Suckers 'r' us

Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe offers some interesting ideas in her latest column.

Highlights...

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?

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.

The Internet ad for a do-it-yourself eye surgery kit might 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.

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.

Ellen Goodman is a columnist for the Boston Globe. Her e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com