A short plea on behalf of checkout workers

It's not a glamorous job. The pay's rubbish and you end up with Repetitive Strain Injury. Sometimes they call you 'buddy' or 'blood', sometimes they treat you as an inconvenience. But it's a job, and they're hard to find these days.

So please refuse to use the automated checkout machines. Apart from the fact that they rarely work properly, they're not 'efficient' for you, but for the company. They're explicitly designed to take jobs away.

Or rather, they're explicitly designed to move jobs, from someone paid a pittance to someone not paid at all: YOU. What automated machines do is transfer labour value from them to you. Unpaid, you do what a till operator once did. Under the guise of convenience, they've found a way to persuade you to do someone else's work.

In a sense, you're actually paying extra to do it: the price of the goods remain the same whether you go to a staffed till or use the automated system. This means that the profit margin has increased by the amount an operator would have been paid to serve you.

I hate it when workers encourage me to use the self-checkout. I look embarrassed and politely decline. If they carry on, I explain that it's a ruse to replace them. They either don't believe me or look worried that management might overhear this tiny act of subversion. It's not nice - but please do the same.

Oh, and Boots? They've discovered a neat line in sarcasm - when I went in for medication yesterday (overactive sarcasm gland), they were playing the tuneful folk ditties of notorious anarcho-crusty band The Levellers. Now that's appropriation, folks!

Some people have no sense of humour

An activist group in Italy has struck PR gold by launching an iPhone game which requires you to catch staff as they leap from phone factory roofs, oversee child labour down the coltan mines (it's a rare element essential for mobile phones) and generally engage in the dubious activities required to be a successful techno-capitalist.

Obviously, they knew Apple would ban the game because major corporations still can't spot an elephant trap. Result: instant win and the point's made. In fact, another good point is made: that Apple's developers and content providers are so in thrall to the company's apparent non-ideological position that they've internalised its ideological values to the point at which almost nothing is 'banned' because nothing 'objectionable' is submitted.

The best bit is one of Apple's objections to the game:

guidelines relate to depictions of "violence or abuse of children", and "excessively objectionable or crude content". 

So, in this hyperreal existence, it's OK to abuse children and adult workers for profit (remember, they'll always tell you that moving production to dictatorships and countries with lower employee and environmental protection is 'efficient'), but it's definitely not OK to play games in which you abuse children and adult workers for profit. One of these just isn't funny: but I can't help thinking that Apple's picked the wrong one.