---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 14:54:26 +0000
From: Charley Lewis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: (ICT-JOBS): Get both hands on the wheel
It's less a question of the technology itself. It's really a question of
who controls the technology and whose interests it serves.
The question of control is, I suspect, perhaps even more fundamental to
how work is impacted.
Daily fist-waving sessions with my desktop PC aside, there is little that
is intrinsic to technology that predetermines its impacts. A spanner is a
spanner is a spanner. It is we who use it to commit a felony or to loosen
a nut.
As Michael Gurstein pointed out earlier, " rather it is the way in which
those responsible are choosing to implement the technology which is
determining the specific nature of the effects which ICT is having."
I too was a little concerned in that the introduction to this theme (apart
from its daunting list of sub-themes and sub-sub-questions) seemed to
reflect a rather deterministic approach to how ICTs affect work. There
also seemed to be an emphasis on ICT workers as the first of the rugged
new individualists, bravely flogging their private portfolios of skills on
the cold silicon marketplace.
The literature is replete with contradictory analyses of ICT impacts. We
are told it will flatten herarchies. We are told it will centralise
control. We are told it will decentralise decision-making. We are told
it will disempower.
If ICT is the "universal enabler" it is so frequently portrayed to be, the
question is what will its automation / time-compression / distance-slicing
facilities be used to enable. And that boils down to who controls the
technology and whose agendas it serves.
Roberto Verzola has suggested three reasons that underpin management's
introduction of ICTs:
1) anti-union attitude - PCs can't join unions, and don't go on strike
(although this last point may sometimes be debatable)
2) productivity / efficiency - ICTs enable a relatively
higher rate of output over input
3) flexibility - ICTs can be upgraded, "right-sized", replaced
quickly and easily
To that I would perhaps add the labour process / cost displacement issues
raised by Braverman and others.
Small wonder then the association between the implementation of ICTs and
the lean (do I smell retrenchments?) and mean (to whom?) corporation.
Small wonder the stampede to outsourcing (of business functions? or of
labour "problems"?). Small wonder the punting of tele-work, which is
often little more than hi-tech piece work (even if it does cause the odd
man to ponder that he too can, and always does, make child-guidance vs
career opportunity choices). Small wonder the atomisation of the labour
force into self-marketing individuals stripped of union bargaining power.
It's no accident that ICTs are so closely associated with calls for
flexible labour markets, where jobs so frequently become marginalised and
casualised, where labour standards are continually undercut in a race to
the bottom.
A lot comes back to the automate / informate paradigm of Shoshana Zuboff.
You can easily use ICTs to automate production, to deskill the work force,
to routinise work, to disempower shop floor decision making. You can
equally use ICTs to enrich production, to build on worker skills, to add
value to work, to empower the work force. The critical divide here is
again one of top-down control versus a participatory approach.
At least one panellist has argued for a laissez faire aproach - let
management get on with it, the more unfettered the better.
But the impacts of ICTs affect society very broadly. And for that reason
society as a stakeholder has both a duty and a right to set parameters and
boundaries. Few would argue for India's right (or that of the
kettle-calling US for that matter) to detonate nuclear weapons in defiance
of international opinion, or that MNCs should be allowed to dump toxic
waste in rural KwaZulu-Natal, or that logging giants should be allowed to
pillage and plunder the forests of Indonesia.
Why then is it acceptable to flout labour standards, to use ICT
implementation as an exercise in union-bashing?
This is why we take issue with a simplistic notion of "global
competitiveness", which puts profits before all else, and which can only
result in an uncontrolled race to the bottom.
This is why, at the level of the enterprise, COSATU has demanded that all
issues with regard to technology implementation to be negotiated with
unions *before* decisions of planning, selection, implementation, work
changes, retraining are made.
This is why, at the national level, we have called for union involvement
in our national system of innovation, in South Africa's research and
technology foresight programme, in all policy issues relating to ICTs and
technology more broadly.
Of course there are huge challenges in all of this for unions - the
challenges of moving to information age unionism, of developing
appropriate policies and positions, of organising a labour market with a
changing profile, of integrating union perspectives with the gamut of
broader social issues, of using ICTs for labour information,
communications and solidarity goals.
Without joint agreement from both labour and business on the full range of
measures, policies and practices with regard to ICTs and technology, their
implementation will remain but one more management weapon against labour.
Charley Lewis
Head of Department
COSATU Information Technology Unit
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tel: 27 + 11 + 339-4911
fax: 27 + 11 + 339-2281
Snail-mail: Box 1019
Johannesburg
2000
South Africa
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