Opinion The shadow of others’ jobs

In a subsistence economy,work directly answers the needs of life: gathering food,growing crops,building shelters and fires. But once money comes into play,a whole range of tasks arises that do not address basic needs. Instead,such work may enable one to earn money and buy both necessities and,if possible,luxuries.

To do the work requires extra jobs,like commuting. The commuter often has to own,insure,maintain and fuel a car — and drive it — just to get to work and back. These unpaid activities ancillary to earning one’s wages are examples of shadow work.

In the industrialised world,shadow work is ubiquitous: shopping,paying bills,housework. Digital technology is steadily ramping up the burden of shadow work for all whose lives revolve around its magnetic field.

The conventional wisdom is that America has become a “service economy,” but actually,in many sectors,“service” is disappearing. There was a time when a gas station attendant would routinely fill your tank and even check your oil and clean your windshield and rear window without charge,then settle your bill. Today,all those jobs have been transferred to the customer: we pump our own gas,squeegee our own windshield,and pay our own bill by swiping a credit card. Where customers once received service from the service station,they now provide “self-service” — a synonym for “no service.”

Examples abound,helping drive unemployment rates. Airports now have self-service check-in kiosks that allow travellers to perform the jobs of ticket agents. Travel agents once unearthed and compared fares,deals and hotel rates. Shadow-working travellers now do all of this themselves online. Medical patients are now better informed than ever — as a result of hours of online shadow work. In 1998,taxpayers spent six billion hours per year on “tax compliance activities.” That’s serious shadow work,the equivalent of three million full-time jobs.

Shadow work isn’t always unpaid; sometimes it shows up at one’s salaried job in the form of new tasks covertly added to one’s responsibilities. One nostalgic appeal of the Mad Men television series is the way it evokes memories of certain amusingly dated aspects of business life,like “support staff,” and even “secretaries.” Support staff is becoming a quaint,antiquarian concept,a historical curiosity like typewriters,stenography and executive washrooms. We all have our own computers,of course,and we type and print our own letters,copy our own reports and mail our own missives. Even those in senior management perform these humdrum jobs.

To be sure,shadow work has its benefits. Bagging one’s own groceries or pumping one’s own gas can save time. Shadow work can increase autonomy and enlarge our repertoire of skills and knowledge. Research on the “Ikea effect,” named for the Swedish furniture manufacturer whose products often require home assembly,indicates that customers value a product more highly when they play a role in constructing it.

Still,a 2007 study pegged the prevalence of fatigue in the American work force at 38 per cent. This should not be surprising. Much of this fatigue may result from the steady,surreptitious accumulation of shadow work in modern life. People are simply doing a huge number of tasks that were once done for them by others.

Doing things for one another is,in fact,an essential characteristic of a human community. Various mundane jobs were once spread around among us,and performing such small services for one another was even an aspect of civility. Those days are over. The robots are in charge now,pushing a thousand routine tasks onto each of our backs.