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‘PLANS TO computerise offices and experiment with word processing have been given the green light at the Ford Motor Company following a national agreement with the staff unions.
‘The plans were held up for three months because three unions were blacking all computer applications.
‘A ten clause agreement published last week will provide a framework for upcoming local negotiations ...
‘The agreement ranges from a pledge of no redundancies for the 11,500 Ford workers covered, to health and safety effects of working with Visual Display Units ...
‘TASS led the three staff unions in the negotiations ...
‘John Tuchfield, a TASS national organiser, said this week the agreement was an example to others.
‘The agreement provides that increased productivity through the introduction of computers will be reflected in improved salaries ...’ (Computing, 26/10/78)
This agreement sums up the attitude of a whole section of trade union officialdom to the new technology.
They see it as providing an opportunity to bargain with the management over money, usually after insisting on ‘no redundancy’ (or at least a ‘no compulsory redundancy’) clause and certain minimal conditions for health and safety. But at the same time management are allowed to prepare to increase the total work load and to run down the total workforce.
IN local government, this means that NALGO allows in word processors providing a £50 a year ‘special allowance’ is paid to the typists who operate them.
IN THE CIVIL SERVICE the first reaction of the CPSA leadership to the introduction of word processors was not to see them as any threat at all, but simply to treat them as electric typewriters.
It was only after protests by rank-and-file members and by some of the left wing on the executive that a moratorium was imposed on the introduction of word processors while a few ‘trials’ with them took place in selected offices. But even now there are great dangers.
Some activists who regard themselves as being on the left on the union say they will allow in word processors under ‘union control’. By union control they do hot mean with controls to prevent job loss, but merely a no redundancy pledge and increased special allowances. Management are left free to run down the workforce through ‘natural wastage’, or to increase workloads by shifting work from one department to another. In an occupation like typing where there is a very high turnover of the workforce, a ‘no redundancy’ pledge cannot by itself stop the destruction of jobs.
IN THE PRINT industry, the tradition of selling jobs for money is an old one. Between 1967 and 1976, 63,000 jobs disappeared out of a total of 159,000.
The general secretaries of all the print unions put their names to a scandalous report, Programme for Action, in November 1976, which would have given the Fleet Street employers carte blanche to introduce the new technology in exchange for payments to those who accepted redundancy. Fortunately, the members of the unions rejected the recommendation in a ballot. But that has not prevented the tendency for unions to be prepared to sell jobs. The result has been a rapid decline in the number of those who can enter the industry from the ranks of the school leavers and the unemployed.
IN THE POST OFFICE Telecommunication, the POEU leadership officially welcomed the new technology, not even demanding special payments for operating it, and opposing calls for industrial action over the shorter working week, until it was finally faced by a June 1978 conference decision to struggle for a 35 hour week. Even then the executive eventually suggested in private meetings with a government enquiry the terms for settling the claim on the basis of a 37½ hour week – which was to be paid for on a ‘nil cost’ basis out of future productivity. A move which had been explicitly ruled out by the conference resolution (Resistance, journal of N. London Internal POEU branch, special issue August ‘78; see also the McCarthy Report).
Unfortunately, the attitude of selling jobs does not only apply to the national unions. It filters right down to many branch officers and convenors. They are often effectively full-time and they themselves do not face the dole or increased workloads when they agree to sell jobs for special payments.
They are the lowest and least privileged part – but still part – of that layer of people who play a key role within the trade union movement but who are not on the receiving end of any deterioration in conditions. All this layer have felt increasingly under pressure over the question of wages over the last two or three years; Incomes policy has made it harder for their members to make ends meet. Selling jobs is an easy way to get rid of this pressure without getting involved in bitter conflicts with the employers.
Yet, for the bulk of the membership this is a tactic that is completely counterproductive. As we have seen, it means an increase in the level of managerial control and in the tedium of work. But it also means something else. Workers who grow accustomed to getting wage increases by collaborating with management to get rid of jobs, soon lose their sense of solidarity and their tradition of common struggle. They also lose to management control over key areas of work which give them bargaining power.
The pioneering productivity deal, in which workers gave up control over work practices, was signed at the ESSO oil refinery at Fawley, near Southampton, in 1960. The deal made Fawley wages among the highest in the country. But in evidence to the Donovan Commission on trade unions six years later it emerged that these refinery workers were among the lowest paid in the country.
A book on Fleet Street by a former functionary for the newspaper bosses’ organisation, the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, makes the same point:
‘If chapels ... did seek to maximalise their members earnings by agreeing to reduce the number of jobs, then they were not nearly as successful as chapels ... which did not.’ (Keith Sissons, Industrial Relations in Fleet Street, p.111).
Workers who sell jobs are worse off than those who refuse to in every respect after a very little time: they have worse conditions, they receive lower wages, and more of them end up on the dole.
These points are particularly important when the new technology is introduced. Management are not daft. They know that they will encounter resistance if they push up workloads the moment a new device appears.
It is much more likely that they will introduce the device and only run down the workforce and then increase the workload over a period of time.
A Fleet Street worker who has already had some of the new technology introduced into his office tells how it happens:
‘You find management and trade union bureaucrats collaborating to let things drift up on you, letting you drift into a situation where, imperceptively workloads increase ... The new machinery comes in. You don’t notice much of a difference to start with, and then you find after a year or two the workload has doubled or trebled and no extra staff has been taken on.’
A group of workers who have already sacrificed jobs and control over the work process for higher pay are not likely to be in much shape to prevent such pressure.
What happens was shown at the first national paper to accept the new technology – the Daily Mirror.
As a large number of Fleet Street NATSOPA members have told, in a petition they submitted calling for a special branch delegate meeting:
‘The Mirror deal produced for our members wage levels which are good relative to many other Fleet Street chapels. The price that has been paid by the chapel is a heavy one, and there is much worse to come. The Mirror deal envisaged a job loss of 100 jobs in a chapel of 600. A t the time that the deal was being voted on, the members were being assured that this job loss wouldn’t really happen. Already over 50 jobs have gone. Now the chapel members are beginning to feel the sting in the tail. You can only hope to apply successfully for an internal vacancy at the Mirror if you won’t be replaced when you leave your current job. The management have put a block on hiring new staff. In department after department, the pressure of working is building up and our members now have no protection ...’
THE DEBILITATING effects on shop floor organisation that come from selling jobs have added importance, because the first battle over new technology is rarely the last one.
Remember, few firms are going to fork out the huge sums of money required to install new technology all along the line all at once. They begin with a few devices only, located at so-called ‘bottle necks’ in the work process (usually, those points where the workers have most control over the speed at which they toil). Then they use the rapidity at which these devices operate to speed up everyone else whose work feeds into or is fed from the device.
At a later stage, management will claim that only by automating out further jobs can the existing electronic devices be fully utilised. Already this is happening in giant offices that were designed 10 or twenty years ago around old computer systems that are now being updated.
For example, the National Giro Centre was built in Bootle, near Liverpool, some years back, allegedly so as to provide jobs in an area of higher than average unemployment. But now a new microprocessor computer system is being introduced which will destroy 1,016 of these jobs (typically, the CPSA union negotiators tried to keep this full figure a secret from their own members).
At the Post Office Computer Centre, a new system TOLD was recently introduced which destroyed 600 key operators’ jobs. The union accepted it for a miserable pittance of £44 a year for the rest of the workforce.
In the newspaper industry, there are three clear stages to the introduction. In the first stage, linotype machines, which require skilled operators, are replaced by computer typesetting, which requires little more skill than ordinary typing. In the second stage, this typing is no longer done by printers at all, but by journalists and personnel who take ads over the telephone. In the third stage the journalists’ work itself is revolutionised, as the lay-out of the newspaper is done on a VDU. And it need not be done on a VDU in the same office, since it is becoming possible for the Press Association in London to lay out by computer and wire through whole pages for immediate printing by local presses. At each stage in the process, a new group of workers bears the burden of the technological change. And a group of workers who have sat back and sold the jobs of a previous group for money, are not going to be in a position to fight when it is their turn to be threatened.
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Last updated on 7 March 2010