to survive. In call centres, workers are more and more subject to black box voice-recognition algorithmic analysis that monitors tone and tracks performance. Appearing energetic or empathetic, especially when managing a challenging customer, requires multiple proficiencies.
Union official Josh Cullinan points out that the modern fastfood worker uses skills that are foreign to most workers from generations past. A fastfood worker in the average drive-through window will be doing multiple tasks simultaneously. She will take orders from customers via an earpiece, enter them into a programme that conveys the orders to the kitchen, collect and hand bags of food to customers and take payment on electronic systems, all within strict deadlines. On top of this, she is expected to be polite, despite working long shifts that can be physically and emotionally exhausting.
Retail workers are also often required to work with an earpiece, to monitor workflow. ‘These young people are using systems in a way that their grandparents could not understand,’ says Cullinan. Workers have to develop skills in managing the emotional and physical toll of such work, which he says ‘takes knowledge and street smarts’. But this work also calls on new kinds of skills, including acting as an interface between ‘various technical systems that 20 or 30 years ago no workplace was using’.
Yet discussing the skills required to do unskilled jobs belies an undeniable reality: much of this work has been deliberately de-skilled in the traditional industrial sense. By breaking up tasks and requiring workers to repeat them endlessly, unskilled jobs strip away the bargaining power that attends skilled work, and makes such work an emotional slog.
This is one of the themes Guendelsberger returns to in her recent book On the Clock. She worked in a number of low-wage jobs — at Amazon, a call centre, McDonald’s — all classified as unskilled. Her time as an Amazon picker in a fulfilment centre is an example of an unskilled job and de-skilled work. Every task for pickers is allocated by an electronic scan gun that provides precise instructions and a specific amount of time for completion, with a countdown in seconds. The work was not difficult but it was stressful and painful, to the point that Guendelsberger was rationing painkillers. The boredom of the work presented a greater challenge than the physical toll of the vast distances she walked on a daily basis. ‘It’s hard to communicate how big a deal the boredom is: it’s much easier to write about pain,’ she writes. ‘The long days of lonely monotony brought me close to walking out more than once.’
These jobs are deliberately dehumanising: ‘All Amazon’s metrics and ticking clocks and automatic penalties are meant to constrain the inefficiencies of human workers, so they act more like robots.’ The tendency of the digital revolution, like the industrial revolution, is to treat people as nothing more than productive inputs, devoid of humanity.
It's hard to communicate how big a deal the boredom is: it's much easier to write about pain.
The long days of lonely monotony brought me close to walking out more than once
Emily Guendelsberger
While repetitive, monotonous work is not uncommon, it does not necessarily correlate with low pay or drudgery. Elite sportspeople often spend their lives practicing a very specific set of skills repeatedly, but such efforts attract a level of recognition and social status that outweigh the downsides. The agonising snare drum part in Maurice Ravel’s Boléro (which demands playing the exact same two-bar phrase on repeat for 15 minutes) is excruciatingly stressful by any metric, yet the glory heaped upon such performers often makes it feel worth it. Even jobs considered skilled, like certain engineering, accounting and banking jobs, and even some forms of medicine, increasingly rely on technological systems that change or reduce the skill and knowledge requirements workers need to do their job. Such jobs continue to be relatively well-paid and well-respected, yet the repetitive nature of unskilled jobs is still used to justify their workers receiving the lowest pay in the labour market.
While repetitive, monotonous work is not uncommon, it does not necessarily correlate with low pay or drudgery. Elite sportspeople often spend their lives practicing a very specific set of skills repeatedly, but such efforts attract a level of recognition and social status that outweigh the downsides. The agonising snare drum part in Maurice Ravel’s Boléro (which demands playing the exact same two-bar phrase on repeat for 15 minutes) is excruciatingly stressful by any metric, yet the glory heaped upon such performers often makes it feel worth it. Even jobs considered skilled, like certain engineering, accounting and banking jobs, and even some forms of medicine, increasingly rely on technological systems that change or reduce the skill and knowledge requirements workers need to do their job. Such jobs continue to be relatively well-paid and well-respected, yet the repetitive nature of unskilled jobs is still used to justify their workers receiving the lowest pay in the labour market.
‘We built this city’
Without the work done by people in unskilled jobs, society would cease to function. Building and construction unions have long used the slogan ‘We built this city’. Barbara Ehrenreich recently spoke about her truck driver friend ‘who likes to point out that every single thing I get in the supermarket was delivered there by truck. Nothing works without people like him.’ The same is true for jobs in food preparation, customer service delivery and many other kinds of unskilled occupations. People who stock our supermarket shelves and help us access food and clothing are essential to our survival. The slogan of one farm workers’ union in Australia is ‘We feed you’. Many unskilled jobs may be boring, painful, and unpleasant, but it is not the case that they are all ‘bullshit jobs’.
Perhaps what actually unites various unskilled jobs is a lack of respect for those who do them, something that we urgently need to change. For some insight into how this might be done, it is worth looking to the account of a call centre worker who became part of a collective effort to organise his workplace. Union delegates talked to members about a range of issues, but one catalyst for change concerned a particularly enchanting demand — the right to read. As an outbound call centre for political and private polling, the phones automatically dial, meaning that workers can have a fair bit of time between calls, during which they would read. When one worker was told by management to put her book away and instructed to leave, it became a lightning rod for resistance. The workers downed tools, won the right to read and reversed the dismissal of their colleague.
Jeff Bezos channelled his experience in an unskilled job into creating an empire of misery, exploiting those who now work in unskilled jobs for him. Maybe it is time he was made to listen to his workers instead, and to start showing them some respect.
Lizzie O’Shea is a lawyer and the author of Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology, Verso, London, 2019. An earlier version of this article was published in The Baffler, no 50, March 2020.
Original text in English
Without the work done by people in unskilled jobs, society would cease to function. Building and construction unions have long used the slogan ‘We built this city’. Barbara Ehrenreich recently spoke about her truck driver friend ‘who likes to point out that every single thing I get in the supermarket was delivered there by truck. Nothing works without people like him.’ The same is true for jobs in food preparation, customer service delivery and many other kinds of unskilled occupations. People who stock our supermarket shelves and help us access food and clothing are essential to our survival. The slogan of one farm workers’ union in Australia is ‘We feed you’. Many unskilled jobs may be boring, painful, and unpleasant, but it is not the case that they are all ‘bullshit jobs’.
Perhaps what actually unites various unskilled jobs is a lack of respect for those who do them, something that we urgently need to change. For some insight into how this might be done, it is worth looking to the account of a call centre worker who became part of a collective effort to organise his workplace. Union delegates talked to members about a range of issues, but one catalyst for change concerned a particularly enchanting demand — the right to read. As an outbound call centre for political and private polling, the phones automatically dial, meaning that workers can have a fair bit of time between calls, during which they would read. When one worker was told by management to put her book away and instructed to leave, it became a lightning rod for resistance. The workers downed tools, won the right to read and reversed the dismissal of their colleague.
Jeff Bezos channelled his experience in an unskilled job into creating an empire of misery, exploiting those who now work in unskilled jobs for him. Maybe it is time he was made to listen to his workers instead, and to start showing them some respect.
Lizzie O’Shea is a lawyer and the author of Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology, Verso, London, 2019. An earlier version of this article was published in The Baffler, no 50, March 2020.
Original text in English
No comments:
Post a Comment