In part of her new book, “The Last Human Job,” the sociologist Allison Pugh shadowed an apprentice hospital chaplain, Erin Nash, as she went through her day. Nash ministered to a family that had lost a young woman to a Tylenol overdose. She went from room to room, praying, offering hugs, even singing with bereaved and anxious patients and family members. “There is nothing like being in the worst moment of your life and being met with comfort by someone you don’t even know,” Nash recounted a patient telling her.
Nash also had to track all of these profound connections in a janky online record that kept freezing, costing her precious minutes of the day that could have been spent in communion and support. Nash had to track her work in three separate systems overall.
Pugh didn’t just interview chaplains. She spent five years following teachers, doctors, community organizers and hairdressers — more than 100 people in total who perform what she calls “connective labor,” which is work that requires an “emotional understanding” with another person.
Pugh explains that increasingly, people in these jobs have to use technology to obsessively monitor and standardize their work, so that they might be more productive and theoretically have better (or at least more profitable) outcomes.
But a lot of care work cannot be tracked and cannot be standardized. “Industrial logic” when applied to something like chaplaincy borders on the absurd — how do you even measure success when it comes to providing spiritual comfort? Unlike with doctors, “The hospital did not bill anybody for her ‘units of service,’” Pugh writes about the chaplain, but she still had to figure out a way to chart her actions in multiple systems, which mostly didn’t capture what she was doing in the first place. This additional labor arguably made Nash a worse chaplain because it sapped her energy — dealing with the glitchy tech frustrated her — and wasted her time.
Pugh’s timely book reveals the hidden ways that technology is making many jobs miserable for both workers and consumers, at a moment when artificial intelligence continues its unregulated incursion into our lives.
