---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 25 May 1998 18:43:13 +0200 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: (ICT-JOBS): SUMMARY OF THEME 1: ICT AND JOBS: CREATOR AND/OR DESTROYER THEME 1 - ICT - CREATOR OR DESTROYER OF JOBS * * * SUMMARY OF THE DISCUSSION 1. With important exceptions, most panellists agreed that ICT both created and destroyed jobs and that the net, long term result tilted toward its propensity to create work rather than to destroy it. 2. An attempt was made to set the creator/destroyer issue in the theoretical frameworks developed by Schumpter and Kondratiev, which predict that we should now be emerging from the job suppression stage to enter the creation stage. But the pace and pervasiveness of ICT resist theoretical packaging. In addition, the pace of change, and the rapid obsolescence of products and skills could make new jobs risky, so militating against job creation. 3. Several panellists suggested that ICT's impact on employment was not determined by technology itself but was the result of social and organizational choices made by employers and national policy-makers. Where the labour-force was seen less as a cost to be minimized, and more as a key competitive asset, the creative aspect of technology was likely to come uppermost. Corporate values, behaviour and *tradition*, and their response to consumer and stakeholder pressure were also seen as important determinants of *desirable or despicable outcomes*. Theme 3, which looks at the new business environment will address this issue in greater depth. 4. Panellists also suggested that arguments for and against technology's impact on jobs were informed by whether evidence was sought at the macro-level of the economy (eg. through jobs research or through industry level accounts of labour shortage (which tended to be optimistic)) or at the micro-level where anecdotal evidence highlighted the highly differential impact that the high tech boom was having regionally, or on particular categories of workers including women and older workers. 5. Others felt that constituency, background and personal experience could also colour attitudes towards ICT. Based on experience, trade unions, like the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), considered it the *job destroyer par excellence*: the *grim digital reaper*. Anecdotal evidence, even from computer-literate professionals who have lost their jobs and cannot find others, also suggested that ICT is destructive. Panellists concerned with productivity, considered the "elimination of non-productive jobs ... a good trend, generally", but others felt that this was one reason why technology was feared as a job destroyer. 6. Reality was more complex. While some jobs based on traditional work processes and skills were indeed falling victim to ICT, new products and services were creating new jobs, and even labour shortages in some sectors. The brain drain among highly-skilled information workers in some developing countries, and the selective immigration quotas of others, were cited as manifestations of this trend. 7. Several panellists argued that, in the final analysis, all new work methods and technological innovations enhance society and the economy to a greater degree than they destroy. Positive spin-offs of ICT include new communications-related jobs; telemarketing which is being used to reach beyond limited local markets (as in the case of Japanese strawberry farmers and Ghanian microentrepreneurs); information on jobs and new types of work which is being used to create new business ventures including consultancy and business services; and teleworking which could facilitate the decentralization of jobs, even off-shore. The flexibility of location and time offered by some of these new work options were creating fresh opportunities, particularly for traditionally disadvantaged workers, such as women, but were also throwing up new challenges such as growing polarization (even between different groups of women), the erosion of bargaining power, the need for lifelong learning and the problem of measuring (and rewarding) intellectual capital in knowledge-based companies. 8. While ICT offered substantial opportunities for informal sector activities and significant livelihood options, these were not adequately reflected in current approaches to jobs and work, or in their institutional underpinnings. The latter included job classification systems, wage structures, career paths, industrial relations systems and social security. It was suggested that ICT offered an unique opportunity to consider the future of work and to design the best approach to it. These issues will be picked up in Themes 2 and 3. 9. Many panellists felt that the real issues went beyond creation or destruction of jobs to the kinds of jobs that were being created, to their quality and to the ways in which the labour-force (and particularly those segments of it that were dispossessed in the course of the transition from old work systems to new ones) could be equipped and supported to benefit from the change. 10. We were reminded that enormous numbers of workers, especially in the developing countries were untouched by ICT and were, consequently, severely neglected in policy-making at national and international levels. Better ways had to be found to understand and describe livelihood systems, how technology impacted on them, and how public policy could more intelligently help them. This is an issue which should be picked up again in Theme 4. 11. The existence of an international division of labour was implicit in many interventions. Because ICT made it possible to find the cheapest sources of labour world-wide, developing country workers may profit from the current movement of jobs, to the detriment of unskilled workers in the developed world. However, this did not apply to all developing countries, some of which were marginalized by the global information economy. 12. We were warned that segments of information processing work currently being carried out in off-shore sites like Manila and Bangalore may disappear in the next stage of restructuring. Furthermore, the professional and technical brain drain from developing to developed countries may outweigh the advantages of relocated employment and may even have a negative effect on the former group's ability to take advantage, on-shore, of the world-wide lack of cognitive skills. 13. Lack of skills and of basic infrastructure (such as electricity and telephones) also hampered developing countries in making the fullest use of ICT's potential as a tool for development. This was an area for state intervention. 14. Decentralization also affected regions or localities in the developed countries. The problem of the lagging regions in leading economies (LRLE) appeared to be caused by the use of ICT to (re)centralize work processes and services to metropolitan headquarters to the detriment of the local economy and of its skills base. The consequent out-migration, especially of young workers, with technological skills, binds LRLEs into a vicious circle in which local labour shortages and unemployment go hand in hand. For LRLEs, as for developing countries, the idea that 'getting the factors worked out right' will promote their development into new Silicon Valleys may actually distort policy-making and give rise to expectations which mask or exacerbate local conditions. This is an issue worth exploring in greater depth and it would be interesting to know if other panellists know of similar cases. 15. One suggested response to this problem was to create a *bubble development*, structurally isolated from surrounding economic, social and institutional conditions. Do other panellists have comments on the feasibility of such a policy or its possibilities of success? 16. Political will and bureaucratic imagination also appeared to be important preconditions for the redistribution of ICT-oriented employment opportunities to peripheries, be they localities or countries. Could the Italian industrial district model, based on co-operation between disparate groups which could include the corporate sector, trade unions, government and academic institution be an alternative to bubble development which incorporates both imagination and will? Do panellists have views on this, or alternative suggestions to put forward? 17. The kinds of infrastructure and community development programmes undertaken by peri-urban and rural communities in South Africa, with the support and participation of the corporate sector, academic institutions and NGO's seem very similar to industrial districts in structure and functioning, if not in goals. It would be interesting to know more about their activities in building information-based local economies. Are there other experiences which panellists could share? 18. Education and training emerged as key preconditions for access to, and survival in, the 'new' jobs. However, some panellists appeared to feel that, here too, traditional systems had to be reviewed and revised to meet new needs. It was suggested that the permanent innovation necessary for competitive survival required a high level of 'permanent education' wherein primary education is designed to create the basis of continuous lifelong learning, flexibility and multi-skilling. If such education really becomes the precondition for access to jobs and work, the gap between nations and between citizens within nations could widen disastrously. 19. Even if education was a major tool in preserving jobs and helping people to find (or create) new job opportunities, it has its limitations, at least as far as the lower echelons of the existing workforce are concerned. It may be difficult to train the unemployed into new jobs which require higher education, new skills and, most importantly, a different mind-set. 20. It was suggested that children show greater facility in acquiring computer-based skills than their parents and grandparents. Does this argue the gradual emergence of a two-tier labour force divided along age lines? Would the existence of such a divide, require dual, or parallel, educational and training policies which focus primarily on the creation of a computer-literate new generation while applying 'band-aid' policies to the existing labour force? Who would shape such policies? And who would pay for their implementation - government, employers, or individual workers interested in up-grading their skills and knowledge?