Work You Didn’t Know You Were Doing

Quietly, business has spent the last thirty years outsourcing service work to us, the customers. It is a transfer of labour happening all around.

It is so gradual, so neatly packaged as convenience, that we have barely noticed. But over the past thirty years, work that was once done by the product or service we were buying - and paid for in the price - has been quietly handed off back to us. All this without any obvious price benefit, and with our consent by default.

The more things you have, the more services you use, the more maintenance work you have to do to manage them. That’s not just a bug of modern life, it’s a feature, usually made manifest through digital technology.

Consider travel. You book your tickets, you have to make decisions on where your luggage goes, where you sit, you may have to pre-order food, you find and manage the taxi on Uber, download the museum audio guide etc… On a typical trip you might be using multiple apps and aligning them with your bank just to get things done. Empowering in so many ways, but also time consuming.

The academic who named this most precisely was Ursula Huws, a British economist writing in the 1990s about the hidden costs of the digital economy. She called it consumption work: the labour that consumers must perform in order to consume.

The Rise of Consumption Work

There are two aspects to this. The first is that capitalism has been very effective at taking tasks that were previously done in the home “for free” and turning them into profitable business or (less often) state run institutions. Areas affected include preparing and preserving food, nursing, washing (clothes), cleaning, fire making, making clothes, caring for the sick and elderly. In other words previously someone (usually women) scrubbed, wrung, dried, weaved, peeled, chopped and comforted. Now we rely much more on machines to wash clothes bought from H&M, microwaves to heat ready made meals from Walmart, TV’s and tablets to provide companionship for elderly relatives and the young.

This has brought big benefits with it. Let's not romanticise life in a mythical time now distant, which was often brutish, smelly and short.

Other factors that Hews lists include advertising which forces up the standards and range of housework (it’s important to kill all known germs dead, as Domestos bleach ads used to tautologically tell us), and new types of household consumption activity (mowing the lawn, managing digital storage or WiFi connectivity). Other demographic shifts like smaller households, and the growing role of men in domestic work create a nuanced picture of whether the load of this kind of consumption work has retreated or increased. It probably depends on who you are.

The second – and growing kind of consumption work which standard time-use surveys barely capture, is the digital self-service load. Managing insurance, renewing documents, navigating benefit systems, dealing with utilities — this has grown substantially.

There is a very clear trend for organisations to “outsource” servicing work to customers whenever they can. Although we have heard a lot in the last twenty years about outsourcing to other countries (i.e.: getting workers somewhere else to do jobs at a fraction of the cost of Europeans and Americans), this was preceded by the realisation that costs could be saved by getting the buyer to do as much of the work as possible. The original supermarket was the first major manifestation of this (you collect, sort, weigh and price the goods). Of course big consumer benefits came too – choice, freedom to browse and select, a greater variety of product.

Other innovations in the outsourcing of consumption work from the last forty years or so have had much less clear advantages for the user – for instance corporate touch tone call answering systems, self service petrol, self assembly flat pack furniture. Things that were previously done for free are now paid for (in time if not cash), and some costs such as storage, transport and selection have been successfully transferred to buyers.

This process spins out yet more activity and associated products and services and expert support.

“The inexorable drive towards the creation of more and more “products” is therefore closely associated with the creation of new forms of “consumption work” and on the other with a growth of “service work”.” Ursula Huws

Is this where our time is disappearing, as we constantly hear people complain?

The more technology advances, the more of this work gets pushed onto the user because it can. Someone has to do it. The question is who. Before the ATM existed, withdrawing cash required a visit to the bank, a queue, a human transaction with a cashier. The ATM transferred all of that to you. In exchange you received something helpful - convenience, availability at any hour - but the bank also received something: it no longer had to employ as many cashiers. The labour did not disappear. It migrated.

The newer supermarket checkout process followed the same logic. The scanner, bagging area, card payment - these moved the work of the checkout operator onto the customer. Again, a real benefit was offered: shorter queues, (sometimes) faster service. And again, a cost that had been embedded in the price of the goods was extracted and handed to you as a condition of buying them.

Travel agents, bank tellers, telephone operators, customer service clerks — whole categories of employment thinned as their work was distributed to millions of individuals, unpaid, who had to learn to do it themselves. We accepted this deal partly because we had no choice, and partly because we were told that it was progress.

Then the internet industrialised consumption work. What had been transferred one task at a time was now transferred wholesale. Every company that built online customer service was, in effect, opening a new office and staffing it with its own customers. When something went wrong - and as customer service experts know every case is an edge case - the process doubled down on itself via interactive voice menus or ticketing systems or FAQs on a knowledge base. Most frustrating of all - the chatbot that loops you back to the beginning.

What is presented as a support function is in practice a consumption work machine: it transfers the cost and effort of resolution onto the person who already has the problem. The company’s costs fall. Your time gets used. This is not an accident of poor design. In many cases it is the design.

Will AI solve the problem?

So which way will this go with AI? On the one hand, one can argue that AI is the ultimate solution to this problem - especially once AGI is achieved (if you believe in it) then presumably that will take all consumption work away from us.

I think that might be naive. There is a clear and present danger that with AI we are in the early stages of a new transfer of labour, and as before, it is being offered to us as convenience. Consider what it takes to get useful output from a large language model. You must learn to frame a prompt well. You must evaluate what comes back, identify what is wrong or missing, and iterate. You must develop a working knowledge of what AI systems do well and what they hallucinate. You may trust your favourite LLM, but you will encounter hundreds from brands every year you have to learn to navigate and trust. You must, in short, become skilled at a task that you did not previously need to perform.

What is new here is that the LLM also captures the value of your output in better-trained models, refined products, usable data - while the work of producing that output sits with you. This is consumption work at scale, and it is accelerating.

There is a version of this story inside organisations too. The employee who manages their own expenses, books their own travel, submits their own IT requests, files their own HR paperwork - they are performing consumption work. Functions that were once staffed by specialists have been distributed across the workforce in the name of empowerment and efficiency. The individual absorbs the friction; the organisation reduces headcount and calls it transformation. Huws wrote about this thirty years ago. The transfer she identified has not slowed. If anything it has found new momentum in every wave of technology since. The question is not whether this trade - convenience in exchange for labour - is ever worth making. Sometimes it clearly is. The question is whether we are making it consciously, or whether we are simply accepting it because the alternative is not offered. Progress is often real. But so is the bill. We just don’t always know we’re paying it.