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EVERY TIME the new technology is introduced, those workers whose jobs are not destroyed are told: this will make your work easier, more skilled and more enjoyable.
Often this talk is coupled with increased payments for ‘special responsibility’. So, for example, typists in local government usually get an extra £50 a year if they agree to use word processors.
However, the experience of nearly all new technology is not that it makes work less boring and more skilled. Instead, workers find themselves under more pressure than ever before to carry out very boring, repetitive, mentally exhausting jobs.
As one Fleet Street worker who uses a word processor describes it:
‘All the natural breaks you get using a typewriter – when you change paper, shift the margin, move from one job to another – disappear, since the word processor does all these things for you at a very high speed. You still have to pay the same mental effort to each part of the task that remains to you, putting words together to make a grammatically sound sentence, and sentences together to make a complete piece of work.
‘But you have to do more such tasks because of the speed of the word processor, with fewer gaps between tasks. The mental effort is more repetitive and more continuous. You get the feeling you are being forced to exert yourself ever more by the pace of the machine.’
This fits in exactly with the claim made by the advertising brochures of the manufacturers of the word processors. Their stress all the time is on the productivity of their machines – the way in which they get operators to hit keys at great speed, without being distracted by anything else.
As handouts for the Contessa word processor insist: ‘A microprocessor automatically controls the machine’s functions, allowing the operator to concentrate on maximum productivity.’ What is more, the word processor, ‘will not become sick, take time off to get another job, or leave to have a family’.
In effect, what happens is that the typist is under greater stress than ever before to hit keys as fast as possible, to do the most routine, tedious tasks at the greatest possible speed.
And that is not all. The computer systems that operate the word processors are also able to keep a detailed check upon the work speed of the typists.
‘Two word management systems designed to help supervisors measure performance and improve productivity of word processing centres have come from Dictaphone Corporation’, reported the Financial Times on 1 November 1978.
One of the systems, Master Mind (an appropriate name – CH) has a display terminal which
‘provides complete information on the status of up to 200 active dictation and transcription jobs in the centre. A disc memory offers a permanent, unlimited archive of the completed work. A companion report printer provides detailed daily, weekly or monthly summaries of input and output activity.’
The electronic time-and-motion man has entered the office with the microprocessor!
Not only is the new technology designed to destroy jobs; it is also designed to increase managerial control over the workforce.
The American socialist Harry Braverman has shown in a marvellous book, Labour and Monopoly Capital, that every time new technology has been introduced during the last 100 years, one of the prime aims has been to wrest control of the work process from the workers.
Management are intuitively aware that their desire to speed up the work process so as to increase profits clashes with the desire of the worker for what he or she thinks of as decent working conditions. If the successful completion of a piece of work depends upon the exercise of skill and initiative by the worker in a way which is too complex for the management to keep a detailed track of, then there is nothing that enables management to tell when workers are ‘slacking’. And so management strive with all their might to reduce the element of skill and initiative involved in work.
Taylorism’, ‘scientific management’, and ‘workstudy’ have all been names for this attempt by management to gain control of the work-process in the factory.
Management oversee the introduction of new forms of technology, and attempt to use them for the same purpose. The use of technology based upon the microprocessor is no different in this respect to previous uses of technology.
As a working paper for the Royal Commission on the Press reported in relation to the American newspaper industry:
‘There is a more or less explicit justification for investment in new technology in the minds of many US newspaper managers, even if it does not produce an overall staff cost saving. That is, that it weakens and may in time destroy the printing craft unions ... by lessening their numbers and substituting less skilled non-unionised labour or at least members of more compliant unions ... Put another way, it has enabled management to reassert managerial control over the plant ...’ (R. Winsbury, New Technology and the Press, p.21).
Workers in manufacturing industry are used to attempts by management to gain control over their expenditure of effort during their working lives. The time-and-motion man and the productivity deal have existed for years.
But office workers have a different attitude. They have usually been accustomed to doing work in their own way, without detailed managerial supervision. Only in a few areas, like the work of punch-card operators, have detailed measurements been applied.
As a government pamphlet on clerical work measurement complained some years ago, traditional work measurement techniques were not believed possible in ‘the “non-productive” areas of maintenance, storekeeping, the office ...‘ because of ‘the greater variability of work in these areas’. But, ‘the disproportionate growth of indirect workers arising from the increased automation in production areas and the growing complexity of modern business has directed attention towards the development of work measurement techniques appropriate to indirect work, including various kinds of clerical work’. The difficulty in doing this, it is claimed, ‘is not thinking time, but the ability to make appropriate allowances for variables’ (Clerical Work Measurement, L.G. Harmer, pp.3-4).
As the number of office workers has grown, so senior management have become more and more obsessed with gaining control over the working lives of those who move paper, interpret forms, prepare and file letters, enter up accounts. Hence the trend to replace the individual typist working for an individual manager with the typing pool, dealing with a continual flow of repetitious work, that can easily be overseen.
Built-in limits to managerial control remain, however, while each worker has to cover a vast range of different tasks – while the individual typist, for example, has to type one sort of letter now, a different in an hour’s time, a third sort later on, each one requiring different adjustments to the typewriter. The typists can use their possession of a range of different skills to tell the management that any attempt to make them work more quickly than they are doing will damage the quality of their work.
The new technology provides management with a way out of this dilemma.
It can be so designed as to reduce complex tasks to quite simple tasks, to take away from the operators their old skills, and to enable management to put pressure on for much work. For instance, with a word processor, management can not only measure the speed of the work flow, they can also insist that there is no need to take more time than is needed to press a single key to move from one complex operation (centring or tabulating) to another.
As one trade union militant in the civil service union, the CPSA, tells:
‘There is a connection between things which don’t seem to mean too much if you look at them in a disconnected way. For example, with word processing equipment they will need to get a better flow of material into the typing pool. But for that they need a centralised dictation system, and a way of prioritising copy. In the Department of the Environment they have already been trying out word processing with centralised dictation.
‘But this even has its effect on junior management. They have to produce work in standardised ways, so that it can be fed into machines. This will change the way everyone works.
‘One of the dangers with the new equipment is that they introduce one bit of it that seems innocuous. But it changes the work process all along the line, forcing other people to work differently. It could even break up union organisation’.
To sum up: The word processing machine enables the techniques of the assembly line to be introduced into the office.
It is easy to see how the same process of deskilling and increasing managerial control takes place in the store with the introduction of the computerised check-out system. The cash register operator no longer has the excuse when he or she feels tired of taking a ‘natural break’ while they delay to check up on a price; the skilled warehouseman is no longer needed once computer is keeping a check on stocks and makes out new orders; all the accounts clerk has to do is to read off figures from a computer terminal or print-out. All of them will be left with tasks which are boring and repetitious – and which, will get harder as management increases the speed of the computerised parts of the work process.
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In banks the speed of computerisation is already taking away from the bank clerk the need to worry about making long arithmetical calculations. This might seem to be an easing of his or her burden; but in reality there is an increase in the number of routine tasks each bank clerk has to do, each one of which still requires the mental attention of the clerk (e.g., to read off the correct figures from a VDU or a calculator).
The microcomputer will also increase managerial control in a whole range of other occupations, both manual and white collar – those where the work involves travelling from one location to another: telephone or gas fitters, insurance agents, meter readers, salesmen, maintenance workers of various sorts.
All these jobs have one thing in common: it is very difficult for management to keep a close eye on the level of effort required. For this reason, the people who have them often feel that even if the pay is not as good as that in a factory or office, they are ‘freer’. But the new technology is going to begin to destroy even that ‘freedom’.
In the Post Office telecommunications devices are being developed that enable faults on phone lines to be checked out using a central VDU, without the maintenance personnel having to go out to the job. On top of this the trend is towards ‘modular phones’. What these mean is told by a letter from telephone engineers in the US sent to the West End branch of the POEU:
‘The company is now converting all residences to modular phones. The modular system is a system enabling anyone to unplug a phone and replace any part of it when something goes wrong. Also on new installation all that is required is to be plugged in ... The company has established several phone centres throughout the city ... If something doesn’t work on the phone ... the customer is directed to bring the phone to the phone centre for repair ... The company has staffed the phone centres with stockmen and service representatives – both of these jobs being lower paid and less desirable than an installer or repairer’s job.’
And, of course, in the phone centre, there can be much more managerial control than when work is taking place in a customers home!
The Financial Times could report on 30 November 1978:
‘The Post Office wants to establish 40 telephone shops in large centres in the next two years ... In the longer term it wants to move to a “jack plug” system in which customers would be provided with a socket into which telephones would be plugged ...‘
A worker whose job it is to travel around the country replacing faulty circuits in computerised devices tells how the company that employs him is increasing its control over workers like him: it is installing a computer terminal in each of their homes, so that instead of travelling to the firm’s office each day to get chits describing the work they have to do, and then reporting back when each job is finished, they will receive instructions and report back via the computer terminals in their homes.
In this way, management will cut the workers’ travelling time and gain an increased control over their lives. Big brother will be there, in the home.
Eventually, you can envisage a situation in which all these sorts of workers will be required to ‘ring in’ details of their working activities using portable terminals that operate via any phone. Management, with the computer, will then have nearly as tight a record of what travelling workers are doing as of the worker tied to a machine in a factory.
The use of the new technology to deskill workers and to increase control over their working lives is even spreading to those who are often thought of as the aristocrats of the new technology – those who design and feed the computer systems.
Braverman shows in his book how the computer operators have been progressively deskilled. The microprocessor will continue this trend, as it takes over many of the functions hitherto carried out by computer operators.
Workers at the Post Office Computer Centre already tell how
‘ten to 15 years ago there was a big demand for Data Input Operators. Now these are disappearing due to new data input methods ...
‘The job of main frame computer operators has changed. Ten years ago, five people on a shift would operate a computer. At least one of these would be very skilled. He would have to decide on the loading of the machine, input, programmes and so on. But this is now handled on the system by programmes.
‘For example in Edinburgh the Post Office Computer Centre used to have a workforce of 300. Now there are only 84 jobs – most of them less skilled, but a handful more skilled than ten years ago. The operators are so bored. Someone with lots of O levels will be standing over a console, pressing a button occasionally at the prompt of the system. The job has changed so much in ten years’.
Even the small expansion of the more skilled people in the operating workforce is more than compensated for by a deskilling of jobs in the actual manufacture of computer systems.
‘Work which used to be done by very highly skilled people at the manufacturers is now done by less skilled people working with computer operators’.
And that is not the end of the matter. At present, the ‘superskilled’ of the computer world are the programmers. Their initiative and aptitudes are indispensable to the development of the programmes that are being used to replace workers in other industries. This makes it very difficult for management to control their working lives. But it is not going to stop management trying, as is shown by an article in Data Processing (July/August ’78) by the head of a management systems company, Gomes da Costa.
He complains that application programmers are ‘dilettante’ and beyond managerial control. The techniques currently employed mean that ‘estimating, scheduling, progressing and testing are all extremely difficult. By and large programmers have very little idea how much valid, documented code they can produce in a day. Similarly, managers have none either.’ This has created the myth of the ‘hairy programming genius’, engaged in a ‘creative art and immune to managerial control’. But ‘harsh economic reality’ makes such a view ‘absurd’ today. The programmer ‘must be kept under control’. He must be ‘separated from both hardware and system programming so that he can produce an independently measurable amount of work’.
Da Costa suggests this can be done by replacing ‘monolithic’ programming (one programmer working on a complete programme) by ‘modular’ programmes: ‘it is imperative that the specific task for a programmer be made as small as possible’, with different programmers each doing only parts of total programmes, and doing roughly similar tasks over and over again.
In this way, management alone will have an overview of the total programme, while a ‘programme task’ will be ‘completely isolated and kept down to a minimum’. Then more work will be obtained from each programmer, since ‘it is no longer possible to blame slackness on the hardware, the computer, the manual and all other excuses ...’
The Financial Times technical page showed similar enthusiasm on 7 December 1978 for a new programming system being developed in California based on ordinary English: ‘success with this development would immediately hand back control of company computing to top management (where it belongs)’
Just as ‘Taylorism’ and ‘scientific management’ broke skilled manual work down into a set of simple tasks that the time-and-motion man controls from the outside, so ‘modular programming’ is supposed to do the same to those working round computers.
Yet, it should not be thought that this drive to increased managerial control does away with all obstacles. It produces a quite fundamental problem of its own.
Any new programme for reorganising a work process can only really operate efficiently if it is based upon an intimate knowledge of the work process and its interaction with other work processes.
The heads of the giant corporations do not have this knowledge. Nor do the programming experts employed by the firms that fit computers.
It is a knowledge that only exists among those who toil on the factory (or office) floor.
The workers’ cooperation is needed if a new computerised work system is going to be based upon the most advanced existing work methods and to fit in with non-computerised work that is still being done. Yet the new technology is designed to take jobs from some of the workers and to further enslave others. It is no wonder that management often try to introduce the technology behind the backs of the workers – they do not want workers to fight to control the technology in their own interests. But without the cooperation of the workers, management cannot at first produce products with the computerised new machinery of as high a quality as those they produced before. This has most clearly been shown in the newspaper industry. Workers have known that computers have been designed to destroy some jobs and to take the bargaining power which skill has given to others. Management have introduced the technology without consulting with the workers.
As a result, the new machinery has often not worked at all well – whether you are talking about American newspapers, where the new technology has resulted in a low standard of printing; the Sporting Life, where management were forced after a couple of days to return to more traditional methods of production; or the Times, where a new computerised system was not ready for use more than a year after its planned introduction.
As a very useful National Union of Journalists pamphlet on the new technology points out:
‘Management have been notorious in their reluctance to discuss their full intention openly with the trade unions ... This may well explain why so many companies have wasted money on the wrong type of systems, which in turn have not produced the required end-product. The last people consulted are the people who have to make the system work’. (Journalists and New Technology, p.16).
To get satisfactory results from the new technology, workers would have to control it – but that would require a complete break with those who control now.
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Last updated on 7 March 2010