Essay On Shadow Work

In order to survive humans have to grow crops, gather food, and build shelters and fire. In our economy we work to support ourselves, and in order to work we have to have jobs. So what happens when they start taking jobs away? In America, unemployment rates have gone up in the past decade. Businesses are growing and new stores are opening, which should mean more jobs. However, America’s employment rate in 2007 was only 38 percent. Shadow work is the reason employers do not have to hire as many people as they did in the past (862).
Shadow work is defined as work you have to do but someone else is getting paid for it. Computers have allowed the economy to have so much shadow work (860). They take the place of employees, which takes away jobs from people that could be working. Technology is not all to blame. Business are using shadow work to cut the pay roll. Going to the gas station, before computers, someone would pump the gas for you. Now you have to pump your own gas while someone else is getting paid for it. All of the jobs that people used to do are being replace by computers, self-checkout at a store or getting medical advice online (861). Jobs that people used to get paid for you are doing yourself without any pay. Technology is controlling us and taking away our jobs.
Technology was supposed to take away the repetitive
People are losing their sense of civility with each other because they are not communicating with each other. Even though shadow work does make preforming tasks faster it still takes time. Businesses use it to cut down their pay role so they make more money and other people don’t even realize that they are doing it when they search something on the internet. People are living in a world were technology is getting more advanced every day. Soon humans won’t even have to do shadow work because technology is already controlling us, technology has