Hazards of Hi-Tech?

[Ed Weick]

JDS Uniphase, the fibre-optics manufacturer, has reduced its Ottawa workforce from about 10,000 in early 2001 to about 1,500 currently.  More cuts are expected.   A day or so ago, TV journalists interviewed some of the employees who had been handed pink slips.  What I found disturbing was how absolutely accepting of the situation they were.  It seemed to be something that simply happened, was indeed expected, in that line of business.   Each of the employees appeared to see themselves as being completely on their own.  There was no sense of a possibility of collective action.  In more traditional industries, like the auto industry, they would have been unionized and would have put up a fight.  Not so in fibre optics.  JDS's sales had shrunk hugely and manufacturing operations have been moved from Ottawa to China.  The employees appeared to accept that firing them was a matter of corporate survival.    Collective bargaining and action continues in industries whose sales remain fairly constant over prolonged periods and in government, but it does not seem to have much chance of establishing itself in ephemeral "cutting edge" industries that can make huge profits one year and huge losses the next.  Moreover, from the interviews, the JDS employees did not strike me as people who would be very interested in collective action.  Even though they were being laid-off, they still appeared sure of themselves, even able to take on the world.  They were definitely not blue collar types.   Is this going to become the dominant pattern of the future?  Are companies going to keep inventing new things (e.g. fibre optic components), glutting the market with them, and then getting out fast by rapidly downsizing?  Will the labour force increasingly accept this as the normal course of things, benignly moving from job to job as each new invention storms the market?  If so, what's it all about?  Making huge amounts of money for a few people and keeping the rest hopping?   Ed Ed Weick 577 Melbourne Ave. Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7 Canada Phone (613) 728 4630 Fax     (613)  728 9382