Cashierless shopping: at what cost to labour?
Soon Checkers will have stores without checkout counters. As parent company Shoprite suggests, this is about using technology for a more convenient shopping experience and — you guessed it — to better monitor customer preferences and behaviour.
Discussions raged last week, with a combination of awe, excitement and shock at this announcement. The large retailer was clear that this is a pilot and the “guinea pigs” are its own staff.
Much of the concern is about employment implications. The trade sector (of which nonspecialised trade in food, beverages and tobacco is a significant part) is the secondlargest employer in the country. It is also a significant employer of women, only surpassed by community and social services, and domestic work.
The sector has borne the brunt of employment losses due to Covid-19 restrictions, with more than 340,000 workers losing their jobs between the first quarter of 2020 and that of 2021. This is more than 10% of all of those employed in the sector between January and March 2020, before the last hard lockdown.
Despite these losses, the nonspecialised food retail trade of which Checkers is a part has been on a rising employment trend since 2009. If one considers the food retail subsector, Stats SA’s retail trade data suggests that more than 180,000 people were employed in 2009 and this number grew to more than 300,000.
To place this in perspective, clothing retail only grew from just more than 130,000 to more than 176,000 in the same period. This caveat matters because this subsector has accounted for employment growth in the past decade. Much of this growth was reversed by Covid-19, and potentially in some segments by increasing automation and work restructuring.
It implies that if adoption of such technology in the short to medium term becomes commonplace (which seems to be unlikely), then much of the employment growth enjoyed in the past decade may be wiped out, with considerable effect on household incomes, inequality and social harmony.
Former Treasury technocrat Andrew Donaldson suggested at the Government Technical Advisory Centre public economics winter school that the construction, trade and transport sectors (our more labourintensive sectors) have a far higher proportion of workers earning below the bottom 25% of earnings in the labour market. Much higher than, say, finance and the nongovernment services sector, which of late has been characterised by digitisation and remote work.
What this suggests is that the distributional consequences of automation in these sectors will affect a significant proportion of those with low earnings anyway, further raising inequality.
In response some have suggested this bolsters the call for a basic income grant (BIG). While it may be worth debating whether such a grant would be targeted or universal, the real issue is how one views such a development, and its implications for labour demand.
Some suggest it is a matter of getting people into work rather than a BIG. Sequentially, such a “trade-off” is perceived rather than real. Put differently, those who say they are in favour of jobs rather than the grant fail to recognise the “revealed preferences” of industry and our political economy. Without the cheap energy and labour of old, industry has opted for a model of production and trade that can advance without the need for human bodies as labour.
When the convenience of cashier-less retail reaches your neighbourhood you might want to think what those who have been replaced by the QR codes of surveillance capitalism are working on, and whether the work-welfare trade-off is a real or imagined one.
While many search and “market” themselves for work, it is disingenuous to imply that work is in sufficient supply for us to not to be bothered about what funds household consumption. If anything at all.