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AN UNPUBLISHED report to the government estimates that the new technology will raise the level of unemployment to that at the peak of the 1930s slump. (As we saw in chapter one.) Its predictions are matched by others.
A spokesman for the programme TV Eye told the Guardian:
‘All the people we have talked to say that between three and four million people unemployed as a direct result of microtechnology is a definite possibility ...’ (Guardian, 14 Sept 78).
A report prepared for the TUC by the ASTMS Research Department ‘predicts that there will be five million unemployed in this country by the mid-nineties even if the government takes every possible step to expand the economy.’ (Guardian, 12 May ’78)
If these figures are anything like correct, it means that there is hardly a working class family in Britain that won’t be hit by the impact of the new technology. Millions upon millions of people will see their lives completely shaken up as their old jobs are destroyed and they are forced to learn new – that is, if they are not among the three or four million for whom no new jobs exist.
The impact of the new technology on just one industry is shown in the following graph of estimates from the Financial Times (see Graph 1).
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The graph has already started having its effect, as women workers for Plesseys in Liverpool have already found to their cost.
The same sort of impact can be expected in industry after industry.
An unpublished report for the Computer, Systems and Electronics Requirements Board lists ‘no fewer than 29 occupations at risk, starting with proof readers and including postmen, draughtsmen, secretaries, filing clerks, meter readers, plate-printers, assembly workers, warehousemen, sales clerks, and many others’ (Observer, 1 Oct. ’78).
But are these estimates for job loss correct? Every time the issue is discussed someone will quote arguments to claim that they are not, usually drawn from official government hand-outs, like a recent Think Tank’ report (for details, see Financial Times, 7 December 1978).
THE GOVERNMENT’S Think Tank report claims that estimates of 3–5m unemployed have ‘underestimated the new markets’ that will be ‘created’ by the microtechnology. It is usually claimed that people replaced by the chips will easily find new work either
So, for example, Ms Carolyn Hayman, one of the economists who drew up the Think Tank report has claimed that ‘the service industries could continue to absorb people displaced’ (Observer, 1 Oct. ’78). Mr Cecil Marks, Director of Systems Training at the Civil Service College, goes further. He recently claimed that ‘automation in the office has increased employment. He expects that trend to continue’ (Financial Times, 30 Nov. ’78).
This message is even being put across by trade union research departments. David Cockcroft, head of the APEX research department says that ‘to look at microelectronics in terms of job loss is like viewing the invention of the wheel in terms of road accidents.’ Yet when there are job losses, the sufferers are going to be those trade union members who pay Mr Cockcroft’s salary.
So how true are such arguments?
Now clearly not all inventions that have increased productivity in the past have led to mass unemployment. When the typewriter was invented, the clerks whose skills became obsolete did usually manage to find new jobs. When the first generation of computers appeared in the 1950s full employment continued (in this country at least – though in the United States this was the period in which the ‘base level’ of unemployment rose from about 2 per cent, in the early ’50s, to about 6 per cent in the mid ’60s).
However, there have been other inventions whose application to industry has caused immense hardship to whole sections of the working class. Look at the suffering endured by 200,000 hand loom weavers in the early 19th century as the power loom made their jobs obsolete. Look at the plight of the Durham mining villages in the apparently ‘prosperous’ years of the 1960s as the oil boom killed the pits where they had worked. Look at towns today like Skelmersdale, which have seen their industries collapse and nothing replace them.
There is no automatic rule by which the collapse of one trade means jobs in another trade. That is all part of the old ‘hidden hand’ mythology of capitalism, which pretends that somehow everything bad the system does is compensated by something good. The wrecked lives of millions of people over two centuries testify otherwise.
If you look one by one at the arguments of those who claim there will be no increase in unemployment with the ‘chips’ you can see how erroneous they are.
1. Will making ‘chips’ provide jobs?
THE ANSWER IS, even under the best circumstances, very few. INMOS, the new microprocessing firm set up by the National Enterprise Board at £50m cost is planning to employ only 4000 people in this country and 1000 in the US. And that’s if it actually works. A great many experts believe that it will soon be squeezed out of business by the established firms in the US and Japan, and by similar firms in Europe. After all, the Japanese alone are spending £500m, not £50m, on microprocessor production, and even the French are investing more in this field than Britain.
There is little doubt that the rival firms of these rival countries will between them be producing far more microprocessors than they will be able to sell within two or three years. The others will be driven out of business, and all the workers promised jobs in their vastly expensive factories will face the dole.
Texas Instruments, one of the giant US microprocessor firms estimates that eventually it will take only 1000 people to produce the whole world’s supply of the basic memory chip.
This number of jobs is hardly going to make up for the tens of millions jobs destroyed throughout the world by the ‘chip’.
It would be nothing less than a miracle if somehow microprocessor manufacturing in Britain creates enough jobs to offset those destroyed.
2. Will there be replacement jobs in software?
CLEARLY, the spread of microprocessors will lead to a great deal more ‘software’ – computer programming – than before. But here again, the number of new jobs will not be anything like comparable with the jobs destroyed.
Even within computer installations themselves, jobs have been destroyed by technological change. Ten years ago there was a booming demand for Data Preparation Operators. Information had to be converted from written forms to punchcards or paper tape before the computer could read it. It is now becoming common for clerical staff to input data direct from office terminals by-passing the Data Preparation room.
In the POST OFFICE DATA PROCESSING SERVICE, for instance, 600 Data Preparation jobs have been eliminated by a system called TOLD (Telecommunications On Line Data).
The BBC Horizon programme, Now the Chips are Down, estimated that in a fully computerised Britain there would be ‘60,000 software engineers’ (programmers etc.). Again, that figure is not going to provide work for the numbers of people whose jobs are going to be computerised out of existence.
Ray Curow and Professor lann Baron wrote in an unpublished report to the Department of Industry:
‘The use of information technology will directly influence 95 per cent of the economy; whereas support for the industry itself will only affect one to five per cent of the economy’ (New Society, 9 Nov. ’78).
3. Will there be more jobs in ‘an expanding services sector’?
THIS IS THE most unlikely prospect of all. It is in the services sector – from banking and the retail trade through to local government and the civil service – that the new technology is most rapidly going to destroy jobs.
The word processor can displace two typists out of three, the discs and tape will take the task of editing and locating information from filing clerks, the computerised checkout system will do away with most jobs involved in stock control and ordering.
Altogether, Professor George Ray of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research suggests that: ‘Employment in services could fall by 1¼ million’ in the next 12 years (Financial Times, 24 July ’78).
Christopher Freeman, of the Science Policy Research Unit, is even more pessimistic. He sees the only chance for an expansion of the service sector as being through a vast expansion of government expenditure – at a time when both government and opposition are committed to continuing to hold government expenditure down.
4. What about the ‘manufacture and maintenance of a vast new range of products’, based upon the chips?
IN A RATIONAL, planned society, people released from tasks in one sector of the economy could easily be found work turning out a new range of goods elsewhere. There are a million and one things that people need, from tractors for the Third World to body scanners and kidney machines.
But we do not live in a rational, planned society. People only get new jobs in this society if the goods they make can be sold at a profit.
There are three ways in which they can be sold: as consumer goods (to other workers), as capital goods (to the owners of other factories), or as exports (to workers or factory owners abroad).
If none of these three markets is expanding, then you can make the most wonderful and useful things in the world, and still end up on the dole queue. The most basic fact about the modern world is that none of these three markets is expanding enough to provide work all round – without even taking into account the effects of microprocessors in destroying more jobs.
Workers certainly are not going to be able to buy all the wonderful new gadgets that are being turned out. In every country in the world attempts are being made to hold down wages, usually under some form of ‘incomes policy’. And as microcomputers destroy jobs, they also destroy wage packets with which workers might otherwise have been able to buy new gadgets.
The owners of factories will, of course, buy some new devices based upon the microprocessor. That is why so many jobs are at threat. But the buying of these microelectronic devices by firms will not create more jobs than they destroy. That would require a vast expansion of industrial investment, which just shows no sign of taking place. The level of investment in this country is still lower than it was five years ago. And Britain is not unique in that respect.
What applies in this country applies abroad. The world market is certainly not expanding enough to absorb a vast output of the new gadgets from Britain, thus creating millions of new jobs. As a discussion paper for the Confederation of British Industries conference in November 1978 put it: ‘World trade cannot be relied upon to expand sufficiently to provide the jobs needed’ (Financial Times, 30 Oct. ’78). Even the National Economic Development Council’s working party on the electronics industry, which shares the government’s blind optimism, does not see the increased output of electronic gadgets as providing more jobs:
‘Output is growing at between 15 and 20 per cent a year and is expected to grow by about 15 per cent until 1980. Employment (in the electronics industry) is expected to remain between 125,000 and 128,000’ (Financial Times, 7 Dec. ’78).
Even without taking account of the impact of the new technology, the National Institute for Economic and Social Research predict that,
‘for full employment to be restored, Britain’s Gross National Product would have to grow by five per cent for the next five years. This would mean an annual growth rate in manufacturing and exports of 8% and 16 per cent respectively’ (C. Mines, The Chips are Down, p.1).
These are figures that have rarely been achieved even for a single year, let alone been maintained for five years. They are, in fact, unobtainable while the economy remains organised on its present basis. When you take into account the effect of the new technology in destroying jobs, you can see talk of three or four million unemployed is not ‘scaremongering’. It is a danger that faces all working people – unless we begin to fight back now, and follow a strategy aimed at seizing control of the new technology from those who currently have it.
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Last updated on 7 March 2010