IT TAKES an Albert Booth to claim that the new technology will unemployment. the trend is have little towards the elimination of jobs within industry as a whole, including the producing industries.
Writing in Scientific American, W.C. Hotton explains that at IBM: The computer itself the Cal DICUaTC the the no has drawings that will be employed to define the circuit pattern on effect the silicon.
Other computers supervise the fabrication process and still another one tests the completed technology- chips, automatically the defective ones?
Similar examples exist within "traditional"
Cal firm Instance. as Topone wereers o RETRAINING RETRAINING Ritno.
In an produced by shows the marking quences of industry. The Fiat, for DrOCCSSOr.
breaks you typewriter disappear The machine.
And consider quences of called to show the correspondents produce the new model, the speed of work, excellent pamphlet the Socialist *Today, Workers Party, Chris Harmar enormous consethe firm. technology on employment. He quotes a Fleet Street worker who uses a word Aerospace "All shown, get using - when you change paper, shift the margin, move ponding from one job to another workers.
since the word They processor does all these things proposals tor you at very high speed...
mental effort is more repetitive and more continuous.
*You get the feeling you are being forced to exert yourself ever more by the pace of the the conselatest electronic switchboard 3750' drawn to our attention by the French metal workers union the FGM. It controls all phone "telechiric' calls, decodes phone numbers of outside the firm. and it can control the check work productivity and follow up the movements of the staff.
Many clerk - or perhaps shoo steward - mav be followed step by step within Mike Cooley and the Lucas stewards have or however that possible to forge elements of an alternative technology corresthe needs of put forward for alternative sources of energy, alternative transport systems and so on They have also tried to counter the tendency where techniques are designed in such a fashion as to objectivise human skill, and thereby diminish or totally replace the human being'.
To counter this drive to 'eliminate all that vast human knowledge, the Lucas Aero space workers have proposed devices (literally "hands at a distance'). These machines are labour-saving, of course, but at the same time ism they allow workers skills to be 1979 developed through the work process conditions of complete safety.
In a vivid way, the Lucas workers have shown us tha there's an alternative to two common positions: a complete opposition to new technology acceptance technology while struggling to win certain concessions at the level of control.
That alternative is workers control over an alternative technology.
THE following material was particularly helpful in the production of this page:
Computer Technology and Employment, papers from a national conference organised by AUEW (TASS) and now produced as a book publishe by NCC The Future of Employment in Engineering and Manufacturing, Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committe CAITS 1979.
New Technology and Social-
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