5. The government turning a blind eye

MILLIONS OF WORKING people in this country vote Labour, because they believe it will give more consideration than the Tories to the problems that worry them – housing, the social services, above all jobs.

Yet the Callaghan government seems not to have given a single moment’s thought to protecting those who voted for it from the impact of the new technological changes.

Not that the Labour leaders have ignored the new technology itself. Since the early summer of 1978 they have made policy statement after policy statement on the subject. The Callaghan government had committed more than £400m to developing the use of the technology by December 1978 (Financial Times, 21 December).

But it did not take one step towards protecting jobs.

The first major statement of attitude towards the new technology came, not from the government itself, but from a sectoral working party of the National Economic Development Council. An interesting feature of the working party was that it was headed not by a minister or an industrialist, but by a trade union official, Eric Hammond, of the EETPU. An even more interesting feature was that nowhere does it show any concern for the jobs of ordinary trade unionists who are not fortunate enough to sit on sectoral working parties.

Its 15 closely typed pages contain one message, and one message only – the government must hand out large sums of money to industrialists in order to ensure that British big business catches up with Japanese and American big business in the new technology.

The same message was repeated in the government’s Think Tank report, which glibly dismissed the possibility of the new technology destroying jobs. ‘It is of utmost importance’, it declares, ‘that the UK is ahead of its competitors in benefiting from the productivity increases which the application of the new technology will make possible’. This it thinks can be achieved by massive government hand-outs. What it does not say is why this should get ‘the UK ahead of its competitors’, since they are also making huge hand-outs (the Japanese £500m, the French £300m, the Germans £250m) to industry for the same purpose.

It does however admit that if somehow the UK does not show magical powers in getting ahead, ‘it will be a case of the devil taking the hindmost’. The devil in this very likely eventuality will presumably be any worker who willingly abandons his or her job without a fight – through belief in the government’s phoney promises that the new technology will create a vast array of jobs.

In 1978 the government, via the NEB, handed out £50m so that a group of scientists could launch a company, INMOS, to manufacture ‘chips’, in which they had a 51 per cent share (at no cost to themselves), while the NEB holds a 49 per cent share.

Further government aid was promised to GEC so as to enable it to link up with the American company Fairchild to produce chips (in competition with INMOS).

£70 million was to be given to private firms to manufacture chips over the next five years.

And yet another £55m was to be given to firms to encourage them to use the new gadgets, and through grants and loans to buy the chip-based devices.

In effect the government will be paying these firms to introduce machines that will destroy jobs!

The Financial Times reported on 31 October 1978:

‘The government will set up a three year programme of seminars to persuade industrialists of the advantage of applying microprocessors to their products and manufacturing techniques ... Mr Varley said he would also be asking other government departments to promote the use of microelectronics in the area for which they are responsible.’

On 8 November the DES announced a £4m scheme to encourage lessons in microelectronics in schools. No doubt they will come before lessons on how to cope at the Job Centre.

This obsession with introducing devices that will destroy jobs is not matched by any measures to protect those whose jobs will disappear. There is a team of only three people at the Department of Employment looking into ‘the problem’ of loss of jobs due to microprocessors (New Society, 9 Nov. ’78).

Yet, a Sunday Times correspondent could report,

‘There is a nagging fear in and around the cabinet that there won’t be enough jobs in the service sector to mop up the unemployed men and women from manufacturing, and this can be put down – in part at least – to the impact of silicon chips’ (4 June ’78).

Those might be the private fears. But the public message from the Labour leaders to workers is: don’t worry, everything will be all right. When employers, like Times Newspapers, have tried to use technology to cut their workforce. Labour ministers have forgotten their ‘nagging fears’ and backed them to the hilt. When trade unionists have asked for a shorter working week, they have been told this is not compatible with the Labour government’s wages policy.

The reason is simple enough. Although Labour depends upon the votes of working people, its commitment is to making the present system of society, based upon the profit system, work. But profits are obtained by using increased productivity to destroy jobs, not to make life easier for workers. And so the government, like the employers, is always obsessed with ‘overmanning’ – with what happens when workers succeed, for a time, in getting control of new technology and using it to make their working lives easier, rather than to increase the profits of their employers.

If any group of workers fight to control the new technology, they will find a Labour government as much their enemy as those who actually expect to pocket increased profits.

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Last updated on 7 March 2010