MODERN SERFS

Doing More with Less and Less

Watching customer service take its last gasps

Resentment at the self-checkout grocery store line appears to be simmering.

Customer service has taken an insidious and treacherous path downhill in my Gen X lifetime. As I’ve watched it choking for air and getting flung out of a car window in a slow-motion wreck, I think of the slogan:

We can do more with less.

It’s a dubious cheerleading credo that crops up whenever Less is served up with a wicked smile in the corporate cafeteria.

Phone trees, self-checkout, and complex hospitality software are the most obvious examples. You used to call up the hotel clerk and ask for a room; now you conduct three hours of online research to avoid paying $179 a night for a fleabag in a bad neighborhood.

We can’t blame scooters lining big-city sidewalks on bad customer service, yet. But those Limes and Byrds are self-serve because everything is self-serve.

I’m grateful I can still afford groceries, so self-checkout doesn’t bug me — but what does prod my antenna is the insidious trend of piling work onto consumers’ backs.

Companies can’t find employees and it’s cheaper to hire robots. They can’t find employees because the cost-benefit trade-off for traditionally “working class” (read: low-paying) jobs sucks in epic proportions.

We are hurtling toward serfdom at such dizzying acceleration that even we, the first-world peasantry, are aware of it.

As I’ve watched the depressing spectacle, I’ve noticed how it’s becoming harder and harder to find a job that hits the trifecta of human decency:

1/ Pays a living wage

2/ Provides medical insurance

3/ Enforces humane working conditions

The Overlords Cannot Be Shamed

Young people are thrilled to get any paycheck, but as we get older and rack up degrees and experience, we expect a decent paycheck. Because we are Americans, we need health insurance — or the paycheck is immediately reduced by 20% since private health insurance is a basic survival strategy in a surreal profit-driven healthcare “model.”

Humane working conditions have been a battlefield from the beginning, and only in the 20th century did modern workers begin to make gains with the 40-hour work week, child labor laws, safety regulations, overtime pay, and the ability to join a union to defend those rights.

Wages, medical care, and working conditions are the foundation for a stable living. Many employers offer 1 out of 3, and some will give us 2 out of 3 — but good luck finding a job in this economy that pays well, provides medical coverage, and doesn’t reduce you to a grubworm.

We are left scrambling to calculate which necessity we can live without.

The disturbing truth is that many jobs have gotten much worse. Teachers, for example, have traditionally gotten medical coverage and pensions, and because they have strong unions, they’ve held on to them. Their wages vary: educators with experience, in some states, do much better than most entry-level jobs. Yet, humane working conditions are becoming increasingly hard to find — anywhere. It’s always been a tough job, yet as public schools continue to be defunded, the work has become untenable. Covid destabilized an already shaky structure, weakened by decades of stagnant wages and poor working conditions.

This leads back to the primary concern: why can’t our society offer jobs that do not degrade most workers?

Greed and power.

Sadly, many of us believe we would never be corrupted by vats of money. Most of us would, and the Bezos/Musk contingent isn’t interested in changing a game they’ve won. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the teachers who helped them get where they are today.

Watered-Down Global Democracy

American jobs used to pay more. Corporate businesses, especially in the manufacturing and automotive sectors, relocated operations to take advantage of cheap labor in Mexico and Asia, a trickle that became a raging river after the turn of the last century.

US companies moved because they could and it was profitable. In some cases, they were struggling to survive but often business was good — they just saw an opportunity for expansion. General Motors (GM), for example, has had its finger in the international auto pie for over 100 years, but in 2009 the world’s largest automaker filed for bankruptcy. Since then, the company has lost market share as they’ve tried to restructure and continue to retreat and downsize.

Today, GM continues to ship jobs overseas. As with other large corporations, they are using this tactic despite robust business, in a steady trend called offshoring.

The US employment landscape has permanently shifted to more low-paying, non-benefit jobs. Lower-paying “gig” jobs have reshaped the American economy, but the effect has been felt unevenly.

Smaller and rural communities watched whole economies dry up, while urban opportunities sometimes increased — thus creating dual worlds and a chance for exploitation by sinister political interests. This sweeping economic schism is a primary driver of Trump’s MAGA scam success and has contributed, sadly, to the false culture wars.

Guys who earned a decent paycheck with benefits and tolerable working conditions are relegated to unemployment, worsening prospects, and losing their status as the primary breadwinner.

Decent wages in industries like meatpacking and slaughterhouses — notoriously hard, dirty work — plummeted from $20-something an hour to $12 an hour within a decade. Recent immigrants were happy to have employment that paid more than what they were used to back home. Former well-paid workers took unemployment and signed on at Dollar Tree, struck out on their own, filed for disability, or moved to the city.

Everyone is doing more with less.

We now have vast segments of the economy that pays “about $12 an hour,” the same wage I made delivering pizzas and teaching adjunct in 1993. We have become accustomed to an economy that is moving backward in real-time. I’m no economist but things cost more in 2023 than they did in 1993. For those who do not like math or are reading this early in the morning, that’s 30 years at the same wage.

Like many, I tried to buy my way out with more education.

The Overeducated Modern Worker

The progressive solution is to get more education and the GOP’s answer is to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, which amounts to getting more education. My degrees barely kept up with workplace demands so let’s just say I’m not a fan of bootstrap higher ed bullshit.

Trends in higher education show that as a nation, we had the biggest spike in people getting 4-year-degrees after World War II. In the mid-50s, the number of bachelor’s degrees fell closer to its historical baseline (around 15%), but then began climbing to beyond 40% (with over 30% of high school grads pursuing master’s degrees and a much larger proportion, especially women, going for doctorates) in the early 1970s.

As we continue to become increasingly “higher educated,” which costs money, our real wages are decreasing.

When it comes to master’s degrees and doctorates, higher ed has become a cottage industry. Women seeking more education is one reason, although it takes much longer, on average, to earn a graduate degree than it used to. From 1960 to 1970, the average time to earn a doctorate was 7.9 years but that number reached a historical high of 10.5 years by the late 1980s.

In order to get the most out of your degree, however, there need to be enough good jobs.

America’s Rigged System

The uniquely American medical insurance fiasco is the second punch after stagnant wages. Our elections aren’t rigged, but our paychecks get hijacked by having to shell out for our own medical care.

Statistics belie the true costs. About half of Americans get private insurance via their employer, with an average annual premium of around $7,800. That doesn’t sound too bad, but the $7,800 is essentially bankruptcy protection.

I pay a little more on the Marketplace, also known as Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As someone who is self-employed, I am only able to get affordable coverage because ACA exists. However, my plan doesn’t cover all expenses, so I fork over another $100 a month or so for actual doctor visits.

The health insurance system punishes consumers in a diabolical way: you never know what it will cost until you get sick and a bill arrives on your doorstep.

Our country is one of the very, very few in the world (first and otherwise) that ties medical insurance to employment. It’s a terrible system that condemns:

— Young people, who are less likely to get “real” jobs because they lack skills

— Old people, who face age discrimination in finding employment and are more likely to become ill

— Self-employed people

— Anyone who has a disability and can’t work, but isn’t so disabled they qualify for SSI/SSDI

— People in the vulnerable age range of 50+ in which losing a job makes it tremendously difficult to find re-employment at the same level AND medical issues are more likely to arise due to aging (this is a large segment of society)

Essentially, every American is vulnerable, but most of the population is kept ignorant about how awful the system really is because they are:

Well-educated and securely employed at a decent wage

OR

Have reached the 65-year-old Medicare finish line

OR

Have never been sick

If you have a good job with benefits and have never been sick or injured, you just can’t comprehend how horrible the US medical insurance racket can be.

We All Pay a Price for Greed

Corporate greed means most customers get shitty customer service, but why should the wealthy overlords care?

They don’t need customer service. They have serfs and task rabbits.

Customers in the medical system die earlier and go bankrupt more often.

Parents, children, and teachers battle declining public education, while our politicians blame the other party. Whoever supports corporate profits over workers' rights and government safety nets contributes to the problem.

It’s every man, woman, and child for himself in a world of fewer services and spreading misinformation.

Sounds bleak, doesn’t it?

It’s a rare individual who is not corrupted by money. Some start out skeevy and shifty, like Musk. Other men have their souls eroded over time, like Bill Gates. But for those like Gates who try to do good, they are hampered by a complete lack of a coherent plan.

Billionaires are like spiders. They will never come up with a blueprint to make this world a better place because they can’t work together. Their ethos rests on territory and competition.

In the meantime, I’m getting used to bagging my own groceries and mastering the art of being kind to whatever bedraggled customer service lady finally picks up the phone after I’ve yelled at the robot:

“I need a human being!”

What can we, the little people, do about our inhumane working conditions?

If I won the lottery tomorrow and became a billionaire, what would I do?

I’m not sure what it means to do good in this world, beyond supporting rights for the oppressed and preparing for the climate catastrophe to come.

I guess I would empower women and children. Men had their chance and they built robots to serve us cheap hamburgers. And sadly, that’s all many of us can afford these days.

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Jean Campbell recently started her first Substack newsletter to laser focus on getting her book, City of Lies: A Street Hustler’s Omaha Journey published.