In 2019, the Dutch supermarket company Jumbo began reserving some of its checkout lanes for those who wanted to stop and chat with the cashier on their way out. The move was a response to widespread loneliness, with the store’s chief commercial officer explaining that “it’s a small gesture but it’s a valuable one, particularly in a world that is becoming more digital and faster”. In a new book, the Last Human Job, the sociologist Allison Pugh writes of the consequences of a world that is accelerating away from, among other things, the time when “grocers knew their clients intimately; clerks kept close track of shoppers’ desires, their habits, and their families, soliciting views and peddling influence”.
The emphasis on speed, efficiency and profit has hollowed out work as a site of everyday, local human-to-human relationships. Jumbo’s approach was a Dutch collective finger in the dyke. Prof Pugh suggests that others will have to follow. She argues that current trends, which are most pronounced in the US, will be bad for society, not least because advanced nations are moving from being “thinking economies” to “feeling economies”, where an increasing number of jobs – from therapists and carers to teachers and consultants – are relational in nature. The academic describes as “connective labour” the jobs that rely on emotional understanding for their success. Underlying this work is “second-person neuroscience” that looks not at the knowledge inside individuals but at what exists between them.
Two tendencies threaten this form of employment. One is the attempt to automate this form of interpersonal and frequently idiosyncratic work. The second is the attempt to systematise it. These have come together with artificial intelligence. Prof Pugh says that when the ChatGPT bot was released in 2022, within a few weeks a US app had used it to offer “mental health support to about 4,000 people”, by using AI to compose replies to people’s requests for help. As she points out: “It’s a fallacy to think these jobs are somehow safe from the data analytics revolution or impervious to what has been called the AI spring.”
For her book, the sociologist immersed herself in the world of professional feelers – therapists, doctors, chaplains, hairdressers – with years of practice in seeing the other. Interviewing 100 subjects in depth, Prof Pugh concludes that the power of connective labour is its capacity to create belonging across differences and to forge a social intimacy. In a striking example of how society’s needs do not align with commercial objectives, she points to a successful medical centre that replaced patients’ 15-minute slots with ones of two hours. This was because, the health centre said, 5% of patients cause 50% of healthcare spending. To get this group healthier – and reduce costs – required them to “start with a connection”, the doctors said. Once established and maintained, not only did outcomes improve but there was also no burnout reported among medical staff.
The thinning out of connective labour by scripting, by increasing precarity and by automation needs reversing. Covid laid bare the frailty of the social contract and for a moment, the common sense was that radical reforms were needed to create a society that would work for all. Prof Pugh goes one step further by calling for a “collective system dedicated to protecting the social well-being of a population … We need to fight for and enable what we might call our social health.” It’s hard to disagree.
