Dapul, Gian Karlo R.

3 BSMS CH Always Right

29 September 2011 PH 101 AA

It is an inescapable fact that we live in a society built on the capitalist system, what Karl Marx described as the appropriation of the work of others. From my experience in the Junior Engagement Program (JEEP) as a person who worked in the Blessings Photocopy and Internet Shop system, I felt firsthand what it was like to be a member of the workforce for twelve hours hardly enough time to grasp the extent of their situation. I was able to experience some of the stress, the tedium, the lack of satisfaction that comprised most of their job, and how they were able to cope with each day by forming strong relationships with one another. But the realities of unemployment and poor working conditions, for example, were still mostly foreign to me. What I did gather from the experience were insights into the nature of how customers believe themselves how we as customers believe ourselves to be of prime importance. Service in the modern age is commodified and distributed, and the system of the so-called service industry focuses on the delivery of the needs and wants of the customer. There is importance given to him or her and what he or she desires, while the people and materials that comprise the production or delivery of the service simply become means to the satisfaction or pleasure of the customer; Hannah Arendts views on utilitarianism are applicable toward this analysis of people as means towards the end-product of service. I believe that as a result, the customer is given the power to create what I propose to be three degrees or extents of personhood distinct from the embodied self of our philosophers in class. I myself admit to have prescribed people around me into the following three categories. Because this personhood is incomplete by virtue of being only utilitarian, for lack of better terms, when I speak of persons, I mean not subjects, but merely embodied entities part of our world; when I speak of personhood I do not mean the entirety of their being as persons, but merely their presence as embodiments fulfilling a certain work I believe is necessary that they do.

There are firstly those persons who are never persons, those whose personhood we do not acknowledge though their existence is fact. They are the people who are behind the people at the counter, those who actually process and photocopy our papers, and by extension those who prepare the

food in a fastfood restaurant or clean our hotel room. I was there in Blessings for four hours a day for three days, and often I was merely somebody in the background. I was someone whom the customer did not even see, but depended on to do my specialized work of folding papers well this is what the sociologist Emile Durkheim called the organic solidarity of industrial society (Macionis 102). They do not fail to become people, rather, we fail to regard them as people, and arguably not even as objects or instruments, because rarely do we even acknowledge their presence as physical entities in our world. In the service industry within which they reside, we only know of the product of their work, because that product is what we need. Such is the case that extends to most characters and their products in the capitalist system the lettuce head without the farmer, the fish without the fisherman. Ask a child where food is from, and he will answer the supermarket. To be ignored and cast barely a glance the photocopy machine probably feels more noticed on a regular basis was what I felt when customers would come in and not look beyond the invisible barrier of the counter.

Second, there are those we acknowledge as persons in our direct interaction with them, but who cease to be persons the moment we no longer need them. I as a person who ran the Isko internet cafe was only relevant when the person needed to use or needed to pay, or when there was a problem; otherwise, I was once again relegated to the realm of the invisible. Similarly, the person at the counter in McDo becomes an entity whom we find necessary to speak to. Once our order is finished, we are finished with them as well. These persons, then, become mere instruments, because we use them to ease whatever work it is we do or we feel ought to have. They are objects because although we call them Ate or Kuya, we stop acknowledging their existence the moment our transaction is finished. And because they alternate between being persons and not being persons according to our need, whatever respect we afford them as people is alternately given and taken away. So easily is this respect withdrawn that even when we speak to them, we often do not afford them the respect that they deserve. The privileged thinking that the customer is always right leads us to think that he who is worked for always has the right to berate or demand even when such a right does not exist. The distaste with which many middle and upper class citizens regard the service industry is a result of the same thinking that these people are persons who merely exist to serve us in the instant that we need them. To be screamed at for failing to

provide excellent service, to be sued when a mistake is made, to be thought of as uneducated or low when we pull a shift in a blue-collar job; these are still common occurrences in many establishments, and whats more, they are thought to be nothing out of the ordinary.

Finally, there are those who are persons that persist, who constantly exist because they consistently provide some level of service to us, but whose existences are delimited by the range of our interaction with them. These people are delimited by their roles, and we regard them merely as such. To paraphrase a popular kids show, these are the people in our neighborhood, or the people that we meet each day. The security guards and photocopy ladies of Ateneo whom we regularly see, ones favorite barista, the washerwoman to whom one hands the weekly laundry. The person running the sari-sari store, the taho seller from whom we buy every after third period, the dirty ice cream vendor across the street; the very Filipino concept of suki comes to mind here. But this categorization even possibly includes the family doctor, ones teachers, the manong driver. This more closely approximates what Durkheim calls the mechanical solidarity, a relationship based on commonality (Macionis 102) in this case, the repeated transaction, and the place in which it occurs. Yes, we have a maintained relationship with these people, and often a mutual respect, but we mostly only know them by means of this particular relationship with them, which fundamentally boils down to some form of us as the customer, and them as the provider, of a service which we believe we deserve by virtue of our payment. Once we see them outside of their place of work the place in which the transaction occurs we are jarred by the knowledge that they have a life outside of their work. From a personal example, the UP Shopping Center incidentally where UP Blessings is located was a place of my childhood. My barber was bald-man-who-would-cut-my-hairevery-Sunday, the fishball vendor at the corner was nice-woman-who-we-bought-fishballs-from-everyweek, the ID photo-taker the man-who-would-take-my-picture-every-enrollment. The people who worked here were people I saw and talked to every Sunday, and at their very core, they were wonderful people to me, but their nature as people were, to me, contingent upon our relationship. Similarly, there were a handful of customers who knew my co-workers names, as they had been availing of the services of that particular branch of Blessings enough to establish a relationship with them, but I am fairly certain that very few of them know of Ate Ms pregnancy stories, or Kuya Js family problems.

It must be reiterated that these definitions of personhood that the customer creates are, again, incomplete because they limit the full extent of personhood, and ascribe labels that do not encompass the entirety of the workers selves, as Marcel would put it. Even the third kind, though based on interpersonal relationship, is inadequate in establishing the wholeness of the person in question. True, though it would be difficult to attempt to include every facet of a person in our interactions with them, humanization of the working person in the service industry only occurs when the customer remembers that there is a fourth kind of person, one that is free from us, one who is defined independently of the customer. From this should accordingly follow a proper treatment of the person; concern and compassion, or at least respect, should emerge from this acknowledgement of a persons other aspects besides his or her membership of the workforce. The narcissism of the customer, an attitude that has developed in an environment of capitalism, is what prevents many of us from giving this proper treatment that should come naturally. Through an awareness and desire to change this narcissism, I believe that I have begun my U-turn, the kind of turnaround that I think the JEEP program encourages in an Atenean such as myself.

Word count: 1,551 sans title and citations

Macionis, John. Sociology, 12 ed. NJ, USA: Prentice-Hall, 2007.

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