The Guardian's view on binding work: Emotions are part of the job description | Editorial

In 2019, Dutch supermarket group Jumbo began reserving some of its checkouts for those who wanted to stop and chat with the cashier on the way out. The move was a response to widespread loneliness. The store's chief commercial officer explained that “it's a small but valuable gesture, especially in a world that is becoming increasingly digital and fast-paced.” In her new book, The Last Human Job, sociologist Allison Pugh writes about the consequences of a world that, among other things, is moving ever faster away from the time when “grocers knew their customers well; salespeople closely followed shoppers' desires, habits and families, solicited their opinions and exerted influence.”

The emphasis on speed, efficiency and profit has eroded work as a site of everyday, local interpersonal relationships. Jumbo's approach was a collective Dutch finger in the dike. Professor Pugh says others must follow suit. She argues that current trends, most pronounced in the US, will be bad for society, not least because advanced nations are evolving from “thinking economies” to “feeling economies” in which an increasing number of jobs – from therapists and caregivers to teachers and counsellors – are relational in nature. The academic describes the jobs whose success relies on emotional understanding as “connective work”. Underlying this work is “second-person neuroscience”, which looks not at the knowledge within individuals but at what exists between them.

Two trends threaten this form of employment. One is the attempt to automate this form of interpersonal and often idiosyncratic work. The other is the attempt to systematize it. Both trends are linked to artificial intelligence. Professor Pugh says that when the ChatGPT bot was released in 2022, within a few weeks it was being used by a US app to offer “about 4,000 people mental health support” by using AI to compose responses to people's requests for help. She stresses: “It is a fallacy to think that these jobs are somehow safe from the data analytics revolution or impervious to what is being called the AI ​​spring.”

For her book, the sociologist immersed herself in the world of professional feelers – therapists, doctors, clergy, hairdressers – and has years of practice in seeing the other. After extensive interviews with 100 people, Prof. Pugh concludes that the power of connective work lies in its ability to create belonging across differences and forge social intimacy. In a striking example of how the needs of society cannot be reconciled with commercial goals, she points to a successful medical center that replaced 15-minute patient appointments with two-hour ones. The reason for this was that 5% of patients account for 50% of health care spending, the health center said. To make this group healthier – and reduce costs – they needed to “start with a connection,” doctors said. Once that connection was made and maintained, not only did outcomes improve, but burnout was not reported among medical staff.

The thinning out of networked work through scripting, increasing precarity and automation must be reversed. Covid has exposed the fragility of the social contract and for a moment common sense held that radical reforms were needed to create a society that worked for everyone. Prof Pugh goes a step further, calling for a “collective system dedicated to protecting the social wellbeing of a population… We must fight for and enable what we might call our social health.” It's hard to disagree with that.