Conference on Organized labour
Responses to the Conference Paper
Charley Richardson
University of Massachusetts, USA
23 August 1998
I am a former shipfitter (heavy steel fabricator) and union steward. I now work for the University of Massachusetts directing a Labour Extension Program and the Technology and Work Program. The Technology and Work Program has done research and training for and with unions on changes in technology, work organization and labour-management interaction for approximately 10 years. We have worked with unions in all sectors of the economy. These are some of my thoughts on the issues facing Organized Labour as we move into the new century.
One of the keys to understanding the challenges facing Organized Labour is understanding the changing nature of work and the workplace - what we have sometimes called turbulence. This turbulence is a result of technological innovation, changes in work organization and the proliferation of new forms of labour-management interaction, all driven by the reality of global competition and global capital mobility.
New technologies can be and are being used to fundamentally change the relationships between workers and their work, and between workers and management.
Computers are used to continuously monitor workers on the job. At a hospital in Massachusetts, nurses wear badges that are automatically read by sensors on the walls every time they enter a room. The computer system therefore knows where every nurse is throughout their workday.
Most jobs are now, or soon will be, monitorable in one form or another. Even over the road truck drivers are not immune from this type of monitoring, as global positioning systems in trucks report on an ongoing basis their location, their speed, their engine speed, and a whole array of other data to central dispatch.
The skills of the workforce are being displaced and bypassed. Technology is used to eliminate the need for existing skills and as an excuse to move new skilled jobs out of the unionized sector and into management or into the hands of sub-contractors.
Jobs are being lost to new technology and new work organization. The steel industry in the United States in the late 1990's is making several million more tons of steel than in 1980 with 220,000 fewer workers, 44% of the 1980 workforce. Metre reader jobs are eliminated as new systems are installed that automatically read gas metres from a van driving along at 35 miles per hour. Many clerical jobs are being eliminated by computerization.
The pace of work is increasing as the new work systems seek continuous improvement and as automated systems take over more of the jobs and eliminate bottlenecks. In the survey at the USWA Health and Safety conference in 1995, we asked if people would be able to do their jobs at age 60, and 63% said no.
Injuries and illness are increasing as a result of new work systems and new technologies. Repetitive Strain Injuries are epidemic in the United States. Everywhere you go you see people with hands and wrists in splints due to work-related injuries.
And complaints of stress from the speed-up, the monitoring and the constant change are increasing. In fact, in our survey at the USWA conference, 88% said that stress was increasing.
And people are dying.
A study of the rapidly growing fatality rate in the Steel Industry by Mike Wright of the USWA Health and Safety Department found that the deaths were being caused by factors connected to the work re-organization and technological change including:
- Massive levels of overtime;
- Job Combinations which are putting older workers on new jobs;
- Insufficient training when new duties are added;
- Running plants at full speed, trying to squeeze every last nickel out;
- Untested equipment and procedures which are implemented without the review that should be standard; and
- Workers working alone.
As a result of technological change and downsizing, more people are working isolated from others who could help do the job more safely or help save a life if something happens. I was recently working with a local union at a tire manufacturer in Iowa. A worker had just died the day I was there - caught and crushed in a tire machine. He spent at least 45 minutes in that machine before anyone found him. 45 lonely, dying minutes when, perhaps, he could have been saved.
But perhaps more important than any of the above, unions are experiencing, as a result of the changes in our workplaces, a significant loss of power. All the traditional sources of leverage for the workforce, particularly unity and skill, are affected by the changes that are occurring in the workplace.
Work is more movable because it is electronic. Workers are more replaceable because their knowledge has been taken from them and integrated into computer systems and work processes. And unity is undermined as workers are more isolated in our jobs and as the changes create tensions within the workforce.
In the midst of all of the changes in the workplace with their negative consequences, a wide variety of programs that claim to be aimed at involving and empowering workforce are being introduced (such as Human Resource Management).
But these programs are in fact designed to facilitate the changes that management would like to make in technology and work organization. In order to make change happen at existing work-sites, management needs two things from the workforce:
The first is acceptance of change. They need workers to accept the changes as they come along, and they need workers to accept the idea that their world will constantly change (and that they will have little or no control over that change).
The second is contribution to change. Management needs the workforce to tell them how the change should happen. They can’t make the changes they want to make without the knowledge and ideas of the workforce.
The dilemma that management faces is how to achieve acceptance and contribution without conceding power to the workforce. The traditional system of production, based on Scientific Management or Taylorism, was designed to be independent of the workers’ thought processes in order to retain control for management. Now a new set of circumstances is creating a need for those though processes.
Human Resource Management and involvement programs seek to establish a discussion of change in the workplace that can be controlled by management, that aligns the workforce to the needs of management, that denies the workforce any real, independent power, that leaves the workforce accepting of ongoing change; and that uses the knowledge of the workforce to make the process more productive and (in the long run) less dependent on the knowledge of the workforce.
It is interesting that these programs arrive at the same time as significant attacks on the rights of labour in many countries - particularly in the United States.
What does this all mean for workers and the Unions that are trying to represent them. Two things. First, the sources of power are constantly shifting - meaning that the union should not expect to derive power today from the same place it had it yesterday. Second, the mechanisms that trade unions have traditionally used to exert influence in the workplace are designed for workplaces that are unchanging. Contracts which define the day-to-day relationship between management and worker and between worker and work become rapidly out of date as technology changes and work is re-organized. Work rules and skill ladders defined in 1998 are not going to apply in 2000 or even 1999.
Some unions have begun to focus more directly on the changes that are occurring and to develop new approaches to dealing with change. Accepting on the one hand that change is a reality that must be confronted while on the other hand not accepting management’s plans for discussing change.
Continuous Bargaining is a term used to describe a union approach to discussing change which seeks to maintain the power of collective voice. It is based on a strong critique of the empowerment movement combined with a recognition that a rapidly changing world requires mechanisms of ongoing discussion of (bargaining over) change. But this in turn requires that unions create new internal mechanisms for investigating the changes that are occurring and are on the horizon, for maintaining and building collective strength, for communicating with members on an ongoing basis and for reaching out to those in newly created jobs and sectors.
I look forward to more discussion on these issues. I have written several pieces on the impact of technology and new work organization and on the responses that unions are beginning to take. These include a pamphlet called "Employee Involvement: Watching Out for the Tricks and Traps" on the techniques used in labour-management programs.
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