Eugene Coyle wrote: > Jim, > In your concluding paragraphs below you make a distinction between two kinds > of technological unemployment. But it is a distinction without a difference. > Both put people out of work and both can be addressed through cutting hours > of work.
>When rivet heaters lost employment when reliable bolts and welding displaced >them, their skills were no longer, or at least less useful. (And rivet-heating >was a skill.) < right. > But they could find other work if hours were cut. Actually a riveting gang > included multiple workers -- all of whom could move on to something else if > there was work. And there could be work if some of the labor supply were > reduced through cutting hours.< Assume initially that there are some workers who are specialized rivet-heaters, and ignore Gene's point about the riveting gang until later. (I apologize ahead of time for the fact that the following discussion is not riveting.) Also, assume that we're talking about a capitalist society.[*] After a technical change is introduced (going to welding and reliable bolts), how is it that a rivet-heater could find other work _as a rivet-heater_ if hours were cut? And when we talk about what I called the second kind of technological unemployment, we're talking about specific skill categories being replaced or downgraded: I presume that rivet-heaters do not automatically know how to do welding. If rivet-heaters _do_ know how to do welding and do not have to buy new tools (or pay any other costs), then Gene is absolutely right that this is exactly the same as the first kind of technical unemployment I defined. That is, if those who do rivet-heating and those who do welding are interchangeable as far as management is concerned, then the impact of technological unemployment on the number of workers hired can be solved either by increasing the demand for the product or decreasing the hours per worker. That presumes that management accepts the second option. But suppose (as I presumed) that rivet-heaters cannot automatically do welding and/or have to invest in new tools to do the new kind of task. The technical change means that the rivet-heater is forced by technical change to do different work or to invest in joining the new skill classification. (Either way, it’s a matter of the employer unilaterally imposing a cost on the worker.) That can easily mean technological unemployment of the sort that shows up either openly as official unemployment, covertly as workers not using their skills as much as they could (and doing less-skilled work), or as workers taking pay-cuts to save their jobs. To see this, suppose that it costs $1 to pay a rivet-heater to install a single rivet (if that's the right verb). If this is a case of technological unemployment of the second kind, the employer would find that it takes less than that (say, $0.90) to install a rivet using reliable bolts and welding. In order to compete with this, the rivet-heater would have to take a pay cut (in this example. a 10% one) unless he or she has the resources to invest. (I'd guess that the employer would insist on more than a 10% pay cut in this case.) Without the pay cut, the employer will use the newer technique and would not employ the rivet-heaters (if their skills do not include welding). That's the way it works if employers are profit-seeking (which is what they are under capitalism). Alternatively, the rivet-heater could spend valuable time and money to raise his or her skills in order to compete. (By the way, because of interdependencies in the production process, it’s likely that the employer would want to hire either welders or rivet-heaters but not both. So we’d see two types of shops competing with each other in the product market: those that hire welders and those that hire rivet-heaters (and pay them lower wages).) Bringing the riveting gang back in, it's true that days of work for each individual member could be increased by cutting hours per worker. But it's quite likely (and I am far from being an expert on this subject) that the introduction of reliable bolts and welding would be just one piece of a larger change in the firm's organization of production. The rivet-heaters gang would likely be replaced by specialized welders, while other tasks that the gang had performed would also be done by specialists of other sorts.[**] If my speculation is anywhere close to being true, that means that the _entire gang_ (and not just the rivet-heater) would face technological unemployment of the second kind. That means that to compete with the now-cheaper (and more under management control) production process, those who want to maintain the gang style of organization would have to either take a pay cut; follow old-fashioned craft union practices to try to block the technological change; or invest valuable time and money getting the necessary training to become the new types of specialists. In the long run, it's likely that management will bring in an assembly line or some similar process, so that the relationship between the various specialists would be routinized and controlled by the corporate bureaucracy. Then the new specialized skill categories would involve less in the way of worker-owned (craft) skills and be more dependent on the management's on-the-job training and/or public education. That means that the members of the "gang" could keep their jobs -- but that (all else constant) would be paid less and would have less control over the work process. Management would increasingly treat them as interchangeable parts in the production process. If this new process is more productive (in the capitalist sense of that word, i.e., leading to more salable output per hour), then it is the technological unemployment of the first kind: demand for the product would have to increase -- or hours per worker would have to be cut -- or the number of workers hired would have to be cut. Likely, management will insist on either the first or the third option. This discussion indicates that we are not talking about “a distinction without a difference.” There are two kinds of technological unemployment that can co-exist but sometimes exist separately. The first kind refers to an aggregate phenomenon that hits workers on average, while the second kind takes into account the fact that people have heterogeneous rather than infinitely fungible skills. Is there technological unemployment of the third kind? I’ll have to read Tom’s message when I get the time. [*] Self criticism: In my original discussion, I should have made it clearer that I was talking about technological unemployment _under capitalism_ and that it therefore involves not only changes in technology (i.e., how labor and material inputs are combined to produce output) but also changes in the nature of the social relations between management and workers and amongst the workers. The story would be different, say, if technological change were introduced in a worker-owned cooperative or in a capitalist firm constrained by craft-union rules. [**] All else constant, I think the Marx/Braverman analysis is valid: under capitalism, production "progresses" from groups of workers working under simple cooperation (in "gangs") to a division of labor in production (workers specialized according to task) to machine-tending (which may or may not involve specialized skills) to the use of assembly-line-type production (which involves much less in the way of specialization, moving workers toward being interchangeable parts). These trends result from the employers' effort to attain three complementary goals: to lower the cost per unit of production (especially labor costs), to increase bureaucratic control over the production process, and to minimize the role of worker-owned (craft) skills, replacing them with those skills imparted by management via on-the-job training or the public schools. -- Jim Devine / "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
