this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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I'd say that self-checkouts are fundamentally a good thing, just like other forms of increased productivity are a good thing – but in today's society they can both lead to unemployment and lower wages. That is unnecessary.
Employment for the sake of employment isn't a good thing, though. The problem that's trying to solve is people not having enough money to live, which has multiple better solutions than makework.
sure, yeah, I would say that if our problem becomes that there's too little work to be done, we should solve this by having a shorter work week, not by inventing unnecessary work
I have some similar feelings to AI here. The advantages of self-checkout are only present because we've made existing systems worse to the point where something not-great is now a better option.
In the 1980s, a grocery lane would have a check-out clerk and a bagger. Sometimes two baggers. You would put your items on the belt and they'd be scanned and bagged (well, so that eggs weren't crushed, freezer items were together, etc) about as fast as you took them out of the cart.
By lowering wages and reducing staff, this got worse. Now the check-out clerk is poorly-trained and probably quitting/being laid off soon and the bagger has been laid off. Mysteriously, the human-checkout line is now kind of slow and frustrating!
Having individual customers do the check-out themselves is even worse (so frequently, someone gets the machine stuck yelling about putting items in the bagging area, or just stares vacantly at the screen), but by parallelizing the process it comes out to usually slightly faster.