In case you’re wondering where the jobs are going, they are being outsourced, not to some Asian country but to a vast army of unpaid workers – namely, us.  So writes Ellen Goodman, a syndicated columnist based at the Boston Globe and an acute observer of our society.  She has a point.

As Ms. Goodman comments, it all started with ATMs (which made us work free as our own bank tellers) and self-service gasoline stations (which made us all work free as our own gas jockeys).  With regard to the latter, as her column points out, we were sold a bill of goods.  We were told that pumping our own gas would save us money, while it was, in fact, a bait-and-switch tactic to make more money for the oil companies.  Instead, we pay a premium to the few people who pump gas, and the rest of the gas jockeys either are doing other work or are unemployed.

Throughout our so-called service economy, we are contributing our own labor free of charge.  That, of course, means that people who used to be paid to perform these tasks lost their jobs.  Businesses will, of course, try to convince us that self-service checkouts are a “convenience” and that self-service saves us money.  The first (convenience) is a debatable point.  The second is a flat-out lie:  the main beneficiary of self-service is the business in which we are unpaid workers.

Ms. Goodman makes a particularly telling point about the way tech companies handle customer service.  Most of the time, the only service one gets from a tech company (if one gets anything at all) is an automated reply with instructions (largely guesses based on key words in one’s question) about how to fix the thing oneself.  It is no coincidence that, even as more and more of us use computers and even as computers become more complex and sophisticated, the tech companies are laying off thousands of employees in support and customer service departments.  (Ms. Goodman's column puts that figure at 30,000.)

Furthermore the "help" we get in these automated messages assumes that we are all technicians.  We are told, for example, to go to our "configsys" file and modify the code by inserting some script at line 64, with the cheerful warning that, if we do not insert the code exactly as described, our computer will become unusable.  Of course, should this happen, we're really in trouble because there isn't a technician within 1,000 miles who can repair the damage.  If we're lucky we have access to a teenager, one of those people whom, as Ms. Goodman puts it, are "fed and housed solely because they can get the family [computer] system back up."

One part of Goodman's column really got to me.  She reports that "a Harvard Business School professor told a reporter . . . that we fix [computers] ourselves because:  'There's a real love of technology and people want to get inside and tinker with them.'"  Sorry, Charlie, I and most of my friends are like most of Ms. Goodman's friends and have, as she phrases it, "as much of a desire to tinker with computers as to perform amateur appendectomies."  What gets to me most is that the speaker is a business school professor, and he and his colleagues are significant forces in shaping business practices.  Using this convenient (and false) rationalization, he encourages business executives to adopt policies that result in outsourcing service to the customer.

Nor is the phenomenon confined to the computer industry.  The telephone companies – once a customer-friendly source of information and support – have now decided that they provide the lines and the instruments but the rest is up to us.  Ms. Goodman tells of a friend who was advised by Verizon, via e-mail, "to test go find the grey box attached to her house and test the line herself."  The e-mail, Ms. Goodman says, added:  "You don't have to be a telephone technician or electrical engineer."  Translation:  "We've laid off so many technicians and electrical engineers that you're on your own.  And you might as well get used to it because, to enhance our profits, we're going to lay off some more.  Just be glad we didn't tell you to climb the telephone pole."

Indeed, the telephone companies must love the self-service trend.  All of our failures to fix things ourselves following unfathomable e-mail instructions must generate a lot of telephone calls, which mean traffic for the phone companies, which, in turn, means more business for them.  Hey, they don't care whether you get through, get put on hold for hours, or get an answer; your call is money in their pockets.  Remember, this is the industry that made megabucks supplying telemarketers with the technology to annoy us – and then sold us features to screen out the telemarketers.  This is the same industry that has made "411 information" such a mess that it's easier to find a phone number using Google than it is via 411 (self-service again, you see).

Where will it end?  The post office, unable to show a profit, will eliminate mail carriers and require us to pick up our own mail?  Towns and cities, with their budgets straining under the weight of paying the salaries of municipal officials, will have us all carting our garbage to the city dump?  Schools, suffering from teacher shortages, will assemble all the kids in the auditorium, hand out textbooks, and send them home to teach themselves?  Far-fetched?  Read about the trend toward home schooling.

True, I have been pampered.  I realize that, back in the frontier days, people grew their own food, built their own houses, and fixed things by themselves.  But this is not the frontier.  I admit that, rather late in life (when the learning curve is a very slow-moving arc), I've had to learn how to do repairs that, in my youth, I would have called a professional to do.  And that has been , in some respects, a beneficial growth experience.  However, I think we all have a right to take umbrage at being forced to work free of charge at jobs that others should be doing, especially when our free labor is depriving others of the means to make their mortgage payments - and especially when self-service is merely a way to decrease a business's costs.  If businesses are cutting costs by using us as slave labor, why aren't prices lower?  Where's the money going?

If you don't know the answer to that one, you haven't been reading the reports of the astronomical increases in executives' salaries during the last decade. 

Rich Turner