Mother May I

How the devaluing of service work will lead to a race to the bottom

Back on February 17, a BBC Radio 4 interview with Huffington Post’s UK editor Stephen Hull confirmed the worst fears of all those who toil in the content mines. Asked why HuffPo doesn’t pay the vast majority of its writers, Hull responded, “When somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real. We know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.”

A tweet by British author Ed Caesar summarizing this quote brought Hull’s words to the world’s attention and engendered great deal of outraged reaction. (Granted, Twitter outrage can also be engendered by an unadorned photo of a turnip.) There were enough angry responses that Caesar had to remind those with insufficient reading comprehension skills that he simply reported the quote and was not its author.

Amid the fray, I tossed off a tweet of my own on the subject.

I intended this as a joke (and as you can see from the fave/RT count, it had ‘em rolling in the aisles). The more I thought about this idea, however, the more the notion of rebranding work in this manner seemed to me like something that could truly come to pass.

The reason why has to the do with the transformation of the American workforce. In 1973, nearly a quarter of the nation’s labor force worked in manufacturing, with nearly all of those jobs held by working class laborers. By the late 2000’s, manufacturing’s slice of the pie had decreased to 10 percent as these jobs moved overseas and the service industry filled the gap they left.

We think of this trend as a bad thing because the manufacturing jobs that have been lost since the early 1970s paid much more and offered far more benefits than most service industry jobs. But we also tend to think of manufacturing as a more “important” or “meaningful” type of work, while we think of service workers as interchangeable drones with no valuable skills. Herein lies an assumption that informs much of our collective thinking.

In the broadest sense, the American manufacturing jobs of yesteryear were little different from today’s service positions. The old jobs required almost no specialized knowledge prior to hiring and only a modicum of on-the-job training. The advances of industrial technology and techniques in the 20th century—particularly the assembly line—were devised for the express purpose of making workers interchangeable cogs in a greater machine. These positions could have been filled by virtually anyone with a high school education or even less, so that if a worker quit or died he could be easily and quickly replaced. A person who assembled Fords circa 1965 did not need to know more before his first day on the job than today’s Starbucks barista needs to know on hers.

And yet we tend to think of this bygone builder of cars as having held a much more “important” position than someone who serves coffee. One could argue that automobile manufacturing contributes more to the overall economy than the manufacturing of soy lattes, but our ideas of worth have little to do with any cold calculations of contributions to GDP. They instead come from our subliminal feelings about the work itself.

Manufacturing was, and is, a masculine world. Call to mind an image of a Factory Worker and chances are you are imagining a man. Someone who worked in manufacturing made something and could therefore imagine himself as an inheritor of the mantle of manly artisans of old—the blacksmith, the carpenter, the cooper—even if he was just ratchet-gunning rims onto a Plymouth.

In contrast, the service industry is considered feminine. In decades past, the service industry offered one the few windows of opportunity for a woman to join the workforce because it comprised work that was considered acceptable for a woman to pursue: Childcare, nursing, waitressing, secretarial work. It was once thought that if a woman absolutely must work outside the home, then best she do so in a quasi-maternal position, catering to someone else’s needs.

The disdain people have for service industry work grows from a subconscious distaste for what was once called women’s work. This is a large reason why the work continues to be so poorly compensated. The service industry was the province of women at a time when employers could get away with paying them far less than their male counterparts. (Not that employers have stopped doing that.) These jobs were essentially seen as extensions of motherhood itself: An immensely important job in which a woman caters to someone’s every need and is not compensated in the least.

Even when manufacturing in America crumbled in the 1980s and more men joined the service industry, the idea persisted that this work was somehow “lesser” and therefore deserved smaller wages. This is why people blanch at the idea of unions or $15/hour wages for fast food workers. It’s not because these people work any less hard, or are any less skilled, than the assembly line men of old. It’s because they do work we do not value, no matter how much of the economy it comprises or how many millions of people do these jobs. Literally billions of people eat at McDonald’s, which should mean that serving them should hold some importance to the world’s economy. And yet we despise this type of work so much that flippin’ burgers is a self explanatory byword for mindless, meaningless labor.

What does this any of this have to do with Mr. Hull’s comments? Though Hull was speaking about young creatives who write for HuffPo for free, his praise for “real” work (as opposed to work tainted by adequate compensation) seems like it could easily be the next step in the devaluing of service work, particularly in its intersection with the gig economy.

We now have apps that will cater to every menial task, be it getting a ride or buying groceries or doing laundry. This too is service work, with a twist. The people who do all this chauffeuring and grocery buying and laundry washing are independent contractors, each of them hustling for as much work as possible. Hence the “gig” of the gig economy.

This creates a very different world from the traditional service industry. Everyone who toils at your local Target work in close proximity and rely on each other to do their respective jobs so they can better do their own. Though it is unlikely for all the reasons enumerated above, it is conceivable this “team” could organize and agitate for better pay and benefits. Contrast this with an organization like Uber, whose every driver is in direct competition with every other Uber driver in his or her vicinity. In such a system, a worker will accept as little pay as s/he can stomach in an effort to guarantee future work and undercut these “rivals.”

And so as more people enter the gig economy, I imagine a future where service work we already disdain is devalued even further in a cataclysmic race to the bottom. Workers will be paid virtually nothing because a pittance will be better than zero. CEO’s will pat them on the head and praise the “purity” of work done out of sheer love for serving the needs of someone who will scarcely appreciate the effort.

In other words, before long we’ll all know exactly what our mothers felt like.