I got yer check-out right heah

A column in Tuesday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has one of those light-hearted, first-person accounts of dealing with some increasingly-common everyday experience. This one was about do-it-yourself shopping, and I don't mean shopping at Home Depot.

On this Labor Day, I missed the laborers. As America shifts more and more to a self-checkout, self-banking, self-toll-paying, self-photo-developing economy, you can almost get through your day of errands without speaking to a real worker.

But it's not as easy as you'd think - nor desirable, as I discovered this Labor Day weekend. Automatic banking has been around for decades, and most of us have mastered the ATMs. Some folks can zip through highway toll booths with the E-Z Pass, make airline reservations via the Internet and breeze through E-ticket airport check-in kiosks.

But not all tasks lend themselves to self-serve, and you wonder whether some increases in worker productivity come from the customer's sweat not the worker. Outsourcing may be a trend in some jobs, but in the service industries it's now become "you-sourcing," as in you-are-the-source-of-their-labor.

She goes on to describe her experiences with self-service dog grooming, self-service photo processing, self-service grocery checkout, a self-service gasoline station, and a self-service car wash.

After a full five hours of laboring for other companies, I realized one thing.

Those companies don't pay me enough.

Although expressed in the time-honored "nobody knows the trouble I've seen" style of cockups and confusions, the point is valid and one I've been arguing for some time to anyone who's fool enough to listen. I told the stranger behind me in the grocery checkout line the other day that I refuse to use the self-service checkout, pitched by the store as oh-so-convenient and oh-such-a-benefit to you, our customer, whose every comfort and need is the very core of our being.

When he said he agreed because of the way they keep breaking down, I said my reason was that what the lane does in effect is make you do more work so they can hire fewer cashiers. They're using you to eliminate jobs. He admitted he never thought about it that way. And of course they don't want you to. They just want you to work for their profit for free in the happy illusion that it's for your own benefit.

The question that keeps coming back to me is why do we fall for it? Why do we keep swallowing the corporate BS that surrounds us, over and over, even when, in a case like the "convenience" of self-checkout, the lie isn't even that subtle? Are we that gullible? Are we that easy to manipulate? Or just that willing to be manipulated?

Since none of those are happy choices, let me offer another: that we are aware in that irritating, "can't put my finger on it," just-below-consciousness sort of way just how much autonomy we have lost, just how fragile our social and economic lives are, just how dependent we are - for the sake of our families' security - on smiling and nodding as our futures contract and we fear, contrary to what I would say is the real "American Dream," that our children will be worse off than we are.

Numerous studies by the government and business bear out that sinking feeling: Wages have indeed been falling or stagnating across America during the last three years. The Labor Department, IRS and the Census Bureau, various economists and employee-compensation firms have all come to a similar conclusion. ...

Income for all Americans fell 9.2 percent in 2001 and 2002, according to the IRS. The Census Bureau says median household income fell to $43,349 last year, down from about $45,000 in 1999. ... Since 2001, income in 34 states has fallen or remained basically flat. ...

[M]any of the new jobs pay less than the jobs they replace. ...

Another element is what economists call "global labor arbitrage," a fancy way of saying corporations are moving some high-wage jobs to low-wage countries. ...

A new [Economic Policy Institute] study says total compensation of U.S. workers has risen just 1.2 percent in three years. The average increase during eight previous economic cycles was 9.4 percent. ...

About 11.4 million people lost their jobs from 2001 to 2003. According to the Department of Labor, about 57 percent of those workers who lost full-time jobs had to take a job that paid less. About one-third took a pay cut of 20 percent or more.

We feel desperate, trapped, cornered, our economic future is clouded and our politics are increasingly irrelevant to our lives. (Concerns about terrorism may figure in here - but while this feeling has worsened over the last three years, it clearly predates 9/11. But those "terror alerts" serve as great distractions, don't they?)

So maybe, maybe, we grab onto "self-service" nonsense because it gives us some sense, even if fleeting, that we have some control, some influence, some effect on matters outside our own doors. I mean, yeah, we're doing more work and yeah, it costs jobs, but dammit, it's empowering!

On the other hand, that's not really a happy alternative, either, is it?