Checkout line blues
FROM GROCERY stores to home improvement warehouses, the tedious, boring, and dreadful checkout process is getting better. Now you can check yourself out! You may even save some money on that magazine you did not really need or on the candy bar your toddler begged and begged for until you could not stand it any longer.
Yet, is saving two minutes and perhaps $2 in the self-checkout line worth the jobs of your friends and family and maybe even yourself?
Every generation has protested technological development taking their jobs, and every generation has failed to stop it. Still, it is so disconcerting to see this generation not even cry foul. Are we so tech-friendly that we have lost sight of our real friends?
We know where management is. Watching joyously from the locked booth. But cashiers and bag-handlers, where are you? Your current jobs are at stake. Can't you see it is already happening? The ''inefficient" lanes may still be there, but only two out of 10 are ever open.
Sure, eventually these jobs will cease to exist. But do you realize that despite the cotton picker's invention in 1850, it wasn't until nearly 1950 that an entire cotton crop was harvested by machine. This is in part because of kinks in the invention but as much because of the stubbornness of Southerners. Certainly their jobs were more demanding than ours; still, the labor force refused to give them up. Why? Employment is security, unemployment is hell, and 90 degrees working beats 90 degrees in the shade of the unemployment line any day.
Prolonging progress is a tradition we should sometimes keep. In a time of high unemployment, widespread employment of illegal immigrants, offshore call centers, overwhelming import loads made by child workers and under harsh conditions, every American job should be preserved from corporate greed. Most employees pack their bags at night and leave from another town. But no matter what town you are in now, the most basic of jobs, checkout jobs, are being cut before your eyes. Just as management manages to take care of its own, so should we protect our fellow workers.
Local and state governments should tax additionally when self-checkout lines are used for revenue to support job training and small business loans. This will also slow the process as customers refuse to pay extra. Customers, who care to care, should refuse to use these lines beginning now. Employees, remembering jobs equal equality, should do what is in their united bargaining power to prevent the machines from working and let it be known to everyone, including fellow employees and every customer, what they represent -- no less than less jobs.
Management knows no one plans to work checkout and bagging jobs forever, so it is unlikely much uproar will occur. They're right, these aren't dream jobs, largely because they have refused to make them so. But for most people, at some point in life, any job is a dream come true.
Sure, it isn't like utility meter readers, higher grossing workers, are being replaced with automated ways of doing their jobs -- wait, that, too, is happening. My gas meter is read from the street and instead of multiple employees and one week of work, it takes one person one day in a truck to record the whole town. Efficient for the company, yes, but my utility prices have not gone down.
Prices for your groceries and home improvement materials will also continue to grow. In fact, the only change to come is the line at the store will get shorter, and not because it is self-checkout. The line will shorten because someone, a lot of someones, perhaps you or me or her or him, can now not afford to put dinner on the table or to patch the leak in the roof because a lot of jobs were getting axed while we rushed by to save a little time.
Dusty D. Farned is a student at Harvard College and a contributing editor to PoliticsOnline Inc. 
