UH: It’s to the benefit of the employers of service workers. What’s happened is that the service industries have become more and more Taylorized, in order to maximize the productivity of service workers. The time they spend on eachtask has to be minimized. The tasks become more and more routinized, more and more speeded up. You can talk to anybody who works in a call center and they’ll tell you what the pressure is to keep the length of the calls down, to deal with as many calls a possible, to meet performance targets, et cetera. Now the way that that is done, the time that is saved hasn’t just disappeared into nowhere. It’s been transferred onto the consumer, so paid time has been turned into unpaid time.

The same thing has happened in supermarkets. In the early years of the twentieth century lots and lots of people worked in retailing and they stood behind counters and literally waited on people. They stood there with their aprons on doing nothing until a customer came along and when a customer came along, they said, “What do you want, Madam?” and then bagged up the vegetables, weighed them, did all the labor and handed them out and it was actually physically delivered by a kid on a bike. In my childhood in Britain in the 1950s you’d be sent down to the greengrocers with an order, and then later that afternoon a boy would come along on a bike and deliver it all.

Now all that labor of delivering and all that waiting time and all that time spent bagging up the vegetables and so on have been transferred to the consumer. And also a lot of the cost of transport and storage that used to be born by the industry is transferred to the customer. And this they call increasing productivity—it’s pressurizing and Taylorizing the work of the paid workers, squeezing as much labor out of them as possible. But it’s also transferring all the squeezed-out labor onto all of us as consumers.

And it’s not just that it’s the amount of work has been increased, but it’s also the quality of that work has changed as well. So the kind of autonomy that people used to have in terms of how they structure their consumer experiences has increasingly been ironed out because of the Taylorization of service workers.