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"The Politics of Consumption: an Interview with Juliet Schor" in Aurora Online Magazine

http://aurora.icaap.org/2004Interviews/JulietSchor.html

Excerpt:

Basically, the market sector has been cannibalizing the domestic sphere, sucking huge flows of labour out of the unpaid sector - labour that is absolutely essential to the preservation and reproduction of the social fabric.

I was thinking about this while I was visiting the OH's aunt at the hospital yesterday. There weren't enough staff there to give patients attention they could use. At the same time, there are lots of people out of work and people working in dead-end, minimum-wage-or-less jobs and kinda pointless jobs. (Technical editing, which is what I usually do for money, seems kinda pointless to me when I'm visiting a patient in a hospital.)

I know it's not a matter of snapping your fingers and reassigning people where they can be more useful, but I kind of wish it were. Or something.

Comments

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

I'm going to echo a bit of what wild_irises said. In my experience with customer service jobs, they are almost always viewed as "cost centers" and when the time comes for "cost containment" they get sliced and diced to the bone, because many companies see little if any value-added to maintaining good customer relations beyond the next sale.

On the taxation front, I'm always amazed that people who I know would never think it proper to simply walk into a grocery store and, without paying, walk out with an armload of food, have no problem driving on public roads (one example of using public infrastructure) while complaining that
taxation of any sort is unfair.

Yeah, maybe I'm a bit bitter

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

many companies see little if any value-added to maintaining good customer relations beyond the next sale.

this is kind of a catch-22 in a country in which a lot of people (if not most) value a bargain or "great deal" over loyalty to somebody who has previously served them well.