I’ve seen Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day blogged about and linked from many sources the last few days:
Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations. It has slipped into our routines stealthily; most of us do not realize how much of it we are already doing, even as we pump our own gas, scan and bag our own groceries, execute our own stock trades, and build our own unassembled furniture. But its presence is unmistakable, and its effects far-reaching.
Most shadow work is probably caused by minimum wage* legislation, which prices out the bottom tier or two of jobs, which affects the least skilled, like teenagers, disabled, or any potential employee looking to enter the market. Think of diner sweepers, gas station attendants, or bellhops. Most of those low-skill jobs get rolled up into this new, higher wage tier “floor,” so you have waitstaff, for example, who also bus tables, because an employer isn’t going to pay a busboy a waiter’s wage. Sucks for the poorest of the poor, but firms generally want lower consumer prices than anything else, so it doesn’t affect buyers as much.
Some of this low-tier work that’s been priced out of the market gets rolled into labor-saving automation, like vending machines or menu ordering screens. But the rest gets passed onto the consumer via shadow work: pumping your own gas or carrying your own bags into the hotel, for instance. This work is not priced accurately nor is it really accounted for by any side, so it doesn’t show up as quantifiable, but its labor taken on at the consumer level. So in this respect, minimum wage legislation hurts consumers as well, by forcing them to pay with time and a bit of energy.
*I actually call minimum wage, “wage window” legislation, because there are people who do work for free, like interns, volunteers, homemakers, weekend warriors, etc., who don’t get paid directly or monetarily. You see, central planning bureaucrats and voters, in their infinite wisdom, are cool with the $0.00/hr wages, but employing someone at a wage between $0.01 to $7.24/hr is somehow an unacceptable evil.