I'm Not Your Customer

I find the training of staff to refer to the users of public and government services as 'customers' increasingly disconcerting. It happened to me most recently at the job centre when, trying to explain that it would have been useful for someone to tell me that I had to file my reimbursement claims before travel when informing me of the scheme, I was curtly told that "the onus is on the customer to find out." In what sense am I a customer of the job centre? If so then they are certainly failing in their 'customer service' (which presumably is the idea in at least some of these cases; 'we treat and value people as though they had money to spend with us' etc.) by apparently not providing any. If I was a real customer, then I would have the choice to take my 'business' elsewhere, but I don't. I have no choice but to deal with these petty bureaucrat assholes. They don't respect us precisely because for this dependence.

A job that I applied for recently (and didn't get) with a company with a large proportion of government welfare-to-work scheme contracts also referred to those that they helped into work as their 'customers'.* Well yes, these companies do receive disgracefully large sums of money from the government for placing these people in jobs. But the 'customers' themselves aren't paying. They are not choosing to enter into any economic contracts. Tagging people under the label of 'customers' places them involuntarily into an economy of exchange and in doing so undermines the seeming human motivation within the role of the advisor of helping people out.

The same goes for the supporters of charities. We do not buy your services. A charitable donation is precisely that. "Q: If I sponsor a child, what will I get in return?" asks an ActionAid ad. Is this really a question that needs to be asked? Are people really only buying bi-annual letters and a sense of their own morality? Conversely I seem to remember being instructed once in one of my waitressing jobs always to refer to customers as 'clients' as this term seems to make more discrete the cash-for-services implication (which is of course exactly what dining out in a restaurant is). I suppose that the seeping of business-speak into every aspect of our lives is just symptomatic of the commercialisation of everything in general. But I can't help but feel that this use of 'customer' is not so innocuous as to be just a reflection a business-based society: it is prescriptive; it alters the way in which we relate to one another, specifically it determines the nature of our human relations as one of economic exchange and in doing so subtly precludes our ability and desire to just to help one another out. Which perhaps goes some way in explaining the unhelpfulness of the job centre staff?

* An article on indymedia a couple of days ago revealing the Christian foundations and ethos of one such organisation (at least not a private company this time) 'Working Links' (from whom I also got rejected) opened my eyes to the ideologies behind these schemes. I realise now that going on about an understanding of social barriers and holistic approaches in my cover letters wasn't going to get me any interviews. According to an advertisement on Reed, welfare-to-work is one of the fastest growing sectors of graduate employment. It seems to me that money would be far better spent training those employed by the government to actually help people who want it into work that has some meaning for them and that they might stick to rather than bullying them into the first minimum wage job that comes along, instead of handing out lucrative contracts to private businesses.