Symposium on Multimedia Convergence - Activités Sectorielles

The entertainment and mass media industries are in the business of capturing the imagination, sparking new interests, and keeping us informed of events around the globe. They ply the public with music, films, video clips, newspapers, journals and radio broadcasts: they cater to every taste. Almost every member of society is able to name at least one entertainer, editorialist or film-maker who has broadened his horizons, awakened his curiosity or simply amused or informed him.

Widespread public awareness of the products and services of these industries -- and the immediate, almost intuitive, response to new offerings -- have made the entertainment and electronic media industries dynamic, prolific and rich. With rising incomes, educational levels and expectations, middle-class consumers have committed an ever-larger portion of their resources to entertainment. In 1995, for example, Americans spent an estimated US$400 billion -- about 8 per cent of total consumption -- on entertainment.⁽¹⁾ Growing audience expenditure on entertainment services has pushed this sector to the forefront of industry earners, and the media portion of the industry is expected to be among the fastest-growing segments. Indeed, increased consumption of leisure and information products has been one of the hallmarks of the post-industrial, information-based economy.

Despite their tremendous variety, the products of the entertainment and mass media industries share one core characteristic. Whether edifying or merely amusing, these products are knowledge-intensive. Teams of highly skilled writers, editors, performers, designers and technicians provide the imagination, inventiveness and technological sophistication which make each product unique. It is the sum of their creative talents, their diverse skills, and their mastery of information technology which instils value into the paperback books, plastic discs and cassettes which consumers buy. Indeed, one might well argue that the multiplicity of material forms in which these products appear -- cassettes, records, newspapers -- merely disguises the fact that only one product is being sold, and that product is electronically processed information.

This central shared trait makes it possible and increasingly necessary to consider the media and entertainment industries, not in their historical specificity, but in their ever-growing digitalized unity. Thanks to advances in computerization and communications technologies, previously distinct information-based industries -- such as printing and publishing, graphic design, the media, sound recording and film-making, along with the carrier industries of broadcasting and telecommunications -- are converging into one. Information is their common product.

Each of the industries cited above has its own origin and history. Until recently, each had its own technology too. But with the advent of digitalization, technological convergence has been set into motion. Today all forms of information -- whether based in text, sound or images -- can be converted into bits and bytes for handling by computer. Digitalization has made it possible to create, record, manipulate, combine, store, retrieve and transmit information and information-based products in ways which magnetic tape, celluloid and paper did not permit. Digitalization thus allows music, cinema and the written word to be recorded and transformed through similar processes and without distinct material supports. Previously dissimilar industries, such as publishing and sound recording, now both produce CD-ROMs, rather than simply books and records.

The impact of digitalization has not been limited to the products of these industries, but also includes their means of distribution. If the common product is now information, the common service will be its electronic exchange and delivery. The convergence of the computer, telephone and broadcasting sectors into a communication and distribution industry is paving the main thoroughfares of the global information highway, along which information products and services will travel in the twenty-first century. The capacity to transmit digital products at the touch of a button anywhere in the world, without interference or degradation of quality, may sound like a scenario for the future. But the future is coming soon.

As analog systems are gradually replaced by digital ones and broadband transmission paths come to link homes, businesses and community centres around the world, information products, often in multimedia formats, will become available on-line when and where the consumer chooses to view, listen to and perhaps interact with them. The need for the material supports on which these products currently rest -- the paper on which the news is printed, the cassettes which contain musical or video recordings -- will be eliminated, but only if affordable, high-performance telecommunications systems are available.

Multimedia convergence deserves our attention for reasons which go far beyond the entertainment, mass media and telecommunications industries. The technological revolution which has made multimedia convergence possible will continue apace, creating new configurations among an ever-widening range of industries. The digitalization of information processing and delivery is transforming the way financial systems operate, the way enterprises exchange information internally and externally, and the way individuals work in an increasingly electronic environment.

These changes are important not only for their immediate economic and social impact, but also because they are taking place at the formative stages of the information economy, in which information will not merely be a resource, but the very basis on which the economy will grow. Knowledge-based industries, such as today's entertainment and mass media industries, will be among those which surge to the forefront of tomorrow's economy. The changes now occurring therein may thus serve as harbingers of developments in the twenty-first century, revealing to us what it means to live and work, produce and consume in the information society.

Technical innovation and the speed of change

The capacity to process and communicate information electronically has speeded up work processes enormously. Within a decade of the introduction of automatic page make-up, the pre-press stages of the newspaper industry had been radically altered, becoming a unified, integrated digitally based production process. Journalists and editors working on-screen could feed text directly to page make-up, which eliminated the need for rekeying and shifted preliminary typesetting functions from the production to the editorial staff. In book publishing, digitalization has speeded up the editorial process, which used to be sequential, by allowing the copy editor, art editor and layout staff to work on the same book simultaneously.

But digitalization has not merely speeded up old production processes. In educational and scientific publishing, where timely delivery of up-to-date information is essential to the value of the product, digitalization has forced a fundamental rethinking of what it means to publish. On-line dissemination of academic journals has already taken off -- some journals exist purely in electronic form -- and peer review of articles is carried out on the Internet. Tailor-made textbooks, composed of chapters chosen from a 150,000-page database, combined with professors' class notes or other articles, are already available on some 900 American campuses.⁽²⁾ And the day is not far off when electronic delivery of constantly updated academic texts to local printers will allow micro-print runs to meet the needs of a seminar.

But technological innovation has not come alone. Regulatory change, the liberalization of markets and the global ambitions of media conglomerates have created synergies that further hasten the pace of change.

Regulatory and structural change

If technology has made media convergence possible, regulatory and structural change has made it "doable". In some countries, limitations on cross-media ownership have been relaxed, allowing large media firms to acquire highly diversified holdings in film-making, music, radio and television broadcasting as well as in book, magazine and newspaper publishing. This horizontal integration allows one media product to be commercialized in a variety of formats (books, films and sound recordings) as well as in distinct end-markets (cinemas, television, and video rental shops, for example). Despite the complexity of ownership structures and contractual relations, horizontal integration concentrates control and marketing power in the hands of surprisingly few big players. In 1995, for example, just five record companies accounted for over 70 per cent of sales in the US$40 billion global pre-recorded music market.⁽³⁾ However, even the largest music firms may form only one segment of much greater media and electronics empires.

Vertical integration is also occurring, though sometimes with a new face. A striking example of the impact of regulatory change on industry structure can be seen in the results of the 1984 review of the "Paramount decision", which allowed Hollywood studios to re-enter the distribution business, from which they had been barred for 36 years. Within five years, studios were reaping some 80 per cent of box office receipts.⁽⁴⁾ Distribution had become their core activity, though studios oversaw film products "from conception to consumption" by providing funding and distribution channels to independent producers. Actual film-making, however, was carried out by networks of production companies and their subcontractors, linked to the studios through contract and investment, rather than through ownership.⁽⁵⁾

The deregulation of telecommunications has introduced a whole new set of players into a previously protected domain of the information industry. Telecommunications monopolies are ceding ground to private service providers, as nations on every continent move to privatize their state-owned telecoms and to liberalize access to communications markets. One result has been a tremendous expansion in the volume and types of services offered. Telecom operators have evolved from being simple carriers of conventional telephony services to become providers of a rich array of value-added services, including mobile communications, data transmission, Internet access, cable television and satellite operations -- all of which support electronic media convergence. Even in conventional telephony, services have expanded tremendously in recent years. Globally outgoing international traffic totalled 30.4 billion minutes in 1990, reached 54.4 billion minutes by 1994 and is expected to climb to 90 billion minutes by the year 2000⁽⁶⁾ -- a tripling of output in less than a decade. Clearly, the global information-based economy is raring to be born.

The dynamism and volatility of the telecommunications industry are demonstrated by the upsurge of private service providers grabbing market share from public rivals, even as the market grows. In 1990, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom and BT carried 42 per cent of all outgoing international traffic; four years later, no publicly owned firm was among the top four service providers, which together accounted for 57 per cent of a vastly expanded market.⁽⁷⁾ In 1995, the telecommunications industry commanded global revenues estimated at US$1,430 billion, equivalent to 5.9 per cent of the world's gross domestic product.

The information superhighway

The premise on which the notion of an information society is based is the construction of the Global Information Infrastructure (GII), often referred to as the information superhighway. The GII is in fact nothing more than the physical plant -- the nuts, bolts and optical fibre -- of the telecommunications systems of the future, which are to provide broadband access to homes, enterprises and community centres in all parts of the world. Universal access to the superhighway would ensure that advanced media and information services would be readily available, not only to major institutions and corporate customers, but also to small businesses, non-profit organizations, schools, hospitals and individuals. At least that is the idea.

Currently, universal access is far from assured, even for basic telephony, let alone for the sophisticated cabling and switches needed for interactivity. Worldwide, "teledensity" varies sharply from more than 60 phone lines per 100 inhabitants in the richest countries⁽⁸⁾ to fewer than one per 100 in the poorest,⁽⁹⁾ and there is a direct correlation between access to telecommunications, economic wealth and social development.

Even within the industrialized world, where telecommunications have become ubiquitous, the penetration of personal computers (PCs) in the home, Internet access, and cable connections to households and businesses varies tremendously from country to country. Within countries, there are also wide discrepancies in service provision, based on personal income and educational level.

As telecommunications are increasingly deregulated and investment follows the lead of market forces, it is feared that the information highway could end up providing seamless interconnection among the world's wealthy enclaves, while further exacerbating existing inequalities between the information "haves" and "have-nots". Those who are currently ahead would gain further advantage, while those who now lag behind would be further disadvantaged. Today, over 60 per cent of Internet host computers are located in the United States; fewer than one per cent are in Central and South America.⁽¹⁰⁾ Access is, of course, possible from every continent for those who have the equipment.

As the world gradually becomes interconnected and distribution capacities become more global, cultural taste is reasserting its regional or national flavour. The music industry provides a telling example. In 1990, 90 per cent of the music sold in Central Europe was international; today the Polish music market carries roughly 50 per cent Polish recordings. Approximately 80 per cent of the pre-recorded music now sold in Latin America is performed by Latin American artists, 60 per cent of Asian sales are of Asian recordings. Although emerging markets are small, they are extremely fast growing. In the first half of 1995, the Brazilian music market expanded by almost 60 per cent, the Indonesian market by almost 45 per cent and the Polish and South African markets by roughly 40 per cent each. The "big five" recording companies are investing billions of dollars in regional recording studios, plants and distribution networks in order to develop local repertoire, but regional independents are giving them a run for their money. Fans want to hear songs sung in their own language and in tune with their cultural sensibilities, and regional independents are well placed to spot local talent.⁽¹¹⁾

Small enterprises

The picture drawn so far has focused largely on the technology and the major players in the convergence process. But convergence has another face. Just as technology has given large media and communications firms a global reach, it has also encouraged the proliferation of small players: individuals, teams and small and medium-sized enterprises able to create high-quality multimedia products, such as CD-ROMs, or to provide niche services, such as building Web sites or developing on-line advertising campaigns. A plethora of small electronic publishing and multimedia service companies in Europe and the United States generate much of the content, as well as much of the employment, of this emerging industry. Many of these might qualify as micro enterprises, composed of two to ten employees. While some specialize in providing such products and services directly to local clients, many others work through subcontracting arrangements which channel their products further upstream.⁽¹²⁾

Electronic mediation has made possible the growth of "virtual" enterprises, in which employees basically work alone, distant from each other, but connected by a modem and a telephone line. An editorial production firm, for example, can easily employ its writers, editors and art directors at different locations, as long as their computers can communicate to exchange and combine their work.⁽¹³⁾ In such virtual firms, employers and individual workers may not even know each other, except through their email messages and the quality of their output. Freelancers -- many of whom may be teleworkers -- form a large portion of the workforce, in effect becoming "virtual employees". When such enterprises combine the work of employees based in more than one country, these distant workers may find themselves without the normal protection offered by their national legislation.

Employment

For some occupational groups, particularly those engaged in providing creative content, the multimedia revolution promises tremendous growth in opportunities for work as distribution channels multiply. In 1995, the production of films and audiovisual products employed more than 850,000 people in Europe, compared to only 630,000 a decade before. At least one observer believes that by the year 2010, films, multimedia and television will be the single largest employer in Europe.⁽¹⁴⁾ Musicians are the notable exception to this optimistic forecast for creative content providers. Technological developments, such as the synthesizer, have been remarkable in the degree to which they have eliminated the opportunities for paid employment.

For other workers, particularly those in craft occupations tied to particular technologies, the challenge will be to acquire new skills and adapt to new modes of working in a context of diminishing opportunity in their former specialities. Examples abound of the labour-shedding tendency of advanced technology. One might mention the miniaturization of camera equipment, which rendered obsolete the cumbersome mobile TV units of the past -- staffed by camera operators, sound specialists and support personnel -- and replaced them with a single reporter carrying a lightweight camcorder. In the motion picture industry, computer-generated "synthetic reality" now provides an alternative to the construction of expensive film sets, threatening the livelihood of the carpenters, decorators and electricians who build and light them. Digital video sampling allows the creation of dozens of "synthetic characters" from the images of a few. The crowd of 50,000 demonstrators in Forrest Gump, for example, was generated from the images of fewer than 1,000 extras.⁽¹⁵⁾

If, as some claim, the digital economy is "a massive job-creation engine", it might be added that opportunity will favour the well-educated, multi-talented jobseeker whose skills portfolio is constantly expanding. Amid large-scale loss or downgrading of employment for those with lesser qualifications, burgeoning opportunity is foreseen for those with the skills mix needed to work creatively in an information-intensive networked environment. Yet most workers, even highly qualified professionals, may expect unstable, impermanent employment, with multiple job changes in the course of their careers. And many workers will find themselves employed on a contingent basis, working part time, temporarily or for more than one employer at a time.

Many future jobs will be based on technology which is today in its infancy; these jobs will call for undreamed-of skills. The speed with which the software houses of Silicon Valley responded to the special effects desires of Hollywood producers gave birth to a flourishing computer-generated visual effects industry within the space of a few years.

Though technology will continue to leap ahead in digital bounds, human skills acquisition will likely progress incrementally "in an analog mode", building on a base of previously acquired skills. When computer colour separation was introduced, for example, the preliminary processes of colour printing were transformed, but the expert eye and technical knowledge of photolithographers who had undergone retraining were much in demand to ensure quality control of the final product. Many trained typographers made the transition from Linotype to computer composition, applying the aesthetic judgement of their former craft to a new mode of work.

At the same time, technology has erased or reduced the entrance barriers to much technical work by becoming more user-friendly. The gradual emergence of industry standards among information technology producers makes skills more easily transferable from one domain or type of equipment to another, enabling more crossover among technical and non-technical staff. Page make-up has become a white-collar job and those entering the field may never have had formal training in the print industry. Indeed, many of those entering the field will find employment in non-printing firms for which the processing and distribution of information is important.

Education and training

Where will the new skills come from? How can firms be assured of finding the skills they seek? How can workers be sure that the skills they acquire will actually prepare them for the job market? There is much room for concerted efforts on the part of governments, employers and workers to minimize the mismatch between available skills and those in demand and to prepare the workforce for the changes ahead.

High-quality basic education is the broad foundation upon which all new skills will be built in the information economy. Such education goes beyond high levels of literacy and numeracy; it should instil a love of learning and the capacity to adapt to change. Many countries are actively engaged in getting computers -- and especially computer skills -- into classrooms in order to familiarize children with the rudiments of interacting with electronically mediated information.

But basic education only goes so far. Higher levels of general education and the acquisition of specialized skills, including a large dose of computer skills, will increasingly be the norm among entrants into the multimedia job market. While many job-specific skills are acquired in the workplace, either through employer-provided training schemes or informally through the sharing of knowledge among colleagues, employers will increasingly expect applicants to come to the job with a skills portfolio which is already well stocked.

Will training programmes, as they are currently designed, meet the needs of these employers and potential employees? Will they adapt quickly enough to rapidly changing needs? Or will they lag behind, braking the smooth transition from school to work by preparing young people for the jobs of yesterday rather than for those of tomorrow? This is an area which could potentially benefit from tripartite cooperation.

Large-scale employers are the best equipped to set up training programmes to meet the specific needs of their enterprises. Jointly sponsored training schemes, along with apprenticeship systems, have also proven their worth in the past. But the information economy poses two great challenges to enterprise-based training. First, the employment structures of many firms in these converging industries rely on a diminishing core of permanent, or at least long-term, employees and on a growing portion of contingent workers employed part time, temporarily or on a project-by-project basis. Because of their part-time status and especially in the instance of short-term engagement, these employees would rarely, if ever, benefit from employer-provided training packages, which are largely directed to permanent staff.

Second, small and medium-sized enterprises account for the most dynamic employment growth in the information sector. Many operate with just a handful of employees; few are able to offer training themselves or to release staff from ongoing work. These employers depend almost entirely on the skills that their employees have acquired before being hired, whether through formal education, previous work experience or at their individual initiative.

Many observers thus expect that in the future much of the burden and expense of training may ultimately fall on the shoulders of individual workers, whether in terms of initial preparation, ongoing education and training, or adapting to new professional orientations.

Labour relations

The transition to the information age is unlikely to be a smooth one. Just as in an earlier time, the industrial revolution disrupted the lives of millions, forcing rural workers to shed their agrarian habits and adapt to mechanical processes, so the information age will shake the foundations of our current economic structures, shatter dearly held assumptions and give rise to a new set of expectations. The chaotic nature of the change in progress, its accelerating pace and the difficulty of foreseeing outcomes exacerbate fears that the global information society will be polarized, fragmented, or even "atomized". Some fear a future in which individuals will be forced to struggle for survival in an electronic jungle. And the survival mechanisms which have been developed in recent decades, such as relatively stable employment relations, collective agreements, employee representation, employer-provided job training, and jointly funded social security schemes, may be sorely tested in a world where work crosses borders at the speed of light.

Social dialogue and tripartite participation in the search for socially acceptable solutions are the principal guarantors of a smooth transition to an information economy. Yet developing the practical mechanisms for social dialogue in this emerging multimedia industry will prove a challenge, for the convergence process highlights a certain structural mismatch of economic forces, political frameworks and social institutions. The rapidity of change, the extent of industrial restructuring and the degree to which work is being transformed will test current institutional mechanisms for workers' representation.

Privatization and the restructuring of telecommunications firms provide an example of the types of challenges being faced. High levels of retrenchment in well-established, traditional service providers have been observed and the increasing recourse to outsourcing has also reduced the level of direct employment. British Telecom cut 70,000 jobs between 1990 and 1992; AT&T announced the elimination of 40,000 staff positions; Japan's NTT is planning to cut nearly 50,000 jobs through early retirement and voluntary redundancy; and Deutsche Telekom may face the loss of 60,000 posts. Although overall employment in telecom-related work is expected to expand owing to the demand for new types of communications services, much of the new employment will concern contingent workers and arise in non-unionized firms or in non-telecom workplaces.⁽¹⁶⁾ How can the interests of these workers best be represented?

A multimedia industry structure is emerging based on major conglomerates and myriad small enterprises. It is often the small firms which create the "content" sold upstream through intermediaries to the major players. Because of the small size of these companies and the varied skill composition of their workforces, terms and conditions of employment are often negotiated on an individual basis. Traditional bread-and-butter issues appear to be of less importance to these white-collar workers than their opportunities for job enrichment and professional development. Unionization rates are low and the institutional mechanisms for social dialogue are often lacking. Again, how can the interests of these workers best be represented?

Those who work in these converging industries have much to learn from each other and to convey to other occupational groups entering the information economy. In industries such as telecommunications, for example, where the workforce has been employed for the most part on a full-time, quasi-permanent basis, tremendous uncertainty has been engendered as contingent work patterns have emerged. Yet the protection of contingent workers has long been the principal activity of actors' unions, for example, and this is an occupation where unionization rates often remain exceptionally high.

Until recently the complex labour relations structures of the entertainment and mass media industries have made it difficult for workers' organizations to communicate across industries, occupational groups and jurisdictional lines. Because their past experience has been so varied, some have operated in relative isolation from each other, although evidence suggests that the convergence process has encouraged wider-based cross-sectoral dialogue. Workers in telecommunications and cable companies, for example, have recognized a commonality of interests.

Workers in the converging multimedia industry should enjoy the same rights, in terms of freedom of association and collective bargaining, as other workers, in line with ILO principles as contained in the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (No. 87), and the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention, 1949 (No. 98), and in the related jurisprudence of the ILO supervisory bodies. Moving from the principle to the practice is the task which lies ahead.

National systems of social and labour protection may also need to be adapted to meet the needs of tomorrow's workforce. It is important to develop the legal and contractual framework (labour law, collective agreements, industrial relations) which will allow firms and individuals sufficient flexibility, while providing adequate security to workers. Two fast-growing employment groups may need special consideration: part-time workers and teleworkers. Two recently adopted ILO Conventions and Recommendations should prove to be of particular interest to these two groups.

The Part-Time Work Convention, 1994 (No. 175), and its accompanying Recommendation (No. 182), encourage improvements with regard to remuneration, statutory social security systems and other forms of social protection for part-time employees. Governments may wish to re-examine their national legislation with a view both to facilitating access to productive and freely chosen part-time work and to ensuring that part-time workers are not unintentionally penalized.

The Home Work Convention, 1996 (No. 177), and its accompanying Recommendation (No. 184), have as their objective to encourage the promotion of equality of treatment between homeworkers and other workers, particularly with regard to freedom of association, protection against discrimination, occupational safety and health, remuneration, statutory social security, access to training, minimum age and maternity protection. Those who work on-line from home or in other premises of their choosing may be covered by their provisions, unless such staff are legally considered to be independent workers under national laws, regulations or court decisions.

Opening the dialogue: The role of the ILO

Previous ILO work in the media, culture and graphical sphere as well as in the telecommunications sector has made evident within specific industries a number of the employment impacts of information technology cited above.⁽¹⁷⁾ None, however, has looked across the spectrum of industries to examine the impact of multimedia convergence as a whole.

In January 1997, the ILO held a three-day Symposium on Multimedia Convergence in order to discuss the social and labour issues arising from this process. The ILO selected for examination in this Symposium a handful of industries within the media, culture and graphical sphere, along with the telecommunications industry, which supplies support and transmission capabilities. These industries span a wide variety of occupations, employment structures and labour relations. No uniform pattern can therefore be expected to take form as they are confronted with converging products, processes and services. As a whole, however, these industries do offer a cross-section of the social and labour issues raised by the advent of the information economy. Underlying the industry-centred debates were three main concerns: (1) the information society: what it means for governments, employers and workers; (2) the convergence process: its impact on employment and work; and (3) labour relations in the information age. The Symposium was thus intended to stimulate reflection on the policies and approaches most apt to prepare our societies and especially our workforces for the turbulent transition towards an information economy.

The Symposium on Multimedia Convergence offered an opportunity for governments, employers and workers to engage in open-ended, exploratory discussions of the social and labour issues arising from multimedia convergence. Participants were invited to prepare presentations on the labour issues raised by the convergence process in their specific industries and countries, highlighting the impact of current trends on employment and conditions of work. These were organized as a series of panel discussions and individual presentations, each of which was followed by a period of general discussion. These presentations and the subsequent discussion have been summarized in this report. Texts have been grouped thematically in chapters which recall the format of the Symposium itself. Each chapter begins with one or more individual speeches followed by comments from other participants and then the responses of the speakers. The final chapter summarizes a discussion on the possible future activities of the ILO in the media, cultural and graphical sphere. In accordance with the decision of the Governing Body at its 265th Session (March 1996), no conclusions or resolutions were adopted. The purpose of the meeting was to have an exchange of views on the social and labour issues related to multimedia convergence; in this, the meeting was fruitful and of benefit for all three sides. It furthermore provided the Office with many suggestions and proposals on activities to be carried out in the future on behalf of the media, culture and graphical sector, particularly in the fields of employment, training and labour relations, as well as regional activities and seminars.

The insights gained in these tripartite discussions will certainly stimulate further reflection by governments and the social partners on how best to prepare the workforce to live and work in the information economy. Although technology has spurred the convergence process, it is the social actors who will guide its course.

Participation

The Symposium was chaired by Mr. Marc Blondel, Worker member of the Governing Body. The Employers' Vice-Chairman was Mr. Walter Durling, Employer member of the Governing Body. The Workers' Vice-Chairman was Mr. Chris Warren, Joint Federal Secretary of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance of Australia, Mr. Werner Ringkamp of the Government of Germany served as coordinator of the Government group.

Total attendance at the Symposium was 66, of whom 41 were titular members.

Governments: 11 members from: Canada, Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, United Kingdom, United States. Turkey attended as an observer.
Employers: 15 members.
Workers: 15 members.
Advisers: 12.
Observers: 12.
Governing Body: one.

A total of 11 women attended: four Government delegates and one adviser; two Employers' delegates; one Workers' delegate and one adviser; and two observer advisers.

Part 1

The information society:
The challenges ahead

Challenges of the information society
Kari Tapiola, Deputy Director-General of the ILO

It is my great and sincere pleasure to welcome you to this Symposium on Multimedia Convergence and to extend to you the greetings of Mr. Michel Hansenne, Director-General of the International Labour Office. In accordance with decisions taken by the Governing Body of the ILO we have invited you to this Symposium to explore some of the labour and social issues arising out of the development of the information society. This Symposium takes place within the framework of the ILO Sectoral Activities Programme.

The term "information society" has entered common usage in recent years. We talk about wired societies, many of us work in network environments and we communicate electronically with our colleagues and partners inside and outside workplaces; in fact these same workplaces can now extend to all parts of the world. The whole notion of a workplace is changing from one rather finite entity to a potentially very extensive network. A generation ago cellular telephones, email and hand-held computers belonged, if not to the realm of science fiction, at least to something very sophisticated and very distant. Today they are everyday tools for those who work in the information economy.

The industrial and organizational structures which have been familiar to us are giving way to new configurations. Small local newspapers struggle to survive while media and communications empires traverse the globe. Major telecommunication firms, among the rock solid employers of the past, are expanding their core businesses while they are downsizing their own workforces. And, at the same time, thousands of medium-sized, small or even micro enterprises generate much of the content and much of the new employment in this information industry. Virtual enterprises composed of employers and workers linked to one another only by computer communications are expanding with very little regard to national borders.

The information technology revolution is a key element of globalization. It forces more and more countries to open up to international competition and to enter the so-called information age. It is a key component of a one world economy. But what are the real implications for governments, employers and workers and their organizations when information becomes the worlds' principal economic resource and when the economy restructures itself accordingly? How can we prepare ourselves for the changes ahead and how will we redefine ourselves as economic and social actors? The evidence suggests that nations, enterprises and individual workers who are able to acquire, transform and use information productively and imaginatively will benefit from the technological advances now set in motion. The OECD has estimated that more than half of the total GDP in the rich economies is produced in knowledge-based industries, such as telecommunications, computers, software and entertainment. Wealth, power and strategic advantage are liable to accrue to those nations and companies which are able to master the forces of technological change and draw maximum benefit from a rapidly globalizing economy.

By some estimates, knowledge workers account for eight out of ten of all new jobs in the advanced economies. Almost undoubtedly, many of these workers will find deep satisfaction when their new job calls forth their creative potential. But what about the others? What about the economies which are left behind? And what about those members of society and of the workforce who are slow to respond to the new demands -- the ones whose skills are rendered obsolete by technological advance, those who do not have the education and training to reap the benefits that the information economy will bring? Even if up to 80 per cent of new jobs are knowledge-related, this does not yet automatically mean that all of them are challenging, well-remunerated and satisfying.

One of our tasks in the ILO is to map out the roles and responsibilities of governments and of employers' and workers' organizations in regard to this change. This calls for a comprehensive review of the kind of society we are facing. Pundits tell us that we are heading for an information society that may be polarized between information haves and have-nots. Signs of polarization are already evident, both between nations and within them. Sweden has 68 telephone lines per 100 inhabitants. The least developed countries have fewer than one line per 100. How can this gulf be narrowed? Personal computers and fax machines have become ubiquitous in the business world but tend to be present only in better-off households. How can universal access to the tools of the information economy be assured? Will we be forced to accept two-tier societies in which good employment, incomes and wealth coincide with access to information and communication, but where those without access are left, at best, in a secondary role and, at worst, dropping out at the margins?

The focus of this Symposium is the impact of the digitalization and industrial convergence on employment and work in the media and entertainment industries. The convergence process has brought together producers of content, providers of communication and distributors. It has created a vast information industry: printing and publishing, new media, sound recording, film-making, broadcasting and telecommunications are all represented in this room. The media and entertainment industries are living and working on the cutting edge of change. Many of you have certainly experienced in your professional lives not only satisfaction but also the turbulence and instability that is expected to be one of the hallmarks of the information economy of tomorrow. You have witnessed the destructuring of the traditional workplace and the restructuring of working time. You have seen the electronic displacement of work and the growth of a competitive global labour market. You may have felt the stimulation of working in a knowledge-intensive environment together with the stress of information overload. You might also have seen how much of the burden of adjustment falls on those with the fewest skills and the lowest wages. In short, I dare to assume that you have seen both the economic benefits and the social costs of change in a very prominent, exposed and international sector of activity.

The technological revolution which has made multimedia convergence possible has ramifications which go well beyond the industries represented here today. It is already transforming the way financial systems operate, the way production and distribution systems structure themselves and the way employers, workers and their organizations and the self-employed relate to each other. Your professional experiences may serve as harbingers of the changes which will affect vast segments of society in the years ahead.

This Symposium holds special significance for the ILO because the questions you are asked to address in the coming days are fundamental social questions of our time. They focus on employment, training and labour relations, that is, how we work, how we learn and how we relate to each other as social actors. It is important to analyse how the nature of work is being transformed by the technological advances and the global economic forces at play. Will employment in the future necessarily become more precarious? How will education and training needs be met as skills requirements continue to climb with every technological breakthrough? Will virtual enterprises become the norm? What will be the future of labour relations when close partners are physically located at great distances from each other, communicating and sharing their work in real time in an electronically mediated environment? What kind of universal labour standards are appropriate as work profiles become even more highly individualized? It is symptomatic that my opening remarks include an unusually large variety of questions. We are trying to grasp a phenomenon which is in swift motion -- and to capture it we have to use a very fast film.

The ILO has consistently promoted respect for basic human rights at work such as freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining, the elimination of forced labour, of child labour and of discrimination and the promotion of equality of opportunity and treatment between women and men. The changes now under way do not call into question these principles. They do challenge us to find appropriate mechanisms to reinforce them and to extend social dialogue.

Through dialogue between the social partners and government we can ensure that the information society will be an open, democratic one in which all can participate, respecting the need for social justice. New policies may have to be developed to balance better the concurrent need for employment security and for labour market flexibility. Traditional occupational, sectoral or even national borders may no longer be the only -- let alone the most appropriate -- ones in which the social partners can find solutions. Social dialogue may need to be extended to areas which go far beyond the bread-and-butter issues of the past to include aspects of globalization, enterprise innovation, competitiveness, job creation, adaptability, or the ongoing acquisition of portable skills.

This forum is an open one. Unlike many meetings in this house, the Symposium does not foresee any negotiated outcome in the form of joint resolutions, conclusions or recommendations. You are invited to engage in a great conversation in which your hopes, your concerns, your critical analysis and your own conclusions and suggestions will find expression. What we are seeking is the widest possible exchange of views among our tripartite constituents as well as your guidance regarding the challenges to be addressed by the ILO and its member States in order to ensure that we approach our goals of greater social justice as we enter the twenty-first century.

Part 2

The meaning of the information
society for governments,
employers and workers

Towards a new partnership for government,
employers and workers
Barbara Motzney⁽¹⁸⁾

The issues paper prepared for this Symposium provides an important point of departure for my remarks today. It suggests that the evolution of leisure and information products industries -- what I will call the "content sector" -- is an indicator of the emerging post-industrial information based economy. It may be a harbinger of the future, showing us what it means to live and work, produce and consume in the global information society, the GIS.

This is a relatively new idea. For years, national and international discussion and research have focused on the value, nature and policy frameworks for the infrastructure. It is only in the past couple of years that the truly transformative power -- not only economic, but social and cultural -- of the deployment of information and communications technologies has been generally acknowledged. The research and policy agenda is beginning now to consider the content. Why is this critical? We believe that there are two reasons.

First, because the industries which make up the content sector are, by their very nature, knowledge-intensive and based upon the information and communications technologies, the ICTs. An examination of these industries will provide important indications of how the GIS will affect the world economy as a whole.

The second reason arises from our vision of the GIS. In Brussels in 1995, the G7 ministers articulated eight principles for the GIS, which were subsequently supported in spirit by APEC and by over 40 countries at the Information Society and Development Conference in South Africa in May 1996. One consistent principle affirms the need for cultural and linguistic diversity of content. With this principle, countries have acknowledged that in order to fully participate as producers and consumers in the information society, people need to see themselves reflected in the products and services that flow over the infrastructure. The growth of vibrant, creative and competitive indigenous content industries will contribute strongly to the information economy. Creative talent -- that of a painter, a computer programmer, an actor -- will be integral to the development of 3D imaging and digital cataloguing of cultural artifacts, or in the construction of attractive, user-friendly, on-demand banking services over the Internet. These new products must be produced, created and developed. Like all goods and services, they must be distributed, marketed, retailed and purchased. However, all this will take place in a new value-added network linking players from many different traditional sectors as they come together to deliver new products and services.

What is the status of the content sector in Canada? Canada is a small, geographically dispersed market in very close proximity to the world's strongest international player, whose entertainment industry is the dominant player in all of our cultural sectors. Canadian cultural policies are founded on the principle of ensuring Canadian spaces for Canadian choices and Canadian voices. The arts and culture sector, as traditionally defined, and new content industries like multimedia will be a catalyst for cultural and linguistic diversity of content. It will also be an important economic and employment engine for Canada. According to 1993-94 estimates, the direct impact of the arts and cultural sector in Canada reached $29.5 billion, with direct employment totalling 900,000 jobs. When expanding this definition to measure Canadian content in the information society by including culture and information services as well as relevant aspects of telecommunications and the computer services sectors, the value increases to more than $50 billion, or 9 per cent of the total economy, and employment totals some 1.25 million jobs.

Looking at its key components in 1993-94, Canadian broadcasting created almost 55,000 jobs and contributed $3.5 billion to the Canadian GDP. Canadian broadcast and cable industries provide broadcasting services to households. Ten years ago this meant that broadcasters created, produced or acquired television and radio programming that was scheduled and provided to households over the air or through cable. Today, this sector includes programmes and services, conventional, pay, pay-per-view and speciality programming distributed over the air, by cable, through direct home satellite or other communications technologies. Over the next five years, as the GIS emerges, broadcasting and cable technologies will define a range of audio, video, digital programmes, services and transactional undertakings from around the world that can be accessed by households through a selected technological link.

The broadcast and cable television industries have a critical strategic advantage for the information society, a technological link into the household. Technology which used to provide one-way programming is poised to become the household link to a range of products and services. The impact of this potential has begun to be felt in Canada. Over the period 1990-93 the number of cable subscribers grew by 9 per cent and revenues from discretionary cable services, primarily new speciality channels, more than doubled. In 1996, for the first time in almost a decade, total hours of television viewing increased in Canada.

This strategic advantage will not last long. New distribution technologies, such as direct-to-home satellite, the telephone industry, wireless providers and off-air broadcasting, are all positioning themselves to access households from within and across borders. The broadcasting and cable industries must be organized to meet this challenge. For the Canadian broadcasting and cable industries to effectively compete in the GIS, this means exploiting the potential of new technologies, responding to a revenue base changing from advertising to subscription revenues, and diversifying into new markets, both geographic and those created by new technologies and new market segments.

This complex and dynamic environment is reflected in the increasingly professional and highly skilled broadcasting workforce. In 1996, preliminary work was undertaken to examine employment in the ICT industries. While not definitive, results indicated that in the period 1986 to 1991, the number of people working in the broadcasting field grew by 14.5 per cent. The composition of that workforce changed significantly over the same period. Employed workers without training beyond high school dropped from 44 to 38.5 per cent of the workforce. Over the same period, employment of those with college certificates grew by some 26 per cent and those with university qualifications by almost 25 per cent. This growth in employment of those with more than secondary school training was felt in both the management and clerical fields. Similar trends are evident in the emerging multimedia sector where creative and cultural content are being brought to bear in non-traditional areas and new product extensions.

In Canada this young industrial sector is growing at a rate which outpaces the general economy. In the five years ending 1993-94 the traditional cultural industries most closely involved with CD-ROM production, book publishers and exclusive agents, showed revenue growth of 16 per cent and film producers reported a 71 per cent increase in revenues during the same period.

Preliminary research has revealed that Canadian multimedia companies are relatively young, privately held and marginally profitable. They tend to be short-lived project-based consortia, multidisciplinary and involved in a range of activities. They are focused on the business, educational and government markets. Key factors in their success include innovation, domestic and international market research, the relevancy of the product, the demand for Canadian products, access to production financing and human resources. It is interesting to note that the multidimensional project orientation of these companies, which brings together creative, technical and administrative talents, is similar to that of traditional Canadian cultural industries. This new segment of the content sector is not that different from its predecessors. Here again the main policy challenges will be to ensure that Canadian producers have access to the new distribution systems, both domestically and internationally, and that Canadian voices have a significant presence in the information society.

So what does convergence and the GIS mean for the Canadian worker in the content sector? The content industries are looking for skilled, educated and flexible workers who will contribute effectively to the projects at hand. Knowledge is the key resource, especially strategic knowledge of ICTs and their implications. Independence and flexibility are the key approach. The current content workers appear to fit these requirements according to an analysis of the 1993 Canadian Cultural Labour Force Survey undertaken last year. It found that 22 per cent more cultural workers had post-secondary education and 24 per cent more had degrees than the average worker in the Canadian labour force. It also showed that 30 per cent of cultural workers worked exclusively as self-employed and another 25 per cent did some work on that basis. However, although 65 per cent of the cultural workers surveyed reported that technological change had affected their work in the cultural sector, 30 per cent had not received training in response to the change. Two-thirds of respondents did not report a need for training at all and the most effective training fora cited were on-the-job professional development and university. Primary reasons for not taking training were cost and time. In many cases, the occupational groups most likely to have expressed a desire for training without having received it were the same groups who were most often self-employed. These findings, although preliminary, highlight a critical issue for employment in the information society. There is a clear requirement for a strong academic foundation and a broad range of technical and inter-personal skills which are continually honed and updated. How can this be achieved by the self-employed worker with no training budget or time allowance and when on-the-job training is not an option?

One of the key challenges for policy-makers, workers and employers in the emerging GIS will be access. There are three basic aspects of access necessary to develop and maintain a skilled workforce: first, physical and technical access to products and services. Do people have direct daily contact with the tools of information technology and the network services available?; second, affordable access to information networks and indigenous content; and third, education, skills and aptitudes appropriate for citizen access. Do people have the know-how to work constructively with the bit-stream? Are they digitally literate? Without access, one cannot participate in the global information society as an employee of the economic engine, as a citizen in this source of social cohesion and community, and as a consumer of new products and services.

So what should be the role of government? In the 1990s, financial imperatives and a citizenry seeking greater transparency and accountability in the action of government led to a critical and continual rethinking of the core responsibilities of national-level governments. Officials and politicians are now asking: Should the government be involved? If so, how? Can anyone else -- another level of government, the private sector, civil society -- do this more efficiently and effectively? Will this enhance the ability of our citizens to meet the challenges and changing patterns of employment required in a globally integrated economy?

The role of government is to serve its people. Governments must balance the social and economic needs of its people as citizens -- for cultural heritage preservation, to ensure a national presence in the information society and for job creation -- with the needs of its people as shareholders, employers and workers requiring an environment of fair and sustainable competition. Policy deliberations and debate centre around finding the balance between these seemingly conflicting bottom lines: citizen values and consumer or market-place values. The G7 principles are our vision. Government must act through leadership and by creating a facilitating national environment in which these principles will be realized. Efforts must also be made to ensure that national environments harmonize on a multilateral level for the full vision to become reality.

What does the GIS mean for governments, employers and workers? It means a new partnership. Nowhere is the global information society fully operational and integrated. The movement towards a global information society, in which the full potential social, cultural and economic benefits accrue to all who seek them, involves significant structural and organizational adjustment as well as a rethinking and recasting of the roles of all actors in society. The traditional value chain describing production in the industrial society, in which each linear step adds value, is being replaced in the information society by a complex, open and constantly changing value-added network.

This value-added network will depend on effective individuals who are able to participate actively as citizens, consumers and employees using and producing with new technologies; high performance teams, which bring the right people together from many disciplines, acting flexibly and innovatively to serve the needs of clients or accomplish a task; and innovative organizations able flexibly to recreate themselves through extended enterprise linkages. Realizing these objectives for the employment environment will depend upon a framework which includes access to information and technology, recognition and support for the non-traditional employment related to the information society, and collaboration between business, workers, unions and government to explore opportunities for training and continual learning. This framework also requires an enabling policy and regulatory environment, both domestic and international, to create a balance between consumer and citizen values while protecting basic rights. Creation of these value-added networks which successfully meet the challenges of the global information society, can only be achieved through unprecedented levels of cooperation and partnership.

In conclusion, I would pose a number of questions which might lead us to a better understanding of the impact of convergence on the content sector. The arts and culture sector, regarded as one of the principal content providers, has not traditionally been seen as an integral part of or link to other business sectors of the economy. This linkage must be better understood. How are the ICTs relating to employment and the workplace? Are new content jobs different from those in the traditional cultural sector? Who is creating these jobs and how? What are their characteristic forms? How do they grow? What government policies could support this new growth?

As policy-makers, we need to identify emerging employment trends in order to invest in the right education and training opportunities. Do we have the right information? Are we asking the right questions, collecting the right data? Are we using industrial society models to describe the information society? Does this provide the accurate picture we need to make the right policy or business decisions? How can individuals, business, labour, communities and institutions work together to promote a culture that values skills and lifelong learning?

The GIS is all about linkages, the linking of networks, content and people through a variety of technologies and in a variety of new ways. These linkages among industrial sectors, governments, companies, institutions and individuals are the foundation of the way forward.

The German approach to the
information society
Jürgen Warnken⁽¹⁹⁾

Multimedia convergence is an extremely important topic for the future. When the German Institute for Labour and Employment Research looked at employment in information-related sectors, it found that roughly half the workforce was already employed in this sector. According to their prognosis, the figure will be over 55 per cent by the year 2010. The United States has very similar figures. Early last year, the German Government undertook an extensive analysis in order to draw up a report on the German path to the information society. We wanted to describe it, to examine its features and to identify the aspects needed to ensure competitiveness in this field for our country. Based on this work, we elaborated an action programme which touches several areas of the economy, such as the hardware and software industries, network service providers and those who provide content. Taken together, all these business activities might be called the "information sector". It is probably impossible to distinguish strictly these areas: there are already enterprises which provide both networks and content, and there are strategic alliances between enterprises in various sectors which can therefore no longer be considered separately.

There are two basic tasks which we have set for ourselves: first, the creation of an adequate legal framework; and second, the development of a policy which supports the integration of scientific discoveries and technical innovations into business practice and raises the level of acceptance among employers and workers who are affected by them. The objective of this policy might be summarized as "enhancing the speed of diffusion".

Let us first look at the legislative field. In Germany we are currently discussing a new Information and Communications Services Bill, which would cover all kinds of new information providers, such as on-line services. Employment legislation is not contained in this new Bill, because the Federal Ministry of Labour currently considers present labour legislation to be sufficient and appropriate to deal with employment issues in the media sector. Therefore, there is no need at present for legislative action in this area. Although the definition of "enterprise" might have to be amended in some cases -- in order to include homeworkers or teleworkers, for example -- these and other adjustments can probably be carried out by the social partners in the process of collective bargaining or at the enterprise level. There is already an indication of the first collective agreement between German Telecom and the German PTT, which covers these new forms of enterprise.

Let me now come to the second major task. A wide dissemination of policy information, a high rate of diffusion of technical knowledge into innovation, and increased acceptance amongst the population at large and, of course, among workers in general as well as for those who are employed in the information sector, are crucial for a country's success in a global economy. The German Government is active in several areas and I would like to highlight a few of them. We are trying to intensify the dialogue with all groups -- the scientific community as well as trade unions. Furthermore, we have created a forum called "INFO 2000", in order to bring information society questions down to the enterprise level. One hundred and fifty institutions took part in the opening congress of INFO 2000 and various working groups are currently dealing with specific topics, such as "Work in the information society", or "Questions of re-skilling, of acquiring new knowledge and adapting to the new circumstances".

In addition, government-based agencies also have a very important function as catalysts or initiators -- by starting pilot projects, for example on telework, or by adopting new information and communication technologies for improving public administration or public health services (telemedicine). Clearly, in the field of new telecommunication technologies, it is particularly important that we do not limit ourselves to the national framework. An inherent part of the action programme we have designed includes cooperation with European and international organizations. The European Commission has already begun to examine the effects of these new technologies in the field of employment, for example. In its first consideration on future research activities it has stated the need to intensify efforts in this field of R&D. Furthermore, one has to appreciate that the European Commission in its Green Paper "Living and working in the information society", clearly placed the person, the human being, at the very forefront of all considerations. Finally, I welcome the fact that the ILO, by organizing this Symposium, has become involved with these questions. Bearing in mind these basic developments on national and global markets, we have to ask what the outcome will be for employment, the organization of labour and social security.

I now want to mention two specific issues related to the information society: education and training, and telework.

Regarding qualifications, more and more jobs in the future will demand an ability to solve complex and abstract problems. Current measures regarding professional or vocational training and further training may no longer be adequate. Initiatives have to start in school. The competence of pupils and young students will have to be greatly enhanced. To this end an initiative has been taken by the federal Government and various other sponsors to encourage schoolchildren to find out about electronic communication media, such as the Internet. The market for electronic educational products is expanding and providing a wide range of opportunities for schoolchildren and students. Familiarity with information technology has become an important precondition for success. It has to be acquired at an early age in order to provide the basis for the lifelong learning process.

Telework, from our point of view, is definitely a form of work for the future -- both in Germany as well as in most other European Union countries. There are very few people who work in this particular way today, although the number is greater than one might think. In Germany current estimates put the number of teleworkers at between 10,000 and 150,000. This wide span is basically due to different definitions and indicates that there is still some uncertainty as to who can be considered a teleworker.

We have taken an initiative to identify obstacles to telework and to increase its acceptance in the future; we have also drawn up an overview of the current situation.

An information and motivation campaign is being launched. It will include a consultation package which will cover such questions as the organizational and economic aspects of telework as well as some legal background. We have asked for expert opinion in this area, since telework can be viewed from different legal perspectives depending on whether it is done by homeworkers or carried out by independent, self-employed workers. Telework should, in our view, be carried out -- as far as possible -- in a well-defined and legally determined framework, preferably in the form of an ordinary employment contract. This would help to increase its acceptance amongst the population. We would also envisage a type of alternating telework, in which some working hours would be spent doing telework and others spent doing the job in the normal manner in order to give workers the opportunity to maintain contacts with their colleagues. The resulting consultation package will be discussed with the social partners and give rise to recommendations. This should help to remove some of the obstacles and objections to telework, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises, so that we can actually mobilize people's interests in this particular type of work and enhance its employment potential. In order to achieve this goal, there is a need to have the necessary protection for teleworkers, but this has to be coupled with the flexibility which is required for enterprises. It would be very helpful to have an international-level consensus on these topics. The motivation campaign with the consultation package is the very core of our action; but there are also other elements, for example, an attempt to make the tariffs for telecommunications in this field as attractive as possible. Furthermore, the federal Government is discussing with regional authorities whether promotion of telework in rural areas can be a successful instrument to improve the economic base of such regions.

Finally, I would like to add that several federal ministries are trying to set an example by launching pilot projects for teleworkers within their administration. To sum up, I do not think it is sufficient for governments to simply limit themselves to legislative activities. They have to be actively involved. Promotional activities such as pilot projects, which provide fora for dialogue as well as educational measures at a very early stage, have to be supported and promoted by the government. It is also important for this dialogue to take place in conjunction with employers and workers so that the result can be acceptable for all the social partners. Furthermore, cooperation at the international level is essential. We must also ensure that despite the changes ahead, new forms of employment will be organized on the basis of accepted social standards.

Issues affecting the workforce in the
transition towards an information society
Chris Warren⁽²⁰⁾

Anyone who follows the discussions on new technologies in the popular media is immediately struck by the high degree of enthusiasm for new technology. This heightened sense of techno-enthusiasm among technology's partisans has in many areas substituted hype for genuine debate. Of course, there is genuine substance behind the enthusiasm. Indeed, for those of us who work in the media and entertainment industries, the packet of changes that fall under the heading of media convergence mark the most fundamental changes in how we work and how we see ourselves since the development of popular entertainment and mass media over 100 years ago.

But the changes are not just matters of technology; they are not just matters of bits and bytes. I want to illustrate this point by highlighting a few coincidences from my own country, Australia. This month, my union is signing a new collective agreement with Rupert Murdoch's Newsgroup, which covers, among other things, electronic uses of the works produced by the journalists, artists and photographers employed by the group's daily newspapers in Australia. Also this month we are negotiating an agreement for performers and technicians working at the Newsgroup's new Fox Film Studios being built in Sydney, which will be one of the largest film-makers in the world, probably the largest outside Hollywood and India. This month we have also served a claim on News Limited on behalf of the professional footballers employed by the group's breakaway competition set up to attract subscribers to the Fox pay television channel in Australia.

I highlight these three things not to brag about the activities of my union, but to highlight two points: first, convergence is now the rule not the exception in the information industries; and second that convergence is driven more by financial and economic imperatives than by technological ones. As academic writers on technology are fond of pointing out, new technologies are not found by accident, they are found because people are looking for them. In the media and entertainment industries, these technologies are being found and developed because there is money to be made out of them and power that can be wielded through them. In other words, the changes that affect us as workers in the information industries are as much, if not more, social and economic as they are technological.

How do these changes affect us in our day-to-day work? First, the sort of people we work for are changing dramatically. We are more and more likely to be working for fewer and fewer employers. The information industry is, more than most, dominated by large global corporations. At this stage there is no clear trend as to the type of companies these may be. Some are large content companies like News Limited; some are toying with content-carrier mergers, such as the agreement between MCI and the Newsgroup; some are software-hardware mixes, like Sony; and some are just old-fashioned conglomerates like Westinghouse. Clearly the tensions within these transnational corporations are common to other industries, but they undermine the industrial and creative control that workers had in traditional media and entertainment companies. It also heightens the struggle for the use of the material we create.

Having paid us a wage, large companies seek to extract multiple uses out of our work for no additional payment and often with no say on the part of the original creator as to how their material is used or misused. For workers in the information industry, control and regulation of intellectual property are one of the central domains of struggle. It need not be of course, because the struggle is first over money -- fair pay for the work we create -- and second, for the moral integrity of our work. Most employers would at least pay lip-service to these principles -- but, in practice, few employers anywhere in the world have been prepared to negotiate seriously with their employees on these issues. Yet nothing goes so much to the heart of the employer-employee relationship for creative workers as the use of the work we actually create.

The second issue, which is related to the first, is that our employers are now more likely to be operating in the private sector than the public. In all countries there is a declining commitment to the concept of the media as a public service, which can be seen most evidently in the decline in governmental support for public broadcasting.

The third issue concerns the growth of the contingent workforce in the information industry. Whether they are known as casuals, freelancers, fixed-term contractors or teleworkers, we are seeing an increasing use of contractual arrangements that fall outside the traditional concept of direct, continuing and relatively secure employment. This reduces the security of all workers and provides greater opportunities for employers to seek greater control over the information itself. We can see this most crudely now in the attempt of the major North American publishers to use the enormous disparity in negotiating power to impose contracts on their freelance writers which give all rights over their work for all uses to the publishers. This is the reality of exploitation that underpins those user-friendly buzz words of an independent and flexible workforce.

This is also affecting the distribution of work on a global scale, as large corporations are able to use technological change to distribute work from organized, high-wage countries to unorganized low-wage countries, whether it be information data-processing in the Philippines or the development of cartoon frames in the Republic of Korea. Related to this is the changing composition of the workforce within the information industries. There has been and continues to be a substantial decline in traditional jobs in what can be described as information delivery systems, telecommunications maintenance and newspaper publishing, to use the most obvious examples, and there has been a contemporaneous increase in employment in content creation and generation. Parallel to this internal shift has been a change in the gender composition of the workforce. Women are an increasing component of the workforce and in many sectors are the majority. This changes the nature of industrial demands and both organized labour and employers have to respond to meet those needs. Indeed, there is a responsibility on all the industrial partners -- unions, employers and governments -- to ensure that the pattern of discrimination and, indeed, in many cases, outright exclusion of women from traditional information sectors, is not replicated in the new information industries.

The centralization of ownership within the information sector of the economy also seriously threatens the cultural diversity of the world. For workers in the media and entertainment industry, this in turn provides a major threat to our ability to carry out our work. The battles around the world for local and national media entertainment structures are important because of the jobs they create in their own countries. However, they are important in their own right as well as a way of protecting and extending the genuine cultural diversity of our planet.

Finally, it also needs to be noted that, while technology has largely been used to strengthen centralized control over the information industry, it also contains its own alternative. It does provide niches for new sources of information and new ways of delivering this information. It should provide the means by which integrity and quality are strengthened, not undermined. We as workers in the industry may sometimes find ourselves in conflict with individual employers regarding changes to our work. To a certain extent, that is inevitable. However, I believe that the information industry and the communities we serve both benefit greatly from a trained, skilled workforce with a genuine stake in what we do and what we create.

General discussion on the meaning of
the information society for governments,
employers and workers

Tony Lennon of the Workers' group opened the ensuing debate by pointing out that the role of governments was not only important in terms of facilitating the development of well-regulated information technology but also in terms of content -- particularly since States were significant producers of content. In many countries it was the State which either owned content providers, such as film and broadcasting companies, or subsidized them, such as the arts industries. Although there might be a decline in these tendencies, the State as a content producer still played a considerable role in multimedia.

Michel Muller of the Workers' group stressed the importance of levelling out the increasing inequalities of the information society we were facing. For governments, this task included both providing access to the new technology for all and improving knowledge via training. Governments should not lessen their involvement, but rather participate and help reduce inequalities. For business people and entrepreneurs, the imperative of reducing inequalities meant meeting their social responsibilities, which could be achieved either through collective bargaining agreements or through international rules.

Walter Durling, Employer Vice-Chairman, observed a certain amount of pessimism about new technological developments among the Workers' group. In his view, current developments had not created greater inequality but just the opposite, namely greater access to information and, consequently, liberation. He welcomed the absence of regulation as a boost for human creativity which could not flourish or blossom in an atmosphere which was over-regulated. Humanity should be given the opportunity to travel along the newly created information superhighway without any road signs. Everybody ought to have access to this highway.

Tony Lennon stressed that there was neither fear nor a negative assessment of the new technological developments on the part of workers, as the Employer Vice-Chairman had implied. Yet these developments had brought a whole range of social issues in their wake, such as an increase in unstable forms of employment and a shift in social policies of governments due to the growth of transnational ownership. All these issues had to be addressed. To simply leave the market alone in its aim to maximize profit was certainly insufficient if smooth development was the paramount objective.

Pier Verderio of the Workers' group stated that we were witnessing a transition period with an unknown outcome. The final results depended not only on technological developments, but on various other aspects as well, such as privatization, market liberalization and globalization. All these were interrelated. No one could know with certainty the number and nature of jobs which would be created by the convergence process. None the less, negotiations, dialogue and, above all, regulation were indispensable during this ongoing transition. There was clearly a need for rules. Even the call for flexibility had to be tackled within a regulated framework. Multimedia convergence could provoke a crisis in taxation. It was tremendously complicated to tax the added value of immaterial products in the content sector. There was the very fundamental problem of how to finance the social security system in the future.

Frank Werneke of the Workers' group observed that it was not the information sector in general which faced deregulation -- new legislation in Germany and the EU proved rather the opposite -- but merely the social aspects which lacked regulation. For the Workers it was unacceptable simply to exclude the labour factor from new legislation. Governments should be urged to tackle these issues immediately. Many problems had already emerged, such as the disappearance of conventional, permanent jobs. On both the employers' and workers' side, many members were no longer linked to organizations. This made collective agreements difficult or even impossible. Governments ought to provide a legal framework in order to lend structure to the information and communication society as it developed.

The Workers' group urged that in a field as heavily populated by freelancers as the media and graphical sectors, so-called independent workers ought to be treated exactly the same as permanent workers, as far as that was possible. They should not be viewed as employers in their own right.

Kevin Tinsley, the representative of the Government of the United Kingdom, drew attention to the clash between workers' desire to see the self-employed provided with the same rights as the employed and the need of enterprises for a high degree of flexibility in order to respond quickly to changes in the market. Governments had to find the balance between these two conflicting desires. Existing inequalities between employees were not entirely negative, since one person's inequality was often another person's incentive. However, access was a crucial question. More access could only be obtained by making equipment cheaper. Strong market competition was generally the best way to achieve cheaper prices.

Tony Lennon approved of the principle of balancing job security with flexibility, but argued that a fair balance had not yet been achieved, at least not in the United Kingdom, where creative content workers had been asked for flexibility on working time, on periods of employment, on rates of pay and even in their home lives, whilst, at the same time, being forced to do without job security, social benefits or regular salaries. It was crucial to correct the existing imbalances in the rights of workers employed in the multimedia industries. If the issues of that core sector were not solved from the outset, then it might well happen that the problems could soon spread to other industries.

Dominique Schalchli, the representative of the Government of France, called for a clearer distinction between the different levels of the discussion. First, the impact of multimedia convergence on the information and media sector was at the heart of the debate. Second, the effects of the new information technology on the world of work in general might be discussed. The future of teleworking was one issue within this wider category. Finally, the importance of the convergence process for society as a whole formed the broadest scope of the debate. There was a need to distinguish clearly between those very different levels and to avoid generalizations.

Katherine Sand of the Workers' group drew attention to the difficulties of reconciling the demand for preserving local content and linguistic and cultural diversity with notions of making products cheaper. Quality entertainment did not come cheap. Local content was in the interest of nationals in all countries as well as of the workforce. She asked for further information on the experience of Canada, a neighbour of the largest entertainment provider in the world.

Philip O'Reilly of the Employers' group evaluated the growth of multimedia convergence overall as a positive thing both for employers and workers. The role of governments was to facilitate the growth of the information society in order to avoid lagging behind a global evolution which inevitably would come. Convergence was likely to be a job creator rather than destroyer, and governments had a vital role in ensuring that such job creation happened. He disagreed with the assertion that the multimedia environment entailed more capacity for abuse of journalists' work and that the trend to internationalization in the media's control had caused a threat to indigenous content. In the newspaper industry in his own country, New Zealand, indigenous content was guaranteed despite major ownership from abroad. Journalists were very positive towards the alternative use of their work in a multimedia or on-line environment.

Eszter Gérecz Kertészné, the representative of the Government of Hungary, stated that the information society and concomitant globalization offered fantastic opportunities for small countries, such as her own, to participate more fully in international science and business via networked computer systems and worldwide electronic connections. In accordance with the suggestions of a 1995 paper on its national information strategy, the Hungarian Government has tried to take part in education and training in new technology in order to enable the citizenry to actively use opportunities.

Response of the panel members

Barbara Motzney made clear that the role of government as a facilitator was not a passive role but a very active one. However inevitable in its nature, the convergence process could and ought to be influenced and directed. It was not the objectives themselves which governments had to change but the means of achieving them. Thus, a modification of the ways government had carried out its policies was under debate. In the content sector, the Canadian Government had tried to comply with the ongoing changes by launching a new convergence policy in summer 1996, which followed the move towards a more competitive environment whilst, at the same time, maintaining an appropriate contribution by all players in the Canadian content sector and broadcasting system. The idea of government as a producer and owner of content was unfamiliar in Canada, where government saw itself as a facilitator and catalyst. Instead certain support mechanisms for the arts and cultural industries had been set up to secure "Canadian voices and Canadian choices". These mechanisms had to be re-examined as to their suitability for a multimedia environment, where new industries and different players were emerging. The Canadian Government was developing a strategy for Canadian content in the information society which should be ready by the end of 1997.

Jürgen Warnken stated that opening the market for information providers was the primary task for governments. Concerning the question of new legal measures in Germany, such as the recent Information and Communications Services Bill, the area of labour law had been left out for a number of reasons. First, it was still not possible to determine exactly the extent and the type of amendments which would be required in that field. Existing legislation had proved to be sufficient in meeting current employment trends. Responses to new phenomena, such as telework, could well be provided within the existing framework of normal labour legislation; consequently, new rules were not yet required. On the specific issue of freelancers in the creative content sector, the high percentage of self-employed journalists, artists or entertainers was not a new trend but a traditional one. Many of those workers would not wish to be forced into a network of regulations. Although various cases had illustrated that some self-employed workers in this sector were simply pushed into such unstable forms of employment, these cases were not yet on a very large scale. Therefore, this issue had to be kept in mind and carefully followed for the future.

Chris Warren listed three essential tasks for governments. The first and major responsibility was to ensure access to the new technology. This required a clear proactive strategy, often including substantial public infrastructure investments. Second, governments had to encourage local content in a very active way in order to gain domestic cultural benefits from changing technologies and to avoid the total dominance of the United States. The third responsibility for governments was to refrain from the temptation to censor new technologies, such as on-line services. Even the United States, traditionally a guardian of freedom of speech, had not been immune to that temptation, let alone countries with more dictatorial predilections. The multiple use and reuse of works produced by creative employees was an important issue. While those workers welcomed new technical opportunities, they still had a right to share in the financial benefits that employers got out of multiple uses of their work. Moreover, cultural workers should have the right to decide on the multiple uses of their output. Moral rights were a matter of enormous importance in a converging environment. Finally, regarding the increasing number of self-employed workers, the argument that these workers wanted flexibility in their work and, thus, preferred being self-employed, might well be true -- but that did not imply that they wanted to give up the fundamental social and industrial rights that full-time employees had. They had asked for these rights but employers had refused them.

Part 3

The information society:
The global challenge

Information haves and have-nots:
The global challenge
Kareem Boussaid⁽²¹⁾

In 1994 at the World Telecommunications Conference, the American Vice-President, Mr. Al Gore, stimulated the imagination of the participants and the public in general by sharing with the delegations his view of what he calls the global information infrastructure. He highlighted a problem that the ITU Conference and all bodies, be they intergovernmental or non-governmental, need to consider and try to solve, that is, the gap which could be created within the information society between what we might call the information "haves" and "have-nots". Action needs to be undertaken to try to reduce the gap separating the developing and developed countries in terms of telecommunications.

There can be no information society without a telecommunications network because all of the applications depend on this network. The gap in the development of these networks is quite clear. The high-income countries, where 15 per cent of the world's population lives, have 71 per cent of the world's telephone lines. Telephone density -- that is, the number of telephone lines per 100 inhabitants -- has gone from 38 to 49, which represents an increase of 11 per cent in those countries, whereas in the rest of the world the progression has only been half a per cent from 2 to 2.5. This unequal distribution of telephone lines in the world has not really changed much in the last ten years. Some 50 million people are on official waiting lists for a telephone and in reality there are probably quite a few more than that waiting. In a recent study, the ITU estimated that the unsatisfied demand in India was at least 10 million people, that is three times the number of people who are officially on a waiting list. In 1992 some 50 countries, representing more than half of the world's population, had a telephone density of less than one. As long as the world's population does not have sufficient telecommunications infrastructure, the vision of a global information society will be purely utopic.

If we move from one region to another, the figures vary. The most striking case is that of Africa, which is very much behind in terms of developing its basic infrastructure for a number of reasons. Whenever it begins to catch up, the progress achieved is overwhelmed by the increase in population. Despite positive growth in absolute terms, in relative terms the overall figure is negative due to population growth. A second obstacle is the lack of investment. We have to look at this from two standpoints. First, investment in basic infrastructure has only reached about 25 per cent of telecommunications revenues, whereas you need at least twice that much in order to achieve a satisfactory result. The second problem is that such investments are not creating the same level of development because the basic infrastructure is not in place. You need 1,500 subscribers for example in an OECD country in order to set up a functioning network, but you need 25 per cent more in a developing country. These countries have to purchase their equipment with foreign exchange and that creates a serious problem because of international indebtedness.

Two further obstacles of increasing importance have to do with inappropriate structures, whether in terms of regulation or a lack of sufficient regional cooperation in the area of telecommunications. We have a regional organization that covers virtually every geographical area. In Africa, this organization exists on paper, but is not really functioning. In the Middle East the telecommunications union was dissolved and the council connected with it does not have the resources needed to establish adequate telecommunications policies.

The economic dimensions of the information society are enormous: some $500 million were spent on telecommunications alone last year, but trillions more in electronics, electronically controlled financial transactions, transport, aviation, etc. The tremendous wealth involved should not lead one to assume that the demarcation line between information "haves" and "have-nots" falls along the same line as that between developed and developing countries. Some developing countries, such as Malaysia, with well-defined information and telecommunications policies have moved rapidly ahead, whereas within even the wealthiest countries wide gaps can be observed in terms of access to information technology.

At the beginning of my statement I said that telecommunications are the basis, the foundation, the backbone of the information society. Telecommunications require basic infrastructure and, in turn, serve as a basic infrastructure to all other services. In order to weigh the obstacles in the way of achieving such an information society and of partaking fully of information resources, we need to include other parameters, in particular, the penetration of the information industry. Here we need to look at the distribution of computers per thousand inhabitants, software distribution and that of interface and protocol industries. The information society rests on the convergence of telecommunications, the computer industry and the content industry. This third element, which includes databanks, information services, audiovisual production, films, photos and other audiovisual products, is very important.

In the developing countries the content industry has hardly been developed with two exceptions: India and Egypt. The computer industry is under-represented with the exception of a certain amount of software development in India and the emergence of an information technology industry in South-East Asia. As for the communications industry, the carrying capacity of telecommunications networks in developing countries is so low that an emergency plan including investments of at least $200 million would be required in order to really get it on its feet. In order to reduce this bill, we are calling on partners in industry, the private sector and in government as well to adapt regulations in order to facilitate the introduction of new technologies, cable network, satellite networks and broadcasting networks.

Multimedia convergence and labour issues
in the telecoms industry in Malaysia
Mohd. Shafie BP Mammal⁽²²⁾

Telecommunications is the largest growth area in the Malaysian economy. The developments that are taking place are aimed to keep abreast of the changes occurring in the technology of telecommunications, computer and satellite transmissions. We are fast approaching the convergence of the three services as the industries progress towards the information society. Malaysia is a world link to the global information and infrastructures which form the path to the information economy. Upgrading the existing technologies and services, Malaysian telecom network operators are eager to upgrade the network and also to create a pool of workers who will be multiskilled. The newly commissioned Telecom University, the University of Malaya and the various technical colleges are offering courses which teach the applications of new technologies. Multimedia is a "hot" subject among students who know that whatever field they major in, they will need appropriate technical knowledge as well. The convergence of the various information systems into one information superhighway is unbeatable.

Structural unemployment has resulted as manual operators in analogue systems have been made redundant at Telecom Malaysia and other operators in the telecommunications sector. Government, employers and workers helped by trade unions are finding ways and means to contain the impact of the mismatch between available skills and those in demand. Quality education is a government priority and many restrictions on foreign study have been lifted to prepare young workers to gain high quality education and multiple skills. Institutions are well aware that the students should be exposed to a large dose of computer skills so as to equip them for the future.

Changes in labour relations. The emergence of multimedia and the convergence of information industries have had a tremendous impact on the labour market and on wages for permanent workers, contingent workers and part-time workers. The permanent workers are unionized. The union makes sure that the members who are displaced or become redundant get retraining to fit into a new environment. But people who sign contracts and work at home on the home computer or on a network and those who are paid at piece-rate -- according to their output -- are outside the control of the unions and associations which look after permanent workers. The terms and conditions of the contingent workers are negotiated on an individual basis and thus the rate may fluctuate according to supply and demand. This trend is going to affect the effectiveness of trade unions, because the contingent workers and independent contractors have no one to represent them and to coordinate their social and industrial relations with their employer. The federations of unions in telecommunications are best able to tackle the issues involving representation for multimedia workers.

As we approach the information superhighway, there are some uncertainties that we are unable to address at this juncture, for example, whether the replacement of old skills with new ones is taking place as fast as developments in the multimedia industry and information technology. We notice there are clear distinctions between simply acquiring new skills and adapting to new modes of work as the old skills are phased out. The Government is looking seriously into providing schoolchildren with a large dose of computer knowledge while they are still in school.

Future industrial relations for IT and multimedia workers. The National Labour Advisory Council in Malaysia, being a tripartite body, is the right place to discuss the impending changes in employment patterns rising from the convergence of the multimedia services. The outsourcing of routine multimedia work will be the subject of future discussions in the council.

Multimedia convergence: Focus on Africa
Wilfred Kiboro⁽²³⁾

In Africa in the closing years of the twentieth century the newspaper industry faces serious and immediate challenges. The reader frequency of the newspapers is going down and younger readers are turning to other media for information and entertainment. Given this scenario, the newspapers' ability to attract classified advertising is gradually being eroded and also the newspapers are facing increasing competition from the World Wide Web as providers of information and as a medium for advertising. The physical medium is becoming less and less important, indeed almost irrelevant. Magazines are now being published electronically. Books are becoming interactive. Laser discs contain screenplays. Interviews appear in almost any kind of media. The media no longer flows from the artist to the consumer in fixed forms, but has become very malleable.

This multimedia symposium gives us the first opportunity -- as governments, employers and employees -- to talk together, to re-examine some of the impacts that these developments are causing in our various situations and perhaps to come up with some recommendations regarding areas of mutual concern as we go forward. That multimedia is becoming increasingly popular for a wide variety of businesses is in no doubt. Entertainment, educational applications, marketing presentations, video games, information services, television, cable television, and so on are all becoming highly interactive. It has become difficult to tell where television and cable stop and where interactive applications begin.

In developing countries and in many other parts of the world, information -- that primary ingredient of multimedia -- is still controlled by governments. The licensing of newspapers, radio and television stations and even journalism, in some cases, still remains a means of controlling information flow and creating a form of censorship. Those countries in Africa and other developing countries which still see the need to have rather draconian licensing should perhaps re-examine their position because some of this legislation is not particularly conducive to the development of the media and may cause their countries to lag hopelessly behind. In the world today, trying to confine technology within a very narrow geographic boundary does not seem to make a great deal of sense.

The second point I would like to make is to note the obvious imbalance between the developed and the developing countries in terms of access to information. Most of the Internet host computers are in the United States and the others are mostly in Europe. Those of us from developing countries do have a certain apprehension as to what that means. Will the "haves" continue to dominate the "have-nots" just because they happen to have access to information and superior technology?

Finally, the radical shifts that are taking place in the workplace are generating widespread concern. In the years ahead, the definition of a worker is going to become even more difficult. In content creation in the multimedia environment, it is very difficult to know who the journalist is, who the editor is, and who the technologist is that will bring it all together. At what point will telecom workers become involved as well as the people in television and other entities that come to create new products? Traditionally in the print media, for instance, we had printers, journalists, sales and marketing staff and so on, but now all of them are working on one floor from one desk. I can see the concern of the unions at the thought that they are going to be losing ground. Employers should not dismiss the workers' concern in this regard. If there is the loss of a platform for collective bargaining, are the workers' rights going to be taken care of automatically by the employers? Can the workers expect that the employers will take care of their own individual rights, and so on? Although these issues may not be addressed in this Symposium, I hope that the three groups represented here will at least end up with a better appreciation of the other groups' concerns.

I represent an employers' group. From the employers' point of view, the critical issue is survival in the business. The name of the game is to remain in business, to survive in business and to prosper in business. If we do not do that, the workers cannot be guaranteed their jobs. On the other hand, the workers must have genuine concerns about whether they will have jobs tomorrow.

It is my view that the people with a good basic education are going to find it probably much easier to integrate and adapt to the new areas that multimedia convergence will bring about. But in Africa -- and in other developing countries where most of the workers probably have not even had a secondary education -- these changing demands create a whole new ball game. These people are not easily retrainable to cope with the new challenges to which this new environment is giving rise -- and this problem needs to be addressed at some point.

Among the global challenges posed by the proliferation of the multimedia in the workplace, we should think about the following issues:

the shift in the definition of workers. This calls for adjustments in such inputs as the education system that will prepare future workers for the challenges of tomorrow's workplace. Training systems within companies need to focus on creating multiskilled workers, since having a single skill is no longer adequate in today's labour market, let alone tomorrow's;
the security of information, particularly when it involves cash transactions;
the declining influence of unions, the loss of collective bargaining power by the workers and all that that implies; and
the various laws that the governments must surely enact related to multimedia.

Finally, the huge gap in the level of technology between the developed and the developing countries needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency. Related to this concern are the continued domination of Third World countries by developed countries in controlling global information flow, the threat to indigenous culture and the need to find the means to protect our cultural diversity.

Information technology needs to be brought to affordable levels. I have a dream that perhaps in our lifetime in Africa, we will see villagers being able to access Internet from their rural villages where today there is no water and no electricity. We hope they will be able to watch Sky News on their portable televisions, but maybe this is just a dream.

Multimedia convergence: The Egyptian experience
Nagwa Abdalla Abd-El Hafez⁽²⁴⁾

The world today, through the use of international networks such as the Internet and the nascent superhighway, is becoming one society, a global information society. The Egyptian Government has expressed a clear desire to participate in this society and has thus emphasized the development of high technology industries, especially software development. Much work has been carried out at the school and university levels. A cabinet-level Information and Decision-making Support Centre, IDSC, has also been established. It is a major centre providing high-level training for the brightest graduates from universities. It employs experts and consultants to assist government agencies or businesses to build computer centres or to carry out other activities.

I would like to say a few words about multimedia, its impact on children, and what we are doing in Egypt today to prepare children for the information society of the future. We have been carrying out practical trials using multimedia programmes to transfer information to children and nowadays the software programmes available to any can access this information, which is communicated to children in an attractive way through graphics, cartoons, music and video clips.

We have developed a new media production city called 6 October, with an information centre specifically for children. The centre is equipped with a computer network which provides access to children's cultural entertainment and educational information through touch-screen computers in an amusing and enjoyable way. The aim of this centre is to familiarize children with multimedia and information technologies generally. We began by making tailor-made software to serve as a multimedia guide. We have also created a multimedia programme so that visitors can have any information about any place in this city, or any event of interest.

Second, we have set up an electronic library. We have brought together encyclopaedias and other information converted from books onto compact discs, and made them available to everybody. We have used a CD tower, consisting of 35 CD drives, and connected it to the network via a multimedia programme. The child can select the required information or CD by simply touching the appropriate icon. The provision of this electronic library was the second aim of the centre.

Our third task was to set up a standard book library for children. The title and date of publication of the book can be entered and the child can retrieve it easily. In order to attract the child to use the computer and be familiar with it, we have added something which is particularly interesting for children, that is, a summary form. After reading a book, the child can write a personal evaluation of the book on the computer by himself, print it out and take it home. Afterwards we can collect these summaries and criticisms which give us the opportunity to re-evaluate the books from the viewpoints of the children themselves.

The fourth aim of this network is to provide Internet access. The whole computer network is now connected via a leased line to the Internet.

[The speaker then showed a video of children at the centre working with computers. The recording included a demonstration of the tailor-made software for the media production city. Touch screen access provided information in a combination of text, sound and video clip. A child working with the electronic library selected a CD on music as he was finding out about various musical instruments. Finally, a young schoolgirl spoke about the summary she had written of a book.]

As a developing country preparing our children for the information society of tomorrow, we must start with the schools. We need to make children computer literate from the beginning. We in Egypt have begun by familiarizing children with computers as a source both of entertainment and of information.

General discussion on the information
society: The global challenge

Thomas Lukusa Tshiananga of the Workers' group reminded the participants of the disastrous situation in his own country, Zaire. The Government had deliberately destroyed the public telephone network system, fostering the private sector and satellite telephone networks instead. Few people had access to these services. For most people, the cost of obtaining even basic information was too high. The price of a daily newspaper was several times the monthly salary of an official in the public administration or even of a university professor or doctor. Most Zairians had to confine themselves to reading the headlines while walking along the streets.

Chris Pate, Secretary of the Workers' group, stressed that globalization had clearly aggravated the polarization between rich and poor in terms of multimedia development. This could be illustrated by the specific case of the printing industries in Zimbabwe and Zambia which were in serious danger of being destroyed altogether through the opening of the borders to greater international trade. Destroying domestic printing industries, however, would mean depriving those countries of the basis for multimedia development in the future. In order to avoid that, governments ought to use certain support mechanisms, such as the Canadians had done, yet developing countries had neither the resources nor the political muscle to do so. Consequently, it had to be the role of the ILO and the United Nations system as a whole to launch a policy of supporting initiatives, coordinated at an international level. Otherwise polarization between rich and poor would get worse.

Carlos Alberto de Almeida of the Workers' group cited the tremendous gap between the poor and the rich countries and noted that it was particularly in the information industries that an ever-increasing concentration of power into very few hands could be observed. Leaving such a situation up to the market would destroy markets for national information products, undermine research centres in developing countries and, above all, weaken national cultures. He asked whether it would be possible to set up an international conference on communications in order to address these issues -- as had been proposed by his union, the Federacion Nacional de Periodistas (Brazil), in concert with the International Federation of Journalists.

Aidan White of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) expressed concern about the process of exclusion of those without access to information technology. The problem embraced not only technical, but also human resources. There was a hunger for training in the use of new information technologies. The ILO should focus attention on the most efficient use of resources for the future in order to ensure that the gulf between "the information rich" and "the information poor" did not continue to widen.

Tony Lennon of the Workers' group raised the problem of cultural domination, evidenced in the fact that the software used in the newly opened information centre for Egyptian children was provided by Microsoft and in the English language. The Arabic market was apparently still not large enough for those computer programmes to be translated into domestic languages. There was reason to doubt that the multimedia industries would produce local products in less financially developed countries. He called into question the optimistic assessment of multimedia publishing as a means of earning revenue. Experiences in the northern hemisphere had suggested rather the opposite, as demonstrated by the failure of subscription services on the Internet.

George Mensah Aryee of the Employers' group queried the link between the development of telecommunications and population growth. Was overpopulation really an obstacle for a better telecommunications infrastructure? In his view, inadequate telecommunications policies in developing countries were simply due to financing problems. The prices of goods and services were dictated by developed countries, and governments of developing countries had enormous difficulties in finding sufficient resources to pay for them. With regard to the issue of cost efficiency, the attempt to make everything cheaper might push us towards a robot society, where everything would be done by robots rather than by human beings. Such a tendency had to be carefully watched.

Response of the panel members

Kareem Boussaid referred to a number of conferences organized by international organizations which dealt with current issues in the media and telecommunications industry. The ITU held major conferences on this theme every four years; one had been held in Buenos Aires in 1994 and the next was scheduled in 1998 in Malta. The World Bank had convened a conference on Knowledge for Development in the Information Age for June 1997. Moreover, the ITU had collaborated with UNESCO since 1989 in order to cooperate on preferential rates for the multimedia, to undertake certain studies on communication and to develop jointly an international telecommunications policy. Regarding the economic feasibility of developing local products as a means to avoid cultural domination, he noted that, in principle, the market had to recover the costs of developing such products and that some markets were indeed too small to do so. None the less, public actions and policies could be of enormous assistance in exerting influence on those markets, as the case of Egypt had shown. The role of international organizations in the provision of services, however, was not only a question of feasibility, but had political facets as well. When the World Trade Organization (WTO) had adopted an annex to an agreement on telecommunications, the European Union refused to extend this annex to audiovisual products, thus making the provision of services in this field impossible. Population growth was not in itself an obstacle to the development of telecommunications, yet there was a linkage between the two since the development level for the telecommunications infrastructure was measured in terms of subscribers per 100 inhabitants. The most important factor for progress was the reorganization of the telecommunications sector. Privatization or liberalization had proved to speed up development, as seen in Latin America and the Caribbean. Local production factors could also be obstacles to efficiency. The cost of a telephone line in countries such as Benin, Burundi, Chad or Mali, for example, was $20,000 compared to an average cost of $1,500 elsewhere.

Wilfred Kiboro deplored the appalling situation in Zaire and explained that Zaire, although in a particularly bad state, was not the only African country where the people could not afford to buy a newspaper. In many African countries, the circulation of newspapers in terms of thousands of inhabitants was extremely low, probably less than 0.001 per cent, but the readership per copy was very high, reaching as many as 20 people per copy. Multimedia convergence might help to bring the prices of newspapers to a more affordable level, as had been the case in his own newspaper company. Distribution costs were expected to come down sharply when the new satellite printing facilities were commissioned as it would no longer be necessary to truck the newspapers halfway across the country. None the less, multimedia convergence and the concomitant globalization process put the Third World countries at a distinct disadvantage. The print media as well as the broadcasting industries were already in the hands of a few major players from the Western world. Africa was inundated by American films which glorified Western values and showed little sensitivity to local social or religious values. In the media in general, Africa was seen by the rest of the world solely through the eyes of foreigners who did not understand its socio-economics. New computer technologies and the increasing gap between information "haves" and "have-nots" might even lead to a scenario where news about Africa was no longer sold from the continent itself, but from New York or Baltimore.

Part 4

Employment trends in the
information society

Customization of technology, services,
goods and labour markets
Marie-Lousie Thorsén Lind⁽²⁵⁾

This Symposium concerns the transition into an information society which can provide tremendous opportunities for people and companies all over the world and lay new ground for economic growth and social welfare. Yet, from reading the agenda of this Symposium I began to worry about the aim of these discussions. Are we here to question the benefits of a technology which is already bringing ordinary people together at a tremendous pace and giving them powerful means to improve their private and working lives?

Today's societies are swiftly changing into something we are only beginning to understand. What could the social partners achieve by trying to guide the course of this technology which is not only used in synthesizers, CD players, systems for digitalized communication and desk-top publishing, but also in a variety of products such as ABS brakes, watches, stoves, elevators, hearing aids, pacemakers and merciful laser surgery. This concept of an information society originally concerned people handling information instead of producing goods. It was invented by the American, John Nesbit, in the 1970s. Since then this information society has gradually been translated into a knowledge society, which is probably a stronger driving force behind today's and tomorrow's global markets than the digitalization which is the subject of this Symposium. That cannot, however, diminish the importance of a technology that has proved its worth as a creative tool in global market-places for media, health care, communications, manufacturing, retail, insurance, banking, and in other areas where people work for the benefit of others.

Life in modern society is already very digitalized. We use information technology in our cars and in our homes. We use it at the office, we use it to supervise all sorts of good things such as the planes that brought most of us to this Symposium. We use it to save lives in intensive-care units, as well as to educate ourselves with the help of the new media. This development is not driven by technology, but by people. Information technology was created by people and is now being used by people to make new things possible.

So far I have added three more trends -- globalization, competency and human creativity -- to the agenda of this Symposium. These trends are mentioned in the discussion paper and are generally considered to be powerful driving forces behind today's changing societies. Because of the social nature of this Symposium I will concentrate on yet another trend -- mass customization. Since the 1970s, this trend has been hitting companies in virtually all branches all over the world, including the media and the information industry, forcing them to change just to stay in business and be able to go on providing jobs. To customize something is to make it special. I use the term "mass customization" to describe employers' and employees' joint need to create value for the consumers, who are the true decision-makers in the new global market-places.

Let me illustrate this by going back to 1975 when I began to work in the information industry. At that time it was a technician's paradise. Consumers could often do nothing but accept systems created by people who were experts on EDP, but almost illiterate as to users' needs. Since then we have attained PC software such as Word and Windows, which are made for the consumer.

A similar need for customization has rapidly altered manufacturing. Think about the early 1980s when car manufacturers all over the world found that customers chose high-quality, cheap Japanese cars that could be adapted to customers' wishes and yet be delivered faster and on time. Car manufacturers all over the world had to adapt themselves to their customers just to be able to stay in business.

The same thing is happening in banking and insurance, two branches that are melting into one. In my country you can pick up insurance and household loans at the post office. You go to the bank whenever it suits you with the help of a telephone or a PC. Also, people have started to do their shopping in shopping centres outside of the cities where they can find a variety of high-quality products at dramatically lower prices. The result is that local shops are losing customers and have to change. This is, of course, changing the conditions in working life and on labour markets. Information technology may or may not play a central role in the process but it is seldom the determining factor. What is important is the way this technology is being used in the hands of customer-oriented people. It is the pace at which the technology is being delivered into the hands of ordinary people and ultimately the way they use it to meet their own needs and those of their families.

How could we guide the use of such technology? Digitalization is right now being used to create competitive advantages on markets that are characterized by ongoing change. This makes it even harder to foresee the future in labour markets which have always been dependent on competition between products and people. So far employers and employees all over the world have found that the best way to stay in business is to live by old truths, such as "customers make pay-day possible" and "staying ahead is the best security". Continuous improvement has become a road to survival for companies and individuals.

This change is driven by people. Call them raw market forces, if you like, but these raw market forces are you and I. We act on the market when we choose a TV programme, do our daily shopping, buy clothes, cars, refrigerators and cameras. We even create markets by having children who need an education and by having our own needs for special care at the end of our lives. Nobody has yet succeeded in moulding human beings into one form, whether in terms of your choice of whom to be with, what to buy, where to go, or whom to do business with. It is we ourselves as consumers who are driving working life towards greater flexibility. We are the main reason for companies using methods and technology that enable them to raise quality and lower prices at the same time. We are the reasons for the demand for continuous personal development and what superficially seems to be new contracts on the labour markets. These contracts are, by the way, not only contracts for employment, nor are they mainly short-term contracts. They are, as they always have been, a mix of long-term and short-term employment and business contracts, put together in a slightly different way than has been in the minds of labour market experts during the last 50 years. Tomorrow's labour markets are being created and recreated right now by the business people dealing with each other. The results show themselves in different, sometimes unforeseeable, requests for competency. They will also be seen in a mixture of contracts for employment and self-employment. These will partly be determined by what you and I are doing on the market-place and partly by the framework created by technology, methods, competency and regulations.

It is truly a challenge for this Symposium to start a discussion about how to support the individual in an ever-changing, knowledge-based, customized, global information society, especially as we now know that tomorrow's regulations have to be built on a new base. Yesterday's rules no longer work. They are swiftly being bypassed by change, sometimes creating obstacles for prosperity and therefore being short-circuited by the very people whom the legislators want to protect. So, there is a lot of rethinking to be done and I am delighted to have been given the opportunity to take part in the process.

Appropriate labour market regulation in the context
of swift technological and organizational changes
in convergent industries
Kevin Tinsley⁽²⁶⁾

In this paper I look at four things: (i) some recent trends in employment growth in multimedia industries; (ii) the economic factors present in the development and convergence of multimedia markets and their impact on employment; (iii) the changing nature of the enterprise and its contract with the individual; and (iv) the principles of labour market regulation which might best be adopted.

I argue that converging multimedia industries produce great benefits for both workers and entrepreneurs and that both sides should be left as free as possible to agree contracts within a de minimis legal framework set by government. Regulation, or other forms of intervention, should only be considered for those areas where information may be insufficient to enable people to make economically rational decisions. Government intervention should minimize the risks of market failure and of government failure, by assessing costs as well as benefits and designing policy consistent with market principles. Policy should enhance decentralization, separate producer and provider, and possibly introduce markets where none existed before.

Employment in the multimedia industries continues to grow considerably faster than in the economy as a whole. Employment in those industrial sectors closely linked to multimedia has grown by 15 per cent over the last two and a half years, compared with employment growth of around 6 per cent in the economy as a whole. Growth in the manufacture of communications equipment has grown by 23 per cent over the same period, whereas growth in telecommunications services has reached 28 per cent. Such growth rates will likely seem puny 50 years hence, partly as a result of convergence in the multimedia markets. This convergence has two dimensions: first, amongst the multimedia industries themselves and, second, convergence with other manufacturing and service industries.

Multimedia industries are young and growing. Five factors are disproportionately present as convergence occurs. They are expansion, innovation, concentration, cooperation and competition. Let us review them one by one:

expansion: multimedia companies tend to be smaller and have more market potential than the average new firm. The effect on short-term and long-term employment is positive;
innovation: the scope for both product and process innovation is immense. Potential demand is huge. New theories and evidence concerning long-run economic growth suggest that it is partly driven by innovation. The more you innovate, the more you grow. Product innovation will expand output; process innovation will bring efficiency gains and increased investment. Both these factors will lead to increased employment in the long term, though short-term losses may occur through process innovation;
concentration: the proliferation of small firms will inevitably lead to takeovers and mergers as firms seek economies of scale in converging markets. As firms rationalize, jobs will be lost. The short-run effect on employment is likely to be negative but, in the longer term, there will be gains. Like every other industrial revolution, the information society is likely to produce far more jobs than it will lose;
cooperation: more alliances will be built across supply chains. While this is happening in many industries, the opportunities may be more abundant in multimedia because of the nature of many of the enterprises. They tend to be informal, flexible, open to change and in need of temporary stability. It is difficult to tell how this will affect employment;
competition: the relatively low and falling barriers to entry will encourage firms to enter the market. Competition will bring mixed news. The potential for employment will help the unemployed. The pressure on wage premia from sectors now exposed to competition will tighten. The net effect on employment should be beneficial in both the short and the long term, though individuals will experience ups and downs.

The analysis suggests that the net impact on employment is likely to be positive, especially in the longer term. The approach to regulation that would tend to maximize employment would thus be one that allowed these factors to flourish -- that is, a de minimis approach in which government: (i) sets a legal framework for contracts; (ii) intervenes only in the case of market failure; and (iii) intervenes, where necessary, in a manner compatible with the market, dealing with causes rather than symptoms.

The nature of employment appears to be slowly shifting as global trade and competition increase. Temporary work has increased in the last two years, but is still low by EU standards, and the upward trend seems to be slowing. There is little hard evidence of rising insecurity in employment. Overall turnover of jobs has not changed much in the last ten years. The majority of employees have been in their present jobs for over five years and around 70 per cent for at least two years.

Nevertheless, change is taking place and this is reflected in two ways: the organization of the enterprise and its contract with the individual. Companies are becoming smaller and flatter, with a shallower hierarchy and much more emphasis on teams and building alliances with other organizations. Decisions tend to be more decentralized. Enterprises are becoming more flexible in three main ways: functionally, where high skills and collaboration lead to mobility across tasks, broadening job boundaries and extending individual skills; numerically, in terms of the number of employees, hours of work and use of part-time and temporary employees; and with regard to their internal and external relationships, either by formal contracts or informal agreement.

The individual's contract with the enterprise is also changing. Anecdotal evidence suggests that: (i) the turnover of jobs in multimedia is considerably higher than the average; (ii) people often work on a self-employed basis, rather than as a formal employee, despite working for the same firm and in the same building as other workers; (iii) promotion is not based on formal qualifications as much as on performance and aptitude; and (iv) rewards are not just in the form of wages. Intangible rewards, such as more power within the enterprise, may replace purely monetary gain. Of considerable interest is the awarding of stock in an enterprise, thus making the worker a shareholder. This has benefits for both worker and employer. It rewards the workers with wealth rather than income; it establishes an incentive for the worker to make the enterprise succeed; and it injects capital into the enterprise.

It is the view of the Government of the United Kingdom that the principles underlying regulation should be the same for every market. To optimize flexibility we need to have as few rigidities as possible. The government should set the legal framework and apply the market failure criterion to any proposed regulation. Such a criterion might be applied, for instance, to health and safety matters or discrimination.

Similarly, any potential policy intervention should be assessed on the risks of the policy failing or of its producing more costs than benefits. Policy should be framed in a way that is compatible with the market. An example is health and safety policy, which might be based on the principle of risk management -- judged and dealt with by individual firms -- rather than by having a detailed and prescriptive set of regulations that apply to all, regardless of circumstances.

A flexible labour market allows the enterprise to respond quickly to changes in economic circumstances, such as changes in demand or supply. Individuals benefit by belonging to an organization in which their potential can be more easily optimized. Individuals can gain wealth as well as income and they can enjoy greater freedom by taking periodic contract work, rather than working week in, week out, year in, year out. A flexible labour market helps to create the conditions in which enterprises flourish and thus enhances the prospect of more jobs. But there are risks as well as rewards. In a fluid labour market a key risk is unemployment.

Unemployment is a natural phenomenon in a dynamic economy. Many of the people unemployed on a given day are between jobs and are claiming benefits in the meantime. The role of government policy for these short-term unemployed people must be to provide income -- when people are genuinely seeking work -- and to provide information that will help the labour market function more effectively. However, the crucial concern for government must be to help the long-term unemployed to acquire the job skills necessary to enable them to find work. Besides these active roles, government also has to take the long-term unemployed into account when deciding on the nature of labour market regulation.

The long-term unemployed, especially those people who have come to feel excluded from the world of work, will benefit most from a regulatory regime that minimizes rigidity in the labour market. Labour market flexibility, which provides the greatest possible opportunity for unemployed people, can only be achieved through minimizing labour market regulation.

Three crucial factors need to be borne in mind. First, if unemployment benefits are too high, they may provide employees with a credible threat of leaving if their wage demands are not met. This enhances "insider power" at the expense of potential job creation and so disadvantages those seeking work. Second, minimum wages typically reduce the dispersion of wages that would otherwise be generated by a deregulated market. Because they create unemployment they are not an efficient tool to redistribute income and may even increase overall inequality. Third, non-wage labour costs and some social labour market regulations will increase the costs of hiring and firing labour. This acts as a disincentive to creating employment, especially lower wage employment where the non-wage labour cost is a higher proportion of the total cost to the enterprise. In the United Kingdom non-wage labour costs -- and our unemployment rate -- are among the lowest in the EU. We think that this fact and the promoting of labour market flexibility through deregulation are not unconnected. Other factors that need deregulation include working time restrictions, which particularly hamper young and growing industries like multimedia and restrain job creation.

Our concern, as a government, must be for all the people in the labour force, not just the employed. If we believe that decisions about work contracts are best left to individuals, then the greatest risk people face is unemployment. Labour market regulation, therefore, must be framed to help the unemployed as much as possible. Minimizing labour market regulation promotes the maximum possible level of employment.

The market is one of mankind's supreme achievements in social cooperation. It has empowered people and freed them from discrimination on a far greater scale than any set of regulations. I also believe in social justice, and I recall the views of John Rawls, who said that to achieve social justice, all policy should be directed towards enhancing the opportunities of those with the least. That is why the unemployed should be given considerable weight in deciding the approach to labour market regulation.

Displacement of labour in the field
of visual communications
Etienne Reichel⁽²⁷⁾

My approach to the question of labour displacement is sectoral and practical. I will talk more about facts than principles. I represent an association which deals with visual communications -- text, image and animated image products -- and have been doing so for some years now. Basically it brings together printing houses. In other words, our association brings together people who are making the very painful passage towards multimedia convergence.

Displacement of labour is quite obviously happening. For the graphic branch there is a growing displacement of workstations. We see this occurring on a daily basis with the disappearance of enterprises on the one hand, and the creation of new enterprises on the other hand. Enterprises have the choice to move towards multimedia convergence as actors or simply as partners; but there are those who have not taken this step and will probably never do so.

In Switzerland the graphic industry is made up of about 3,000 enterprises, basically publishing houses or printing houses employing between one and 500 employees. At the European level there are about 60,000 enterprises, which employ roughly a million workers and have an annual turnover of about 75 billion ECUs. This is an economic branch which has recently realized that it has to share its monopoly in communications, a monopoly which it has held for about four centuries. Displacement of work is taking place at a very fast rate due to amazing developments in electronics. Interactivity, group-working capacities and the immediacy of the transmission of information are giving rise to a transfer of activities.

In the visual communications sector, this transfer closely resembles that which occurred with the arrival of mechanization during the industrial revolution of the last century. As far as this branch is concerned, there is an increase in productivity with great added value and this is having a great influence on the human contribution to the production process and bringing about structural changes. Competition has arisen with the new media, which since the beginning of the nineties has grown at the rate with which you are all familiar.

The automation of working methods has led to a reduction in human intervention. Data transfer, transmissions and the elimination of certain steps in the production process, such as the computer template process, for example, have led to the reduction in the number of traditional jobs in our branch. The work of 20 typesetters is now carried out by six qualified workers. There has also been a concentration of centres of production, thus placing enormous pressure on the small and medium-sized enterprises which are traditional sources of employment. At the same time, an epiphenomenon of tremendous economic consequence, though probably of a temporary nature, is the trend to the partial atomization of the branch, at least part of the production process. Computer science makes it possible for experts to become independent producers. Approximately 30 per cent of employees have set up independently and have been able to carve out part of the market.

Despite the extent of these changes, the graphical industry can only benefit from the arrival of a multimedia convergence. Multimedia products will continue to be accompanied by visual communication, even if the role of visual communication is no longer so monopolistic as it has been in the past. If multimedia production increases, visual communication will also increase.

In parallel, the jobs in the graphical industry or the audiovisual communications industry are to a certain extent transferable among production units. We know, for example, that image processing or the setting up of a page on the network requires the cooperation of several experts in different fields. We have seen this creative process work successfully.

A great deal of progress has been made, but it has proven difficult to define clearly the new roles of typesetters, animators or other experts in the visual industries with a view to ensuring quality. Much remains to be done in the area.

The printed product has a long life. Multimedia convergence has meant that we have speeded up things to a great extent, but human beings seem to be developing their own antibodies. Although they are attracted by instant retrieval of information listings and by what appears on the screen, they still want to have printed work, they want to have a beautiful picture and they want to have this in tangible form, not simply on the screen.

We have seen that jobs are being moved due to the convergence of multimedia. This shows that all these professions can adapt. None the less, the rules governing working conditions must be maintained and vocational training must go on. The enterprise must be flexible. Social partnership is an important factor which will enable us to combine our efforts in order to provide for vocational training and further training.

General discussion on employment trends
in the information society

Chris Warren, Worker Vice-Chairman, noted that, while previous speakers had affirmed that employment in the information economy was expected to rise, there was little information about the sort of jobs that were being created and about the impact of those new jobs on the people who actually worked in the industry. Workers had seen a substantial decline in their rights and working conditions. Employers -- in their aim for more flexibility -- appeared to expect the contingent workforce to subsidize permanent employees by refusing them the same rights and wages as for people who were in more traditional employment relationships. This strategy of employers in the growth areas of the content sector was, in fact, an attempt to bypass deliberately many of the gains that unions had made. While this problem was predominantly a challenge for unions and had to be solved between the social partners, governments had to ensure that people who had been forced into quasi-contractual or non-employment relationships were able to have the same access to collective organizations and collective rights. Instead, in many countries there were legal frameworks which prevented those workers and unions from actively organizing. This was the case not only in some of the least developed countries but also in some of the most developed ones, such as the United States. Governments had to walk away from the legal fiction that people employed in a contractual relationship had an equal bargaining power with employers, that, for example, "a freelance journalist had an equal bargaining power with Rupert Murdoch".

Walter Durling, Employer Vice-Chairman, wondered what rights the workers were afraid of losing and what union gains were being bypassed by the employers. The freedom to negotiate was a fundamental right of a democratic and free society, a right which neither the employers nor the workers wanted to lose. Technology might make this freedom to negotiate more complicated but it neither jeopardized nor destroyed it. Quite the contrary, it even provided more freedom and a far greater social development than in the past.

Tony Lennon of the Workers' group stressed that it was not technology itself which caused fear, but its effects. These included a greater concentration of ownership and power, changing forms of employment and the erosion of diversity and of locally made products. Organized workers had taken for granted a right to negotiate from the outset. Workers had an abiding belief in collective representation. Therefore, the shift to a more individual relationship with the employer through new forms of work caused concern for them, because such a non-collective, one-to-one basis entailed a power shift in favour of the employer and against organized workers. Freelance and so-called independent workers also required social rights and the facility to be represented collectively by a trade union.

Ulrich Holtz of the Employers' group insisted that the image of a worker who needed a representative in order to establish a balance with the employer was outdated. During his 12 years of experience in the industry, he had noticed that workers had become increasingly prepared to take their fate into their own hands, i.e., to negotiate salaries and working conditions themselves. Furthermore, employers in the multimedia industry had realized that they could only survive if they provided good working conditions, pay and benefits to their employees.

Jürgen Warnken, the representative of the Government of Germany, stressed that the convergence process would not only affect one sector, the media, but the whole information economy, including the banking sector and such phenomena as electronic shopping and trade. He was, however, rather sceptical about the new market opportunities and consumer friendliness of these new phenomena. He recalled an article about Christmas shopping via Internet, where a consumer had described his negative experiences in getting access to the proper suppliers on the Net and in imagining what the items displayed on the computer screen looked like in reality. As a result, the customer finally preferred to go directly to a shop, where he could see and touch the products.

Tony Lennon questioned the prediction of a short product life for new audiovisual material. The fact that multimedia conglomerates increasingly attempted to buy old film or videotape libraries in order to build up a stock of intellectual property which could be permanently reused, suggested rather the opposite, namely a very long product life. Liberalization and deregulation were not the best way to respond to multimedia convergence. With regard to the claim that diversity demanded minimum regulation, he referred to the example of British broadcasting, where a high degree of diversity in terms of minority programming and cultural content had been achieved through the very strict regulation of public service broadcasting. Telecom-related industries did not have to be free from regulation in order to thrive. The case of British Telecom demonstrated the fact that the most heavily regulated private company in the country was nevertheless phenomenally profitable. Regulation could well ensure delivery of high-quality public service while satisfying the requirements of the commercial sector.

Ulrich Holtz considered privatization as the main tool for achieving diversity of products. This was significantly reflected in the field of broadcasting. Ten years ago, viewers could receive only about four channels in Europe. Today there were roughly 50, offering a broad international spectrum and advertising opportunities for international products. That development was entirely due to privatization.

Response of the panel members

Marie-Louise Thorsén Lind recognized that it was almost impossible to predict what sort of jobs were being created. Nobody could foresee the results of this swiftly developing process which, among other things, had shown itself in a dramatic creation of goods, services and processes based on information technology. The labour markets were already responding to this change. Recent research in Sweden had revealed that the existing range of contracts between employers and employees was already being used to promote flexibility. Some people were employed, some were self-employed and others worked as subcontractors. Contracts were being established partly on employees' conditions and partly on employers. It was considered probable that the situation would stay the same with a slight tendency towards more long-term business contracts. None the less, it was unlikely that society was heading towards a situation in which people would be out of jobs, even though there might be fewer opportunities for employment in the future. Since the labour market was already deep into these changes, unions also had to accept the need to change. Otherwise, they might not remain able to support their members in the future.

Kevin Tinsley explained that basically every prognosis concerning the nature of the newly created jobs was founded, not on real facts, but on anecdotal evidence. His own anecdotal panorama foresaw that in the future a lot more people would be self-employed -- not because they were forced into such a situation, but because it suited them. Self-employment would provide them with more freedom and better income. the example of British Telecom was, in his view, not a lesson for the success of heavy regulation, but for privatization, since prices had plummeted after the transformation of BT from a public sector monopoly to a private enterprise. If BT were more deregulated, it would lead to more competition and, hence, even lower prices. Finally, when using the term diversity, he had not meant cultural diversity, but simply diversity of views about how society ought to be run. Since the United Kingdom had so little social consensus pertaining to this question, the best solution would be to allow as much freedom as possible in order to minimize conflict.

Etienne Reichel underlined the need for diversity and the importance of having the economic means to achieve it. Otherwise, an information consumer would only have fast food available, and fast food did not really age well.

Part 5

Changes in level and
type of employment

What jobs are being lost? What jobs are being
created?: The case of the New Times Corporation
George Mensah Aryee⁽²⁸⁾

It is my intention to structure this discussion on labour issues raised by the convergence process in Ghana and in my organization, the New Times Corporation, according to three main themes: (a) the convergence process -- its nature and scope; (b) its impact on employment and conditions of work; and (c) changes in the levels and types of employment.

Over the years, as we know, many new technologies have evolved in the North and are racing ahead faster than most nations in the South can keep pace with. Nuclear power, genetic engineering, computers and electronic manufacturing equipment affect each one of us and have an impact on society and the natural world. Whilst these technological breakthroughs produce huge amounts of goods and services, they also consume vast quantities of natural resources, not to mention the millions of people rendered unemployed and unemployable.

In recent years the concept of popular technological transfer and technical assistance flowing across borders, allied with the notion of global participation in development, has come into vogue in many parts of the world. The North offers the South technological fixes on seemingly attractive terms, which have been richly rewarding. These advanced technologies have been both productive and seductive. Computers and electronic machinery all promise exciting power at the touch of a button, turning out thousands of products within a short time frame. The seductiveness of technological transfer is such that companies today are being confronted with rapid changes in technology and markets which make it necessary for the management of these companies to be able to respond to these changes to ensure the continued viability and growth of their businesses. The New Times Corporation, the newspaper and publishing company of which I am the chief executive, is no exception.

^{The impact on New Times Corporation}. Major infrastructural and industrial development reforms in Ghana started well before independence with the drive to establish the industrial base and an Africanized workforce to fill the senior civil service and state/privately-owned enterprises. A crash programme aimed at achieving self-sufficiency was put in place -- and that gave birth to the New Times Corporation.

The Corporation is a newspaper and publishing concern with a wide variety of machinery. Some has become obsolete due to advances in technology and has been replaced. The equipment and machinery on hand at the beginning were of the rotary classification, highly mechanically operated machines. This typographic mechanism is used for letterpress printing and is characterized by countless complicated and time-consuming production processes -- beginning with news gathering, then proceeding to Linotype, block-making and engraving, returning to the news department for proofreading, then back to Linotype for hand composing of the final corrections and finally to the rotary machines for printing.

Given the complex history of the Corporation, which was established as a party press house, the tendency of filling positions with party activists was very tempting. Again, as a result of the decentralized hiring policy, recruitment in the public sector increased rapidly. This gave an opportunity to the recruiting authority to fill the numerous positions along the unending processing line. The effect was that as recently as 1974, there were 633 staff positions at the New Times Corporation. Most of these were unskilled.

As a result of the technological advances and social changes, new forms of work and working conditions are developing. This rapid technological change has brought with it possible job-destroying effects arising from the intensified international competition and globalization. With modernization through technological advance, New Times has moved from mechanical to electrical and electronic printing systems, thereby drastically streamlining the production process. Labour input had hitherto been high, since by our estimation, 288 staff were engaged in production alone.

With modernization, we have moved away from mechanically operated rotary to electronic web offset. Computerized typesetting and page layouts, which make effective use of the page maker and electronic dummy pages, have eliminated the Linotype process and manual make-up activities -- which used to involve physically cutting printed stories to the width of the columns and pasting them onto a dummy together with headings. The sequence or steps in production have been reduced from six to four, production time has been greatly shortened and the labour input has fallen to a mere 78 people. The paper also gets to the reading public in all regions of the country much earlier.

Similar successes have been chalked up in the commercial printing and accounts departments where operations were formerly done manually but have now been replaced by computers. Labour in these departments has been reduced by 50 per cent.

The impact of these technological changes has been the need for structural changes in employment to take account of the new realities. My management has been confronted with certain changes as a result of modernization. The social costs and attendant consequences are enormous.

Several bold initiatives have been embarked upon, all dedicated to enhancing the quality of personnel, improving the welfare and conditions of employment and, most importantly, rendering the workplace a very conducive environment for productive work. One basic underlying objective of those programmes was the restructuring and streamlining of cumbersome, outmoded practices, procedures and regulations, which had persistently impeded efficiency, effectiveness and productivity in the organization, and had also undermined workers' morale over several decades.

Labour that had been rendered unemployable and/or redundant by virtue of modernization had to be redirected. Management, in consultation with the Ministry of Information and the trade union, took the decision to lay off a segment of the workforce. This comprised the unskilled and untrainables. For those staff with skills, talents and knowledge which could potentially be applied in other sections of the organization, training courses in electronics and computer science were organized to prepare them for the management and manning of the computerized news production and accounts departments. For the first time in many years, staff were introduced to a training programme designed to enhance both managerial and non-managerial efficiency and effectiveness.

We had to create a new worker who was professionally trained, career-focused, results-oriented, and efficiency minded, with a thorough understanding of the complex, competitive environment in which he had to operate. At the same time, management embarked on a vigorous search for competent, skilled and more qualified staff to improve efficiency. This process has been going on for the past three years.

The way forward was to improve the skills and performance of our human resources to ensure institutional renewal and more effective delivery of services. Employees who were trainable were given the appropriate training, whilst untrainables were relieved and paid their service benefit.

The question is: Does it end here? It looks as though, at the national level, training programmes have to be organized for workers who have been laid off as a result of the introduction of modern technologies and may have moved into the informal sector.

Employment perspectives in the American
newspaper industry
Bernie Lunzer⁽²⁹⁾

It is hard to grasp fully the impact of convergence on the print industry. The effects are quite massive. When people think of convergence, they often think in terms of the World Wide Web. Currently, there are about 200 news sites in the United States that are on the Web, functioning on a daily basis. These we would consider hard news sites.

It might surprise you to know that the number might actually be smaller next year due to the fact that the Web is not profitable. Not much money is being made on the Web currently, at least not within our industry. There had been great hopes for display advertising, but people are now more optimistic about classified advertising. Subscription is seen as a losing proposition. The reality is that when you make subscription a requirement for access to a particular service, you cut off a huge amount of traffic to your site.

The Newspaper Guild represents workers on about 14 of the 200 sites operating at present. Many of those Web workers actually function in dual roles: one in the normal print sector, the other on the Web. Overall we have observed a slight growth in our newsroom workers, amongst our journalists and production people, and a slight loss in our service people. That has been one of the negative impacts of convergence. The use of wide area networks and local area networks has actually made possible a fairly large displacement among service workers. Take for example the local daily papers which come out in Detroit, Michigan, in St. Paul, Minnesota, even in San José, California. If for some reason your copy of the local newspaper is not delivered, you may make a phone call to ask why it is late. That call is actually routed to Miami, where someone answers the phone and, through the use of a wide area network, sends the message back to the local paper. This is an attempt to consolidate a large number of jobs across the country into one regional calling centre and it has caused a great disruption. So while there have been employment gains on the news side, there have been losses on the service side.

Despite low profitability in the industry, the legal battles are tremendous. There is a huge battle over intellectual property rights, especially with freelancers, but also with our members who work under collective bargaining agreements. The freelance agreements that writers are asked to sign are shocking. Bear in mind that freelance writers are paid very little. They turn over all their future rights -- reuse rights -- to the publisher and get very little in exchange. Publishers are fighting for control and ownership of product, because they are seeing the future.

There are also battles over jurisdiction and others over subcontracting. A recent case concerns a publisher who is redefining his competitors in order to restrict journalists in terms of whom they can write for. Because of convergence, the concept of a competitor has been broadened. Although there is no profitability, people are trying to leverage themselves and prepare for whatever the future holds.

Why are publishers on the Web? Perhaps from a fear of being left behind. Everyone believes that this technology is going somewhere, though currently no one really knows where. New alliances are being built between companies and between different types of media. More mergers are taking place within the industry. There is great concern about where these alliances and mergers are leading, as we see greater and greater consolidation of ownership in the media industry. Competition among news sources will diminish and fewer and fewer workers will be used to staff more and more papers.

A number of our reporters who previously worked only in print are now being accessed for TV broadcasts. Either their copy is used or they are actually interviewed on TV. Also, some of our members are beginning to work as systems operators and managers of the email traffic that comes into various Web sites. Besides these changes in the nature of our work, we are also concerned about the quality of the content. As the quality of content diminishes, you provide much less value to the consumer, to citizens and to society as a whole.

Our reporters have seen new deadline pressures build as the material is used throughout the day, not just at the end of the day. There is also a huge safety problem in the newsrooms themselves with repetitive strain injuries. Some people are losing their careers at the age of 35 and 40 due to repetitive strain injuries, a problem that was unheard of in the age of the typewriter. But as people work 8- to 10-hour shifts without ever leaving their terminals, this has become an increasing problem.

We expect rapid change to continue and we are trying to deal with it on a daily basis. We are not just naysayers. We try to work with employers as much as possible. We believe in some co-determination projects and have worked with employers to try to improve the product. Unfortunately there are many attractive concepts, such as team work and quality of work programmes, that are used in a cynical fashion simply to streamline processes in order to utilize fewer workers. Our people are excited about the new technologies and often have a much better grasp of this technology than many of their employers. Our people see the future as exciting as well and they are trying to manage it on a daily basis. Where it will go, we just do not know.

How newspaper publishers can preserve
employment and create jobs
Heinz-Uwe Rübenach⁽³⁰⁾

How can newspaper publishers preserve employment and create new jobs? The answer depends upon a number of factors, most importantly the press market, the development of new digital media and the relationship between the two.

If we look at the future development of the press, the question that arises first and foremost is whether newspapers will survive. At the present time there is really no doubt that people will go on reading newspapers. For the next few years, new multimedia products and on-line services will not be capable of pushing newspapers out of the market, but on-line services can already compete in particular areas such as real estate advertisements or job vacancy announcements. When it comes to innovative areas such as the announcement of discussion fora or ordering tickets for special events, they are even more suitable and consumer-friendly than newspapers, since one can always keep them up-to-date and tickets can be ordered directly. In these areas, it might well be that multimedia services win the competition. However, presuming that newspapers as such are still going to appear, there is no reason to believe that jobs will be under threat. Journalists and other newspaper workers will have to adapt their activities to new technologies in order to compete successfully and secure jobs, but in fact this has been the case for a long time. For over 20 years we have seen the activities of publishing houses develop and adapt as technologies have been introduced. For years local editorial offices have been linked electronically with the central editorial office. For years journalists have been producing print-ready pages on their own computers. The sector needs to continue to draw on these progressive changes.

In Germany today we have too many printers as a result of certain collective agreements reached some 15 years ago. They were not in line with the technology at the time and are even less now at a time of economic recession. These old regulations have to be revised. In fact, that should have been done years ago.

Has the work of journalists changed or are major changes to be expected in the future? Let us consider the main aspects of journalistic work. Journalists have to supply up-to-date, accurate information and consequently their working time and working conditions depend on events that cannot actually be determined or influenced by the employer. That has always been the case and will continue to be in the future. Therefore, working conditions of journalists have to remain flexible. The same staffing structure is also likely to remain. A large number of freelancers are employed and this is not going to change. There is no cause to fear an increase in freelancers to the detriment of permanent employees either, because the field of activity and the information flows will not change. As far as teleworking is concerned, it is not really a new phenomenon. Local editorial offices have been linked up with the central editorial offices for a long time, exchanging information and products by electronic network.

Now I would like to come to digital media. A number of newspaper publishing houses distribute their newspapers electronically as well as in print. Although local and regional on-line services will be offering special services, for instance, ticket sales, merchandise orders and electronic banking, it is actually newspaper publishing houses that are the best placed to develop these services. Through their work, they have developed close contacts with the administration, with all types of organizations, businesses and cultural institutions. They also know how to prepare and present information designed for special purposes. To offer these on-line services, newspapers will certainly need to employ new people, but journalists will be in demand as well, for example to run discussion fora. On-line services are only at an early stage of development, but we can already observe that new jobs are being created and old jobs are not being removed.

A German magazine specialized in media themes⁽³¹⁾ recently surveyed 45 on-line services and found that an average of 5.84 persons were employed per on-line service. A large number of these services were start-ups and if they are successful, the number of people employed will obviously increase.

I carried out a similar inquiry within our European association of newspaper publishers. The responses revealed that in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and France there were on average three employees, that is journalists, in each on-line service. These were newly employed people who had not originally come from more conventional newspaper activities. In Germany, an average of six permanent jobs are created per on-line service and roughly five freelance positions as well. There were no jobs lost in publishing houses as a result of the new activities of newspapers in on-line services. These figures, while not totally representative or complete, do indicate a general trend, which is that when newspapers add on-line services to their activities, jobs are created.

In Germany there has been some discussion as to whether a new type of job, that of an on-line journalist, is being created. The professional profile of the journalist has certainly changed in recent years and it will continue to change in the future, but under no circumstances can one speak of a total break or a totally new professional profile for the journalist. Journalists have to work normally with modern technologies and computers in order to be professionally active and effective. They have learnt to do this in order to be able to sell their products. The development of new forms of presentation will change the professional profile somewhat, but not fundamentally.

Finally, on the relationship between the press and the digital media, from a media policy point of view, I believe that newspaper publishers should have free access to all on-line services, they should be freely able to offer them, there should be no restrictions there and there should be no ownership problem.

Copyright is one of the keys to the future information society. If a publishing house which offers the journalist work, even on an on-line service, is not able to manage and control the use of the resulting product, then it will not be possible to finance further investments in the necessary technology. Without that financing, the future becomes less positive and jobs can suffer. If, however, publishers see that they are able to make multiple use of their investment, then obviously this is beneficial for all. Otherwise the costs associated with on-line services would increase considerably. As far as the European market is concerned, this would only increase competitive pressures, since United States publishers do not have to pay for multiple uses.

It is important that service providers should be able to see exactly which users have access to a particular on-line service and what use they make of it. Providers need to have the technical means to control this, so that they can ensure refinancing.

Finally, the view has been expressed that multimedia should be brought to young people when they are at school so that they can become acquainted with on-line services at an early age. From a newspaper publisher's point of view, I would add that schoolchildren should not just focus unilaterally on one kind of medium, even multimedia, but should learn to use television, radio and newspapers as well. They need to learn to choose the medium they want to use at a particular moment in time. Schoolchildren should be given an opportunity to go to the particular source of information that they consider most suited to their purposes.

General discussion on the changes in
level and type of employment

Michel Muller of the Workers' group questioned the various prognoses that the information society would generate jobs, particularly since the workforce had often been confronted with rather the opposite, namely job losses. In France, the graphics industry had lost 20,000 jobs -- falling from 110,000 to 90,000 -- within the last decade, and it had required very expensive social plans to re-employ those people. If the technological developments really created new jobs, as had been suggested, then it might have been better to invest the money in reliable studies about what jobs were being created and which ones were being lost, rather than in social plans which often created artificial jobs. These studies should highlight the new skills and qualifications in demand as the technological convergence process broke down the barriers between the printing industry, journalism and other vehicles of information. Another problem caused by convergence was the trend towards ownership concentration. A few big groups controlled not only the bulk of the print media, but a wide range of other media, and thus posed a threat to pluralism in expression. Various tax advantages enjoyed by the press today should be re-examined and adapted to the new realities facing the press and multimedia enterprises. Managing all the social and societal issues raised by new technologies required widespread agreement and consensus. Collective agreements were vital, since neither individual negotiations nor the market alone could sufficiently settle these matters.

Tony Lennon of the Workers' group followed up the call for in-depth studies on the nature and number of jobs being created, which would clearly indicate regional and sectoral trends. Concentration of ownership entailed two problems. First, worldwide conglomerates, because of their economies of scale and their desire to achieve higher efficiencies, had more of a tendency to reduce the number of employees and to pose problems for workers in terms of working conditions and rates of pay than did single companies in single countries. Second, concentration caused political and cultural problems by undermining cultural diversity. Governments and the social partners should protect national diversity and national culture.

Marie-Louise Thorsén Lind of the Employers' group stated that the information society would not entail concentration, but pluralism. As part of such pluralism, various forms of negotiations had emerged. Today, not every worker wanted collective agreements, some preferred to negotiate on an individual basis. Such a right to choose ought to be respected.

Nestor Cantariño of the Workers' group expressed his concern about comments implying a denial of trade union participation in labour relations. Employers and even some governments might prefer individual negotiations, yet such ideas were a threat to the traditional form of tripartism, as understood within the ILO.

Dominique Schalchli, the representative of the Government of France, noted that the key question was not whether to substitute collective representation by a movement towards individual agreements, but to recognize that collective bargaining had to undergo certain changes in the way it was conducted.

Ulrich Holtz of the Employers' group said that, in many aspects, reality had already overtaken the current debate. In the software industry, a different kind of worker had emerged. First and foremost, these workers wanted more flexibility in their work. In fact, the demand for flexibility was even greater on the workers' side than on the employer's. The desire for flexibility often superseded income as the main point for discussion.

Walter Durling, Employer Vice-Chairman, stressed that collective agreements should not serve as a tool to retard or stop the development of technology, but had to move along with it.

Marco Biagi, the representative of the Government of Italy, argued that the reason for collective agreements was neither to stop nor speed up the introduction of new technologies. It was simply the best route to regulate new forms of employment in a flexible way. Collective bargaining was by far the most flexible method to manage labour relations and was therefore generally preferable to legislation and strict statutory law. New types of work were still in an experimental phase and the social partners were, by and large, better equipped than governments to be the pioneers in regulating these new forms.

José Luis Erosa Vera of the Employers' group pointed out that multimedia ^{as such} did not exist. What did exist were certain services which companies or sectors could carry out and certain activities, such as journalism, which could be regulated in various ways, including collective bargaining. Employers were therefore neither diminishing nor overlooking collective bargaining, but simply pointing out that there was no multimedia entity ^{per se} giving rise to any bargaining or legislation. There might be modernity, new technologies or changes in specific types of work in a given enterprise or sector, but that was all.

Tony Lennon replied that, while it might be difficult to describe the multimedia industry, similar changes were occurring in a number of separate industries and this process of change should be regulated through collective agreements between the social partners.

The Employers' group emphasized that, while they did not oppose collective bargaining as such, they objected to the idea of imposing collective agreements as the only means to negotiate working conditions in a given area of technology. Such a principle contradicted the freedom of action of each individual. Each worker had the right to determine whether he or she wanted to negotiate on a collective or an individual basis. An employer's main objective in hiring a worker was to obtain that person's collaboration -- and workers would collaborate if working conditions were satisfactory. In short, the intention to legislate was detrimental to society's development. One could not legislate that agreements had to be conducted on a collective basis.

Tony Lennon disagreed and stressed that one ^could legislate for collective agreements as a means to cover the function, the activities and the pay of individual workers. The fact that employers had a significant amount of power over individual workers remained unchanged, irrespective of any technological development, and, hence, required collective organization. The workers' habit of organizing to set pay could be observed long before trade unions as such had been set up. History also showed that collective bargaining was not irreconcilable with a high degree of flexibility, because it was highly skilled, self-employed and, presumably, quite flexible workers who formed the first collective organizations before the industrial age.

Carlos Alberto de Almeida of the Workers' group referred to the very different situation between developed and developing countries in terms of the context within which the new technologies were introduced. Many Third World countries were facing considerable reductions in the budgets for public education programmes. Since workers had no chance to receive vocational training, new technologies resulted in greater unemployment. While many became redundant, the few workers with the necessary skills had to take on many additional functions alongside their initial tasks. Such a multiplication of functions entailed an increase in the working day and, since there was no additional payment for the new parts of the job, resulted in an actual reduction in the worker's salary. As trade unions in most of these countries were weak due to the existing political conditions, they could hardly meet the new challenges -- such as structural unemployment or an increase of working hours without equitable remuneration -- let alone other issues, such as protecting the copyright of journalists. Hence, it ought to be the role of the ILO to prompt the governments of these countries to carry out training and retraining programmes. Furthermore, the trade unions should be informed in advance about the introduction of new technologies. This would allow them to establish plans so that workers could adapt to these technologies and ensure collective bargaining. Finally, since the press in countries such as Ghana or Brazil reached only a minority of the population and many could not afford to buy a newspaper, governments would do well to launch programmes to stimulate the expansion of the press and readership, instead of merely focusing on new technologies. Such a stimulation would not only enhance the cultural level but also increase the number of jobs in this sector.

Response of the panel members

Bernie Lunzer stated that the speed of technological change was dizzying. The need for on-going training for workers would remain very strong. Moreover, workers needed access to real representation in order to deal with the new pressures. In the United States the laws were stacked against the workers. A person who tried to form a union to get collective representation would most likely get fired. Bargaining was seen as an act of conspiracy and invited anti-trust. In short, the situation in a country which was supposedly the most developed nation in the world was quite deplorable.

Heinz-Uwe Rübenach conceded that media concentration was taking place, but this was partly due to the need to obtain capital for further development. In continental Europe in general and certainly in Germany, collective agreements were seen as an appropriate means to regulate working conditions. However, trade unions had often demanded working conditions which were unrealistic. Consequently, enterprises and individual employees no longer accepted them and had begun to negotiate on a local or enterprise level or even by individual contract in order to determine their own fates. Lack of realism on the union side also caused problems for employers' associations, because enterprises did not want to be bound by unacceptable collective agreements. Enterprises had started to leave these associations, preferring to resolve conditions at their own level. Bearing this danger in mind, he urged the workers to contemplate more realistic ideas for the further development of working conditions.

George Mensah Aryee appreciated the fact that the participants did not only look at the high-flyers of technological change, but considered the particular problems of the developing countries as well. African countries had come a long way in the transition from a planned economy to a free enterprise environment and needed a bit of sympathy in their struggle with technological developments. Furthermore, he stressed that African countries wanted to believe that there was some virtue in the use of collective bargaining as a means to ensure the right balance in future development.

Part 6

The impact of convergence on the
conditions of work of performers

Changes in the production system and in the
working conditions of musicians: The influence
of technology on the human mind and
human activities
Shinji Matsumoto⁽³²⁾

It is often said that multimedia will stimulate people's artistic and cultural sensibilities and open up a new world of communication. Multimedia is seen as a key industry of the twenty-first century in Japan. It is often described in positive tones. But today I would like to talk about another aspect of recent developments, that is, the impact of digital technology on musical performers.

Until the 1960s, if you went to a recording studio, you would find 50 performers, including soloists, playing together under the direction of a conductor. The conductor and the musicians worked together to complete the musical piece. Composers, singers and performers shared time and space and, by communicating closely with each other, they completed the recording together. There was a sense of solidarity among them as they created music together.

Many of the studio musicians were employed by the recording companies. Yesterday an employer member mentioned that many workers, including musicians, preferred self-employment; however, as far as musicians are concerned, we preferred being employed by the recording company. Nowadays, the labour relationship has been converted from one of contractual employment to one of non-employment. The relations between musicians and employers have become very weak, and this is a source of deep concern.

With the development of technology, simultaneous recording has gradually disappeared. Different groups of instruments, such as rhythm, string, woodwind and brass instruments, are recorded separately and sound engineers combine them later onto one track. Afterwards, the vocal element is added to complete the piece. As a result, performers simply play their parts according to the musical score without ever hearing the whole piece.

In the mid-1960s the synthesizer emerged and enabled the use of digital sound sources. This changed the recording studio tremendously. Where there had been human performers, now there was the synthesizer. Human performers disappeared from the recording scene and synthesizers took the place of musicians. The new skills of the synthesizer programmer were used to bring the sound as close as possible to that desired by the composers. At first, instruments which produced simple sound waves, and then almost all instruments, were replaced by synthesizers, as sampling technology made it possible to create a tremendous variety of sounds with synthesizers. The synthesizer came to dominate the musical world, as it replaced almost all musical instruments. Currently, the only acoustic instruments remaining are highly specialized ones. Otherwise, musical instruments are simply used to add depth and flavour to synthesized sound.

Then came the MIDI standard. The computer became the controller of the synthesizer and performers were placed under even greater threat. Through years of hard training, they had learned to express their musical talent and had finally established themselves as musicians. Now, however, with the introduction of computer-controlled synthesizers, even people without professional musical skill could enter data into the computer and take part in musical production. As a result, the professional status of musicians has been threatened. The tendency for acoustic instruments to be replaced by synthesizers or computers is rarely used for the best-selling musical pieces. However, as far as film soundtracks, commercial music, the music used for computer games or the sound sources for karaoke are concerned, these are mostly mechanical sounds produced by synthesizers. Under these circumstances, many studio musicians are struggling to survive in a storm of technological unemployment.

Synthesizer programmers, who replaced the human musicians, enjoyed initial popularity. However, with technological innovation, synthesizers became available at very low prices, they became easy to operate, and the programmer's function was also deskilled.

Altogether these changes have had a major impact on the working conditions of studio musicians and have raised three major problems. First, because musicians are under the constant threat of losing their jobs, they are not powerful enough, either individually or collectively, to conduct effective bargaining to improve their working conditions. This has resulted in the relative decline in the recording fee. Over the last ten years the minimum performance fee of studio musicians for broadcast productions has increased on average by 35 per cent, but that for record production has risen by only 20 per cent. Second, since studio musicians are freelancers, they are not entitled to the same social benefits as employed people. If they lose their jobs, they receive no unemployment benefits. The third issue relates to copyright and neighbouring rights. A major question that we have to address is whether synthesizer programmers or sound producers using the computer fall into the category of performers under copyright law and whether they may claim remuneration on the basis of neighbouring rights.

How have the life and work of performers changed with increasing multimedia production? A very large number of CD-ROMs under production are to be used for multimedia computers. However, as far as performers are concerned, this situation has not led to improved employment opportunities. Musical pieces are mostly downloaded from existing CDs. Even when a decision is made to create new sounds, the sound is produced by an extremely small number of people. Multichannel digital TV broadcasting has started using communication satellites. However, the majority of broadcasts simply reuse existing programmes or foreign programmes imported into Japan. While there has been a slight increase in the coverage of live concerts, that has not resulted in more work for musicians.

The multimedia content providers or broadcast operators say that content is important, but in reality rather than making new products, they often simply import the products from overseas or reuse existing ones. As a consequence, in many cases the neighbouring rights granted to performers have come under attack. In exchange for appearing in a programme, in many cases performers are obliged to sign over their neighbouring rights on the programme to the producers.

Beginning in 1993, a new treaty for the protection of performers and producers of phonograms was discussed at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the treaty was adopted at the end of last year. Many performers had expected a greater protection of their rights corresponding to the needs of the multimedia era, but the Convention actually adopted was anachronistic and a great disappointment. It failed to recognize the right of performers in audiovisual works.

Social communication has changed in its nature. Economic rationale has been the overwhelming concern and people have stopped thinking deeply and spending time on art and culture. People are content passively to receive fixed patterns of culture, and they live life rather superficially. Recent technological innovation has not necessarily always contributed to the development of new human abilities. To take my experience as an example, I always use a word processor to create a text and, of course, this speech is no exception. Word processors are very convenient for revising and improving my text, but the price I pay for this convenience is that I have forgotten many of the Chinese characters I used to remember. In the past, when I wrote a paper, I used to look over a lot of books, journals and newspapers, but now I simply search the database on a CD-ROM or use the Internet and just combine the data I choose to complete the paragraph.

With the penetration of computers into our lives, human wisdom is not used for thinking deeply. Instead, our intelligence is used for operating computer software and mastering operational skills. If we look at children absorbed in computer games, we worry that this might impede the sound development of their individuality or sensitivity. Of course I am not negative about the social progress that science and technology have brought. However, I am concerned that in the future, people will forget how to talk to each other face to face and will simply stare at a computer screen the whole day.

Of course with the development of computer information networks, anybody can communicate freely with people living on the opposite side of the globe, or even in virtual reality. But should human relations and the expression of our individuality be limited to such virtual exchanges? Seemingly, multimedia broadens our world, but I wonder whether this is not an illusion. Perhaps human beings are confined by computers and our artistic and cultural sensitivity is restricted by the capacity of computer software. I am afraid that human sensitivity may decline, that creativity may diminish and that we will end up living in a superficial society.

Now let me focus on the effects of multimedia on the development of our culture. It is not only in developing countries, but in advanced countries as well that we need to maintain our traditions. Japan is quite receptive to foreign culture and foreign technology. We introduced foreign technology and science very actively, succeeded in commercializing them and began to export such products. This led to the very rapid recovery of economic prosperity after the war. The same holds true in the area of culture. We have always respected foreign products. For instance, half of the CDs released in Japan are foreign products. In terms of classical music, one fourth of the concerts given each year are by foreign performers. Half of all concert revenues go overseas. Given this wide acceptance, foreign culture is pouring into Japan and, in fact, the domestic market is being dominated by foreign products. Despite this, when it comes to preserving and further developing Japanese culture, there has been insufficient support from the Government. Opportunities to perform have gradually decreased due to lack of support for cultural activities. I think this issue is even more serious than that of technical unemployment.

With the development of information networks, the earth is getting smaller and it is wonderful to be able to make cultural exchanges across vast distances and to deepen mutual understanding among people. We have to remember to respect national cultures and social systems. We also need to formulate the conventions, systems and rules which are appropriate to advanced information societies in the multimedia era. Performers are engaged in a profession which appeals directly to people's artistic and cultural sensitivity. Our activities motivate people to live better and they in turn motivate us to develop new creative approaches. Years of effort have led to rich artistic creation and social progress. The faster the pace of technology, the more important artistic activities should become. Artistic activity is one of the main distinguishing features of mankind. Unless we value human feeling and artistic expression, the multimedia society cannot mature. This is my strong belief.

General discussion on the implications of
convergence on the condition of performers

John Morton of the International Federation of Musicians (FIM) recalled that the phenomenon of technical convergence was not new to performers. In fact, performers were among the first affected by technology, such as the development of sound and film recording, as well as by the convergence of technologies, the dissemination of these recordings through radio and television broadcasting. These developments had radically separated the performer from the performance in time and place and had had an enormous impact on musical and theatrical activities. Musicians had turned to the ILO some 70 years ago in order to address the labour and economic issues caused by the convergence between recording and radio. The ILO had made an important contribution to the Rome Convention in 1961, which covered not only performers' rights but also those of record producers and broadcasters, since those groups had recognized the need for intervention as well. Performers greatly valued the ILO's essential, practical input into the current discussions on the rights of performers, authors and producers. ILO history showed that tripartite deliberations could produce balanced proposals and measures. Current concerns of performers regarding convergence went beyond the matters of recording and broadcasting, that is, fixation and dissemination, tackled in the Rome Convention. These new concerns included issues such as the reuse and modification of fractions of their performances, the ease of unauthorized and unpaid access to and use of their work, as well as the difficulties in establishing collective relations within the fragmented production and user industries. Performers were well aware that ongoing technological development entailed not only dangers, but also enormous advantages in terms of the distribution and use of their work. The way in which technological progress would occur was certainly not inevitable or predetermined. Man could control technology and decide on the structures and uses of it. It was none the less necessary to see how these developments could be fitted into well-established frameworks. Furthermore, performers put much emphasis on the need to preserve a diversity of cultural resources. While exceptions might exist, the bulk of performers wanted collective representation. Even very prominent performers who could quite easily negotiate their remuneration individually still worked under collective agreements. Strengthening social dialogue, improving economic and legal structures and studying the applicability of standards might not appeal to the ideologues of unfettered market forces or to "techno-anarchists" who believed that all technical change was inevitably beneficial, yet this challenge would appeal to concerned participants in the present debate.

Katherine Sand of the Workers' group regarded the question of performers' intellectual property as a central issue in the context of the multimedia revolution, since an erosion of performers' rights could be observed worldwide. The pressure imposed on performers, through contracts which forced them to give up their rights, had increased. Performers should have an ongoing relationship to their work and a continued financial interest in the use, reuse and modification of their performances, which had become extensive. In the new multimedia production, there was an increasing use of performers' voice work in computer games, for example, and audiovisual material on the Internet. All these subjects ought to be discussed with the employers. While performers were, by and large, quite optimistic about the expansion of work possibilities provided by new technologies, it was misleading to talk about a global information society. Actors in many parts of the world were completely untouched by the new phenomena. This had serious implications for national production and the preservation of national cultures. Finally, digitally created virtual performers were unlikely to make actors redundant. To create digital actors one needed live performers to start with. In any case, even in the multimedia future, the general public would still wish to see real live actors.

José Luis Erosa Vera of the Employers' group stated that discussion of the labour aspects of broadcasting should be limited to the^first transmission of a performance. Problems concerning the secondary or subsidiary uses of a performers' work were copyright issues and, thus, had to be dealt with at the WIPO, not the ILO. The current labour issues for musicians, performers or actors were certainly linked to the new technological developments. Technology very often entailed displacement. However, this was not the fault of employers, as had been implied by referring to the lack of contracts, but was due to performers who had failed to keep pace with technological developments. Technical people without musical knowledge had consequently been able to displace musicians in compositions or musical performances.

Pier Verderio of the Workers' group foresaw that the information society could transform certain unprofitable entertainment sectors into lucrative businesses. Operas or theatre plays, for example, which had never been financially successful due to their small market size, could soon be connected to one big market. In other words, events which had traditionally been limited to the place of performance could "travel through space" and, thus, become profitable. The information society as a virtually globalized entity would entail a crisis in the field of taxation due to the impossibility of detecting exactly where production and sale took place and, hence, where to tax the added value. Since social protection was often based on a general taxation system, the effects of these problems were far-reaching. It was necessary to contemplate alternative contribution systems. Companies and other legal entities could pay taxes in a way different from the actual contributors. A society built upon immaterial production required a new way of envisaging taxation.

Marc Blondel, the Chairman of the Symposium, referred to current problems in France with the existing inter-occupational unemployment system in special relation to performers. The employment situation of performers working on a part-time basis had become more and more unstable, their contracts were often short-term and there was considerable rotation within these jobs. Therefore, there was a very extensive use of the unemployment insurance system by people from this sector. As a consequence, employees from other professions whose contributions had been increasingly used for this sectoral labour issue had started to challenge the whole inter-occupational system. The argument that their contribution had to be regarded as an indirect subsidy for culture and creativity was rejected as not being the task of an unemployment insurance system. The whole issue raised a number of questions about social solidarity and its limits, state intervention and the way governments should shoulder their responsibilities in preserving culture and creativity.

Nagwa Abdalla Abd-El Hafez, representative of the Government of Egypt, referred to her experience in the field of broadcasting and stated that, while a sound studio could be replaced by a computer and software, a computer could nevertheless not replace the talent of human beings. In the music industry, very talented musicians were still needed to edit the separate recordings of several instruments. In cartoon production, talented artists could still not be replaced by computers, despite the use of the latest software. In short, the computer helped human talent to express itself, but could not replace the talented person.

Response of the speaker

Shinji Matsumoto agreed with the view that human talent could not be replaced by computers, but stressed the importance to performers of gaining wider social recognition. Too often the role of computers was emphasized while the importance of the human contribution was diminished.

Current labour issues of performers were certainly related to technology, but the plans of production and, hence, the decisions as to how to apply new technologies, were made by employers. Consequently, it was not simply technology, but also employers and companies which were responsible for the labour issues that confronted performers.

Finally, it was no longer possible to confine the problems of intellectual property rights to just a single organization, whether WIPO or UNESCO. The demarcation line between international organizations had become blurred. ILO involvement in intellectual property was appropriate as many performers had been forced to give up their rights in order to appear in a programme or performance. This was not a copyright, but a labour issue.

Part 7

The impact of convergence
on skill requirements

The implications of multimedia convergence
on future skill requirements
Phil O'Reilly⁽³³⁾

In addressing the implications of multimedia convergence on future skill requirements, I will speak from the perspective of newspaper publishers in New Zealand. It is my view that newspapers have some very strong advantages, both in terms of work organization and skill requirements, for moving into the convergent future. Although there will be significant change in skill requirements, many of the key building blocks for the future already exist in newspapers and will need change more by way of development than from starting from scratch again. Solutions for one company may be disastrous in others and ILO Conventions should take that into account.

Let me describe the New Zealand newspaper industry. New Zealand has a population of approximately 3.5 million people and that population is serviced by 26 paid daily newspapers and two Sunday newspapers. Each publishing day some 850,000 copies of daily newspapers circulate throughout New Zealand and they are read by approximately 1.7 million people. Daily newspaper publishers employ around 5,000 people.

What is happening in newspapers in New Zealand to prepare for the changes ahead? In terms of the convergence process, the most obvious response that newspapers have made worldwide so far has been to explore the possibilities of the Internet in terms of providing an alternative medium for readers and advertisers. Two newspapers in New Zealand currently have active Web sites, but I would expect that the number of those participating in this area will increase dramatically in the next year or two as others move forward, based on their colleagues' experiences and their study of overseas trends.

Newspapers are ideally placed to compete on the Internet because they hold significant amounts of information and, moreover, they have the capacity and experience to package that information and to make it attractive. However, because the Internet is a new medium, new thinking needs to take place. The Internet is not a newspaper on-line.

Given the fact that the Internet is very different from the traditional newspaper, our experience in New Zealand has been that it takes a disciple of this new medium to get activity going at each individual newspaper site. That disciple may come from inside the newspaper or may be hired from outside. The team leader will pull together people inside the newspaper and probably consultants from outside, who together can make the new venture work. Certainly overall in New Zealand, net employment growth has occurred in newspapers as a result of the development of Internet sites. This net employment increase is currently very small, but we expect it to grow once more newspapers take up the challenge of the Internet.

What are the implications of convergence on skill requirements? Implications vary widely. In some cases virtually no changes occur -- or very small changes. A journalist remains a journalist. In other cases, significant change is required. A graphic designer for a print product may need to gain significant new skills for designing and maintaining a Web page. All workers involved in the project need at least some new skills to understand how the medium works.

Who will help them gain those skills? It is rather glib to suggest that in general workers in the convergent labour market-place will increasingly have to gain their own skills in their own time and at their own expense. The gaining of work-specific skills will still be significantly financed by employers in the future -- at least, so far as the New Zealand newspaper industry is concerned. Newspapers will continue to be heavily involved in training so that their employees can contribute to the development and growth of an excellent product, whatever that product might be. Skills such as information-gathering and organization, skills such as design, graphics and other devices to keep the readers or viewers interested, and technical skills such as computer skills will be just as important in the future, or even more so, than they are today. Nothing about convergence changes those imperatives.

What I think will occur, though, is a sharpening of the focus between the gaining of generic skills on the one hand and newspaper-specific skills on the other. Let me explain. Traditionally, providing the basic building blocks of education has been the responsibility of parents and the State; nothing will change in the future in terms of that responsibility. But the basic building blocks themselves will inevitably change to meet future challenges. The New Zealand Government, of course, is already investing very significant funds into computer-based education in schools, just to give one example. It is vital for this to occur so that students leaving school have relevant skills, not only for tertiary education, but also for employment.

So far as newspapers are concerned, the situation is a little more complicated. Most content providers, such as journalists employed on newspapers, are already tertiary qualified. Technical personnel -- designers, graphic artists, pre-press computer operators and the like -- are increasingly coming to work for newspapers having gained tertiary skills as well. Our system for setting skill standards, developing them and monitoring them is therefore vitally important at the tertiary level, and I am pleased to say that our systems for doing those things in New Zealand work very well.

New Zealand has a national qualifications framework which allows portability of skill recognition across occupational barriers and provides for active employer and worker control over skill attainment and the monitoring of educational institutions. Government funds much of the tertiary framework, but employers and workers have a critical involvement in what is taught and how outcomes are measured. This, along with the portability of recognition provided by the framework, provides an excellent path for future skill attainment across increasingly divergent disciplines. One other critical factor makes the system work, namely, that it is competency-based. The concept of time served in apprenticeships and the like has disappeared from the New Zealand training scene.

Our industry enjoys excellent cooperation between employers and unions in this regard. Both groups in New Zealand have a long history of positive activity in training. That is not to say that our model works for all. Prescription of a structure of consultation and cooperation would almost certainly lead to its destruction. Our system of worker and employer cooperation in the printing industry in New Zealand works because it is voluntary and it is based on shared interest. Employers are left to train workers on specific equipment and in specific workplace skills. Once again, in our industry in New Zealand, workers are usually involved in that process. Employers invest significant funds not only in tertiary sector training, but also in workplace training.

There is, of course, a time-lag in training for the new skills that technological change demands. Nothing new in that! But we think that our system minimizes that time-lag because the industry players largely control the system. So far as New Zealand is concerned, we are very used to technological change and to increasing competitive pressure leading to the need to change, to develop skills and to multi-skill, if necessary.

None of this is to say, though, that some employees and potential employees will not train themselves. That is the nature of the convergent market-place and there is nothing new in that. The pace of change is already, and will increasingly be, such that those at the cutting edge will tend to be self-trained in at least some of the areas of their activity. This is, in my view, at least partly because a desire to be at the cutting edge is an interest, not a skill. Or, to put it another way, passion is not a learned behaviour.

I now wish to discuss my view of the role of the ILO in this process. Let me first touch on the issues paper which we all received prior to arriving here. Although it was very useful in some parts, it contained a number of assumptions which were not necessarily supported by facts, and some of the language used in the report was regrettably value-laden. To suggest for instance, as the report does on page 5, that in the information age individuals will be "forced to struggle for survival in an electronic jungle" with "survival mechanisms" which have been developed over previous decades "sorely tested" by change is an apocalyptic vision of the future that I for one do not subscribe to.

Towards the end of the report, a number of ILO Conventions are mentioned. I found that at least two of these Conventions, Nos. 87 and 98, came into force in the early 1950s. I think we can all agree that the world was a very different place then. I suggest that it is also most interesting to consider that one of the key reasons our world has changed so much in the last 40 or more years has been the development of extremely cheap and effective mass media. The fact that information swapping amongst communities all over the planet is occurring at unprecedented levels has led, among other things, to the death of prescription. Or, to put it a more positive way, it has led to a recognition that different communities and individuals will go myriads of different ways in order to reach the same objective. I am not convinced that ILO Conventions written in the 1950s adequately address that new realization.

I would always assert that workers, no matter where they are employed, deserve adequate protection in terms of bargaining, freedom of association and a range of other issues. But I would also say that employers, workers and governments in the convergent future should be left to decide for themselves the most appropriate responses to those general issues. Perhaps some of the issues raised by multimedia convergence suggest that the ILO might have some responsibility to revisit its Conventions, to ensure that the principles contained in them remain universal and valid in the twenty-first century, but not prescriptive as to their method of achievement.

What is absolutely certain about the phenomenon of multimedia convergence is that no one model will work for all. It never has before, and it certainly will not in the future.

Changes in occupations and skills:
New qualification levels in multimedia
Frank Werneke⁽³⁴⁾

In the Federal Republic of Germany, when the reform of media professions is discussed, we include two basic questions: how existing media professions can be adapted and what new professions, occupations and qualification levels will arise due to changes in the information and multimedia environment. In Germany all changes in the definition of professions, skill levels and qualifications take place after tripartite discussion and evaluation. Changes are made at the federal level on the basis of new legislation.

To understand the changes in professional profiles or qualifications which are taking place in the multimedia environment, it might be helpful to imagine the labour market model in the form of three concentric circles. The central area represents the core of the multimedia sector. This is where such things as electronic catalogues, CD-ROMs and on-line services are being developed and produced. Hardly any of the 11-12,000 workers employed in this core area of the multimedia sector have traditional job profiles. The growth rate in the first circle is considerable.

The second circle includes advertising, broadcasting, the print media as well as audiovisual production, that is television, radio and so on. This provides employment to about 500,000 workers in Germany and offers about 14,000 apprenticeship places.

The third circle embraces a broad range of very different sectors, such as tourism, trade, banking and insurance. We can foresee that sometime in the future multimedia specialists will be needed in all these areas: there will be multimedia bankers, commercial workers and businessmen. Since the field of multimedia is so complex, our old concepts of professions and skills may no longer be useful. It is difficult to conceive of a multimedia professional qualification in the same way as a printing or a publishing qualification. Currently, the multimedia core sector has very few workers with a traditional training background in other aspects of the media. In the future we shall need lots of people with multimedia skills: multimedia directors, multimedia concept developers, multimedia technicians. There will be a rapid expansion in new professional qualifications and new professions which are going to have to be developed.

Another approach to the ongoing changes within professions and job profiles in the information and communications industry in particular is a so-called 3-cluster model, which has been jointly developed by the social partners. The concept is based on different clusters and aims to show how we can develop or adapt professional contents.

First, there is the contents cluster, which includes both journalism and graphic design. In most cases it is not necessary to develop a new profession, for example, the profession of multimedia journalist. Instead the challenge is to adapt existing professions to the new requirements. For example, we in IG Medien are involved in developing a European media Master's degree for people from graphic design backgrounds or those who have already graduated from a graphic design college.

The second cluster includes the technology underlying multimedia, basically information and communications technology. Here we have the software industry and the telecommunications sector. In this cluster, a process is under way now to create four different new professions.

The third cluster might best be described as media integration and multimedia. This covers the professions and skill types which we already have in the media landscape. The aim is not to create new multimedia professions, but to base ourselves on the existing professions and skills, to build on them and to define new professional types.

But why is it essential to define and describe new professions? We cannot just assume that developments will simply occur in line with some self-regulating process. There are in fact three main reasons why definitions are so important: first, in order to develop initial professional and vocational training possibilities for the new professions; second, in order to provide appropriate guidance to people who are already working in the media sector regarding further training and retraining; and third, to provide guidance to small and medium-sized enterprises. By defining qualification levels or professions, we can help them to adapt to structural change.

The problem in creating new professions or new professional descriptions in this media sector is that there are different trends. Some enterprises already work with on-line services or in the development of CD-ROMs, whereas others are still very conventional. They use old-fashioned processes, make little use of new communication and information technologies, and are very far away from media integration. Obviously these enterprises develop at different speeds and we have to take this into account.

This process of defining new professions and new skill types is probably going to be concluded next year. It covers the whole of the printing industry and the audiovisual media in general. We are currently discussing the professional skills needed at the preproduction stages. We are planning to define an occupation to be called "media designer" or "media servicer" in such a way that it will cover several different areas. Training for these new multimedia professions is therefore not going to be organized in the same way as the old-fashioned typographers' or printers' professions were set up in the past. It has to be more flexible. We are planning to have a modular programme in the first and the second years, but especially in the third year of vocational training. A person will be able to choose among the modules proposed depending on the type of enterprise in which he or she is going to be working -- whether it is an old-fashioned traditional enterprise, one which already works with the new media, or perhaps one in the broadcasting field. Thus, training will be structured according to five different fields in the new media landscape: administration, technical aspects, media integration, manufacturing and media production.

Multimedia, as we see for example with the World Wide Web, is not a phenomenon which is confined to just one country. The question of qualifications has to be discussed not only at the national, but also at the international or even global level. Different training courses or approaches need to be discussed and compared in order for us to coordinate our work. This is one of the problems that we will have to deal with in the future.

A second point is that we will have to develop not only basic training, but also define and provide further training on the basis of existing qualifications, for example, for people who are working in the broadcasting sector or in other multimedia technology fields. We have to ensure the quality of further training and we also have to ensure that there are agreed qualifications, which are recognized, for example, at the European level.

New challenges in training and retraining
Adzhar Ibrahim⁽³⁵⁾

Up to now, much of the discussion has been soaring at 50,000 feet, looking down at multimedia convergence from a macro-philosophical and social point of view. I would like to come down to earth to examine the specific area of training in the era of multimedia convergence.

Much discussion has focused on the impact of convergence on entertainment and journalism. Though these areas are in the vanguard of the multimedia revolution, as we move forward many other professional groups will also be affected -- those working in public and private education, health care providers and local and national government administrators not to mention the end-users of multimedia. Training will continue to be important, but retraining will become even more critical. Like other new technologies, multimedia has increased the need for extensive training and retraining, but it also provides a great tool and a great opportunity to make training and retraining more successful.

If current trends continue, workers can expect to change jobs several times in the course of their careers, whereas in the past our fathers probably worked for only one employer until retirement. Frequent job change will require a lot of training and retraining. In the old days, experience carried a lot more weight than it does now. Experience will still count, but not as much as it used to, because of the rapid changes in knowledge and technology. Lifelong learning and ongoing training will have to be the response to these changes.

The accelerating pace of technological change requires constant retraining. Some of this change is due to built-in obsolescence, but most is due simply to the amount of innovation and creativity in the information technology field. As they say, "only the paranoid survive" and there are a lot of paranoid people in the field racing against each other trying to come up with newer and sexier information technologies.

Many low-tech jobs, such as some of the older jobs in the printing industries, and even no-tech jobs, like meter reading, are becoming higher and higher tech as time goes by. Low-skilled people are being laid off. Many of these people will require retraining in fields which are brand new to them, if they are to be able to re-enter employment.

Training costs will be a critical issue, because cost in general has become critical to the competitiveness of any business venture. Training takes up its own resources, but it uses other resources too. It takes people away from their jobs. Perhaps their time would have been better spent maintaining competitiveness, being innovative and focusing on a customer. Therefore, training effectiveness will come to the fore. If training is to be seen as an investment rather than a cost, it must be seen to pay for itself many times over.

In my view, multimedia is a combination of what the latest technology and older technology have to offer. A piece of paper is a medium and all media form a part of multimedia. Training which uses multimedia need not be entirely computer-based. It can make use of whatever is available and effective from the old technologies as well. Multimedia is not paperless, for example.

It is unfortunate, but true, that the more a person needs retraining, the less likely he or she will be comfortable with multimedia. Age is an important factor. People who are laid off are often in the latter part of their working lives and these are the people who have the greatest difficulties in learning new technologies and new ways of doing things. There is a great need to build awareness in the minds and psyches of these people of the need to change and to accept new things.

Computer simulation is getting easier as time goes by because of the increase in computing power coupled with the fall in computing costs. Multimedia provides an opportunity to try out simulation and it allows us to do virtual learning. This is a great strength. Research has shown that people learn more, learn faster and retain much more of what they learn if they are able to learn by visualizing and by simulating things. Multimedia is a tremendous support.

Multimedia also allows us to combine real time training with actual work, so people do not have to be taken out of the office or off the shop floor and put into a classroom purely for the purpose of being trained. This is a boon to productivity. Multimedia offers other avenues for the delivery of training apart from the classroom and it allows the trainer to develop customized training programmes adapted to the needs of the learner and set at a comfortable pace.

Multimedia is not suitable for all types of training. We know that if we are trying to create an enterprise culture or to build teamwork, multimedia tools are not necessarily the best approach. One size does not fit all and multimedia training will not replace all of the other types of training that we need to do. In fact, there is even the danger that we may over-emphasize technology at the expense of people. If multimedia tools result in less interaction between people, in the end that could lead to greater alienation and social problems. This is a problem to watch out for.

Multimedia tools need to be integrated properly. This is not just a question of putting people in front of a computer and putting a couple of CDs on. We have to make sure that the right combination of technology is available to us. Learner preferences have to be taken into account. A 5 or 10 year-old child is probably very comfortable with the latest technology, but a 50 year-old person may find it very intimidating. If pushed the wrong way, that person may become totally turned off by the new technology and by what you are trying to teach. Training must start at a low enough level to gain the acceptance of the trainees, and training materials and methodologies should not be threatening to those being trained.

Another concern regarding multimedia training is the difficulty of knowing how successful the training has been. Sometimes people may carry out training through self-directed learning, perhaps in the confines of the training room behind a closed door learning at their own pace, or perhaps learning at their desks or maybe even at home, if their home computer is wired up to the office server. It is very difficult to find out how much benefit is derived from all of this training and investment. In addition, some traditional instructors may feel threatened by the advance of multimedia training because their own jobs could very well be on the line.

Among the macro-concerns regarding multimedia training are some privacy issues. It is technically possible, using the latest multimedia training tools, to keep track of just about everything the trainee does -- how many keystrokes are made, how many hours or minutes are spent, how successful or unsuccessful the outcome is, and what topics are chosen and what files are downloaded from the Net. All of this information can be kept in a file somewhere. In the long run, this could raise some privacy issues.

Another important issue is the question of who will pay for the training of those who are hardest to train and who are the least able to afford it. Basically, these are older people who have been laid off or who are working in older industries and who need to change. Employers will only train their own employees, not those in the unemployment line. So it looks as though the responsibility will fall to the State, and the State will have to find a way to get the money to train these people who would otherwise continue to be a burden on the taxpayer. The best thing to do is to catch the problem early and to try to nip it in the bud. This means training people as young as possible so that they will never become hard to train or become intimidated by the training that they need.

In my own country, Malaysia, the single most important topic over the last year or two has been a project called the Multimedia Super Corridor. This is an area of about 750 km2 where the Government is investing literally billions of dollars to set up the hard physical infrastructure, such as broadband networks. The Government is also pushing laws through Parliament which will encourage the development of software and the protection of intellectual property rights as well as laws that will provide incentives and guarantees for investments. We, as a nation, feel that we are at a critical juncture and that we have an opportunity to leapfrog over some of the development stages and to be on par with some of the developed nations. This is probably the only opportunity that we are going to be given and if we miss it, we will miss it for good. So there is tremendous excitement in the country to make sure that we do not miss this opportunity.

Perhaps there are other countries in the developing world which feel the same way, but there are many more which are likely to wake up to discover that they have missed the boat altogether. Many parts of the world will not have access to the technology that we are talking about and will fall further behind. There will be a great divide between the haves and the have-nots.

Training needs: How France is responding
Dominique Schalchli ⁽³⁶⁾

How will the multimedia training market develop in France? Are we capable of discerning future training needs? How will the problem of finance be resolved? These are just some of the questions that came to mind as I prepared to visit the bipartite institution responsible for the training of workers, including freelancers, in the entertainment and media fields. Although I have been involved professionally with training issues for quite some time, I am not a specialist in multimedia. The discussions held at the Institute provided an overview of the current training situation in France.

What is multimedia training? Does it exist? Is it easily identifiable? In answer to these questions, the Institute brought out computer lists of training programmes. Of the 35,000 training courses financed in 1996 by their institution, 378 concerned multimedia, in other words approximately 1 per cent. I was told that other types of training included some aspects of multimedia, so this 1 per cent figure was probably an underestimation. Even so, the fact remains that today in my country multimedia training, even in the media and entertainment sector, is minimal in comparison to the overall continuous learning and training processes available to adults.

Multimedia training courses also tend to be short. Of the 378 courses devoted to multimedia, 181 last less than 100 hours, about a third are between 100 and 400 hours long and only 26 are longer than 1,000 hours. Therefore, I concluded that these training courses were too short to meet the retraining needs of those changing careers or professions.

How is the training supply structured in France? I saw numerous catalogues from various training organizations, but none gave a precise idea of how the supply was structured. Are there major institutions dealing with this? Are they scattered around the country or is training centralized? I did not get a good answer to my questions. The truth is that at the moment no one knows.

My basic conclusion is that the multimedia training market is not yet well developed. In fact, it is anarchic. It seems to be shooting off in all directions without any coherent strategy behind it. Adam Smith's invisible hand does not seem to be working very well as far as the training market is concerned. Since that is the case, sooner or later the authorities are going to have to take up their responsibilities in this respect. They must play a certain role in structuring the market and in defining the major approaches towards multimedia training in the future, if that training is to develop in a coherent fashion.

This is particularly true when you are talking in the much wider sense of training workers in general. A lot has been said about initial school-based training, but one of the problems of greatest concern is the training of people over the age of 40. Do we consider these people to be a lost generation with respect to multimedia? I would like to think the opposite. Indeed, I am certain that if we had a policy organized and run together with the authorities, it should be quite straightforward for those over 40 to be trained in multimedia, rather than being left on the sidelines of the new technology.

What will be the training needs of the future as far as multimedia is concerned? Do we have some idea about how professions and jobs in multimedia are going to develop? In France we have made fairly clear distinctions between people who design projects, those who implement projects (such as sound, light and video technicians who will have to be trained to handle new technology) and those who develop information technology. These three major categories are well defined, but in themselves are insufficient. We need to carry out an analysis, both nationally and internationally, to better understand the types of multimedia jobs and professions that are likely to arise and the kind of training necessary to have access to those jobs and professions.

This raises the question of financing. In the issues paper prepared for this Symposium, it is noted that some observers believe that in the future much of the burden and expense of training is likely to fall on the workers, whether in terms of initial training, continuous training, or adapting to new professional requirements. That struck me. It even shocked me a bit. Does that mean that tomorrow in the multimedia sector workers are basically going to have to pay for their own training? In France employers and trade unionists are engaged in ongoing discussions on the possibility of co-financing training, but no one has ever mentioned the possibility that training costs would be shouldered by the workers themselves. Will this be different for multimedia? When I posed the question, I learned that, in fact, we are already in a situation where we get by through self-training. Strong individualists get themselves trained in multimedia in whatever way they can, enrolling in part-time training programmes or borrowing training documents or CD-ROMs. Training is haphazard, but that is the way it is being done.

There is quite a considerable need for this question of financing multimedia training to be included in discussions between the social partners, either on a bipartite or a tripartite basis. Experience nationally and internationally has shown that vocational training is an area where the contradictions between employers and workers and government, if there are any, are not great. It is possible to reach consensus. In my view it is urgent for the question of financing of multimedia training to be included in general discussions on training. In my own country, continuing training has already become a subject of discussion and I hope it will continue with the support of the social partners.

Finally, there is the issue of the individual and the collective. Perhaps this term "multimedia" and the term "multimedia workers" indicate a more individualistic approach than in other sectors. If that is the case, then training courses and structured training programmes would offer an opportunity to bring people together to define strategies, to exchange opinions, to settle conflicts perhaps and basically to work in a more collective manner, to work together. This would certainly not harm the smooth development of the individual and, in fact, I think it would help.

Skills for employers and employees
Robert Zachariasiewicz ⁽³⁷⁾

Much has been said and written about the overall benefits of high technology to modern economies. Technological advances are seen to create good jobs, not to eliminate them. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 1994 to the year 2005 net employment is projected to increase by 14 per cent in the United States. All employment categories that require education and/or training beyond high school are projected to grow faster than the 14 per cent average.

Most of the training in the United States is provided by businesses. According to the American Society for Training and Development, American businesses are spending some $55 billion a year upgrading the skills of their employees -- 20 per cent more than in 1984. But the number of workers has risen 24 per cent since that time, meaning that private sector spending has barely kept pace. Considering that skills are far more important now than they were in the early 1980s, this shortfall is deeply troubling.

The emerging information technologies and the related globalization of the economy are resulting in a fundamental change in the way that work is carried out in the high-wage sectors of various economies. In the United States, the fundamental change is the movement away from full-time employment in a traditional employment relationship to one of outsourcing and subcontracting, temporary and freelance employment.

Whereas health care and retirement benefits are not the responsibility of the employer in many of the world's other major economies, in all of these countries the traditional employers have assumed sufficient responsibility for training and retraining their higher wage workers. Training is a key issue in all countries. Continuing education is of the utmost importance if workers are to keep up with emerging technologies and rapidly changing skill requirements.

This issue has been acknowledged in the United States and has served as the basis for the President's Middle-Class Bill of Rights tax proposals. If approved, these proposals would provide resources for individuals to continue their education through general tax deductions applicable to any type of training and education, and limited tax credits for the first two years of college. These proposals could be criticized as being unfocused and lacking assurances that the resources will be used effectively. Are there alternative policies and programmes being utilized in other countries to address this issue, such as industry training funds, training institutes, individual training accounts and training contracts? If we want more assurance that, independent of any employment relationship, the typical worker will engage in the continuing education and training needed to maintain a competitive workforce, perhaps we should establish individual training accounts. This would guarantee a minimum level of resources for such activities, independent of the tax system.

Another consideration is whether vocational training or traditional apprenticeship can be organized to respond to the greater flexibility required by technology? If the economy is indeed best served by a skilled and trained workforce with a stake in the industry, then the question at hand is how to develop this well-trained and skilled workforce.

It does not seem to be the case that workers today are being left to shoulder the burden of training and retraining on their own. Most major employers view training as an investment, not just a cost. I would be curious though to know if other industries are making the same kind of commitments and the same kind of changes as those outlined by Mr. O'Reilly and Mr. Werneke concerning the printing and graphical industries. We need to discover what types of training programmes are best suited to meet the needs of those industries. Then we can open up a continued discussion on the responsibilities of governments, employers and employees to meet those training needs.

General discussion on the impact of
convergence on skill requirements

Adriana Rozenzvaig, a Workers' adviser, drew attention to the heterogeneity in the content sector, not only in terms of differences between regions and countries, but also within organizations, where one could find both employees with a very high level of qualifications and skills as well as low-skilled workers. While the high-skilled workers might be able to negotiate on their own behalf, it was difficult for those with very low educational levels to do so. Retraining and upgrading of their qualifications were of paramount importance. The issue of training and retraining was often addressed by unions as part of collective bargaining. Tripartite involvement was needed. In Latin America, the State was unfortunately not very engaged in raising skill levels. Enterprises should be interested in improving skills for a number of reasons. First, the information industry was becoming increasingly sophisticated and demanded qualified people to work in it. Second, the products sold often required a certain degree of intellectual capacity as well as financial resources on the part of the customers. Such products would not be widely sold in countries with millions of barely literate people. Therefore, enterprises should also have an interest in educating people.

Before questioning the relevance of Conventions Nos. 87 and 98 on freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining, it should be recalled that there were countries where children made microchips and where ^maquiladores absolutely prohibited the formation of trade unions and, hence, freedom of association. The importance of these two fundamental rights should certainly not be challenged. The ILO should remain vigilant with regard to the application of these core Conventions.

Walter Durling, Employer Vice-Chairman, made clear that Employers had neither attacked Conventions Nos. 87 and 98 nor referred to the rights contained therein in a disparaging way. Indeed, freedom of association and collective bargaining should be used in order to obtain a better situation in the sector.

Kevin Tinsley, the representative of the Government of the United Kingdom, pointed out that training was one area where the "invisible hand" of the free market did not work. It was a classic case of market failure. This raised the question of who would pay for sufficient training. Whereas employers might continue to pay for the bulk of it, they were in fact often reluctant to invest in human capital, since it was so difficult to recoup these investments. In order to overcome this problem, one could envisage introducing transfer fees. If a company had trained an employee who then decided to leave and work for another enterprise, the new company would have to pay compensation for the training investment. Another possibility might be to set up a levy on employers as a means to finance training. The State could then use the money for the provision of training vouchers to individuals. Moreover, governments certainly had to intervene when people became redundant. They had to provide training for the unemployed in order to reintroduce them to the employment market. In general, the issue of how to reach the optimum level of training very much depended on the existing institutions of a country. The provision of training might therefore vary between States with a long tradition of bipartite or tripartite organizations and those without.

Chris Warren, Worker Vice-Chairman, argued that the pattern of training did not so much reflect heterogeneity as bi-polarity. Those working in secure employment relations, particularly employees of big corporations, would by and large continue to have access to training and retraining, while the contingent workforce would not. Currently, these contingent workers had to carry the costs of training themselves. This burden affected in particular the unemployed, underemployed or substantially non-employed. Both employers and governments had to meet their responsibilities in this context. Governments should provide training directly, or encourage it indirectly through non-state institutions. Employers, who needed a flexible contingent workforce and benefited from it should, at least partially, provide the funds for these training programmes.

Jean-Pierre Lehr of the Employers' group stressed that the visual information industries could not survive without highly trained people. During the last 20 years, 15 per cent of the investments in the area of multimedia had gone into technical material. These extremely sophisticated technical machines -- worth between $100,000 and $2 million -- had to be operated by very skilled technicians, who had to be trained on a permanent basis. It was also essential to have a well-trained group of part-time and casual workers, since soliciting people on very short notice, almost from one day to the next, was very common in industries such as television broadcasting. The need for sufficient training for permanent as well as part-time and casual workers was undisputed. Employers, in concert with workers, had set up a funding mechanism to ensure the availability of appropriate training.

Michel Muller of the Workers' group cited the problem of access to appropriate up-to-date training and recognition of new qualifications. In France, joint consultative committees had looked into this question and measures had been taken to provide financing for training. However, the traditional approach of providing specific training for each different sector -- one type of training for entertainers, another type for graphic arts, etc. -- should be adapted to the needs of the multimedia sector. There should be a common pool of training possibilities available to all the branches of the content sector. The ILO should encourage governments as well as employers to be involved in providing such training opportunities.

Barbara Motzney, the representative of the Government of Canada, noting the complex nature of multimedia convergence and the information society, warned against simple approaches to coping with future changes. The fact that larger corporations were declining, while small and medium-sized enterprises were expected to be the driving force of growth in the information industry, caused a further problem in terms of training, since these companies often had very limited funds to spend on training. No single training course would be sufficient for handling the impending challenges. It was vital to set up new models which embraced a broader scale of training. It was essential to build up life skills.

Response of the panel members

Phil O'Reilly emphasized that freedom of association and collective bargaining were absolutely vital and had to be defended. It was, however, necessary to ensure that Conventions Nos. 87 and 98 would still be relevant in the twenty-first century. Therefore, they had to be examined in the light of the huge ongoing changes within the multimedia convergence market-place.

Robert Zachariasiewicz stated that the nature of many issues of the multimedia industry was not different from past problems in other industries. Today's considerations that workers in multimedia needed training in order to use highly expensive equipment in a proper way were exactly the same as those expressed in the construction industry 50 years ago. However, the question of who should bear the costs for sufficient training had become more complicated. Employers, workers and federal and state governments would all be expected to make investments in training. While anybody could buy a software programme which taught new technical skills, such as building up Web pages, it was the provision of the resources to purchase this software which had to be sorted out. Although multimedia convergence eliminated some jobs, it would also create many good employment opportunities. Yet most of these would be created by small companies with 20 to 25 employees which, again, raised the issue of financing, since these enterprises did not have the resources to invest in training. New technology and the convergence process posed many challenges, such as providing the means and opportunities for training, protecting the right to organize and bargain, and expanding pension and health protection. These were among the priorities cited by former United States Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich. In short, there were numerous issues which had to be dealt with, and it was hoped that the ILO would provide assistance in finding appropriate responses.

Part 8

Information technology and the future
of the employment contract

Telework in Italy: The role of collective bargaining
Marco Biagi ⁽³⁸⁾

Technological change is a very complex phenomenon, not simply from the technical point of view, but because it implies a fundamental change in social perspective. For this reason, new technologies -- and telework -- are controversial and continue to encounter resistance and friction.

As a labour lawyer, I observe that telework cannot be easily accommodated by the legal framework in my country, which makes a distinction between subordinate and autonomous workers and which serves as a discriminant between two different protection regimes. This new form of work is unknown to the legal system. It is certainly not illegal, but then neither is it regulated by the legal system. There are serious obstacles to its diffusion.

Telework is by no means widespread in Italy. Official statistics are not available, but it seems that the number of teleworkers is quite minimal. What are the possible reasons for this resistance? A recent opinion survey conducted by a Milan-based private research institute Teknova, revealed mixed feelings about teleworking among employees, employers and trade unions. Some 86 per cent of workers were in principle interested in teleworking, provided that some work could also be performed in the normal workplace. On the employers' side, management expressed doubts about the organizational and legal changes that might be required and questioned how performance would be evaluated, pay determined and work controlled. Traditionally, trade unions have been hostile to telework, seeing it as a possible first step towards dismissal or towards the introduction or reintroduction of piece-work. However, unions seem more open towards teleworking when, as in the case of Telecom Italia, it is introduced experimentally and in a negotiated framework.

Under the current Italian legal system there are obstacles to the introduction of telework. According to the provisions of a law passed in 1970, management cannot use audiovisual and similar equipment for supervising and controlling employees at a distance. Labour legislation views with great suspicion technological monitoring of workers. The law states that these legal restrictions can be removed only on the condition that a collective agreement is reached. Presently there are only a few such agreements.

Probably the most significant of these agreements concerned the introduction of telework at Telecom Italia, our major telephone company. A company-level agreement was negotiated and signed in 1995. Interestingly, it was negotiated in the context of personnel redundancy and mobility processes. Telecom Italia initiated a home teleworking project in order to redeploy personnel who would otherwise have run the risk of being dismissed. The introduction of telework was one possible way to avoid redundancies or at least to limit them.

Management chose an activity which seemed to be particularly suitable for the introduction of teleworking. This was the directory inquiry services. Previously, when you called for information, the operator who replied was in the same geographical area. Today, your call is likely to be answered from a distant location, very likely in the south. The management of Telecom Italia made a strategic choice to group directory information operators in a number of southern Italian towns, where the risk of redundancy had been high. It is a voluntary experiment in which 200 directory information operators are involved. They work from home on a part-time basis for a period of at least three years. The company installs all the necessary equipment and pays the power bills. Technically speaking, the employment contracts of these people have been converted from classical full-time employment contracts into half-time jobs. Obviously not all the employees who are willing to be involved in this project may be accepted as teleworkers. They have to demonstrate that their house is compatible with the needs of the job. The work area should be separate from the parts of the home that are used for family life, and must be in compliance with security norms and with safety and health standards. Potential teleworkers have to be really interested in the experience.

From a legal point of view, telework in this case means simply a change in the place where the employee's duties are performed. It does not affect the role or grade of the employee in the organization. Consequently, home teleworkers must perform the duties assigned to them and they are subject to the control of their employer. In general, the discipline and the regulation of work remain more or less the same, for example, in terms of working hours and working time arrangements. The work is performed during the working hours of the business unit to which the employees belong and is based on shifts to be specified. Routine hierarchical functions connected with the employer-employee relationship are carried out by teleprocessing.

As mentioned earlier, teleworking has proved to be particularly difficult to negotiate with regard to control and privacy, because of legal provisions which outlaw the use of audiovisual and similar equipment for supervising and controlling workers' activity at a distance. The solution provided in the Telecom agreement involved the use of the same form of indirect control applied to in-house computer operators -- a light that switches on when the operator is working. Furthermore, the teleworker's computer console is be equipped with an automatic voice-recognition device. The agreement states explicitly that the teleworker remains part of the company and that all management and administrative instructions and information are provided through the information technology used. The parties also agreed that appropriate measures would be taken to ensure that there was an adequate degree of socialization for those engaged in teleworking. After three years of teleworking, an employee may request a return to office-based work. Both unions and management hope that teleworking will prove popular with employees and that it can be extended to other services.

The content of this agreement is not particularly innovative or advanced. It is just the first step towards the introduction of telework. So far, after about 20 months of implementation, the principal problem appears to be the lack of socialization of these workers. They feel somewhat lonely and in some cases have a sense of being abandoned by management. They fear that their career may be slowed down. They feel that their situation is precarious and exposed to a possible future downsizing of the corporation.

The second case involves telework at Italtel, which was also inaugurated in early 1995. The agreement takes note of the common interest in teleworking of the two parties and its possible introduction at Italtel on a permanent basis. It is considered an experiment to be performed "with no specific regulatory or operational constraints that may jeopardize or predetermine its outcome". Since the major concern expressed by labour union representatives related to the professional and career conditions of the workers involved and their possible isolation from the corporate environment, the agreement guaranteed the participation of union representatives in the periodic reviews planned for the workers as well as the possible use of the communication facilities to send workers the usual labour union bulletins. Finally, the company and union representatives agreed to explore the possibility of continuing and broadening the initiative, and possibly defining a framework agreement "settling the terms and conditions for an appropriate regulation of the issue". The experiment would obviously be conducted on the basis of shared experience and results.

As regards the specific conditions applied to the experiment, a letter was submitted to each teleworker for approval, in accordance with the collective agreement. The most significant points were that telework was to be introduced on a purely voluntary basis; the worker and the company were free to discontinue the experiment at any time. The teleworker would work periodically on the company premises. In order to make telework more attractive, teleworkers have been excluded from overtime, night and holiday shifts. Also, the corporation has committed itself to periodically make an all-encompassing lump sum payment to teleworkers in order to replace the other kinds of bonuses which they might have been entitled to, for instance, the so-called canteen bonus for lunch.

Telework, as it is conceived in both the Telecom Italia and the Italtel agreements, is a type of subordinate employment relationship. It is new, but not really innovative. However, telework may be much more than this. It potentially has multiple legal facets -- as an entrepreneurial activity, as the rendering of services or the securing of results on a freelance basis, as a contract of cooperation, and even as a contract of decentralized employment. Telework is an abstract, general notion and sooner or later, it will need a new terminology. Simply being connected with a customer, an employer or somebody else through a technology is not a sufficient definition of telework. Telework is a sociological phenomenon and legally speaking it will probably require new definitions.

Within the two corporations that I have mentioned, there has been some discussion as to whether it is in the interest of management to introduce telework and in the interest of workers to accept it. As far as management is concerned, teleworking is difficult, complex and costly to organize. Managers are frequently unprepared to manage human resources in this new way. It takes time to make telework operate efficiently. None the less, these two case-studies and other experiences I have studied have led me to believe that telework may represent a competitive advantage for management in the future. Why?

When introducing telework, management inevitably has to readjust the corporation's structures in a more efficient way. Seeking and obtaining the involvement of employees is almost unavoidable, because teleworking cannot function efficiently unless teleworkers are really involved. In the Italian context of industrial relations, there is no possibility of introducing telework unless labour unions cooperate closely with management. As a result of such an experience, it is not difficult to see that the climate of industrial relations may become more friendly, less adversarial and more cooperative. Both sides of industry are involved in the same experiment. They pioneer something new together. They feel closer.

Yet I am troubled by the fact that, in our experience, telework may not always be an entirely free choice. Workers are very reluctant to become teleworkers, when there are other viable options. Telework is voluntary from a legal point of view, of course, but basically workers choose to become teleworkers when they lack other alternatives. So I ask myself, to what extent is a choice voluntary if one does not have other options. We should probably be more careful with this distinction between voluntary and involuntary, and be more sincere with ourselves.

What is the best way to regulate new forms of work associated with new technologies, and telework in particular? In my view, collective bargaining is preferable to legislation. After all, legislation in many countries is a bit obsolete. It is not able to take new things -- such as new ways of working -- easily into account. Legislation cannot be revised at the same speed as new technologies evolve. Thus, legislation should regulate employment practices only once they have become reasonably consolidated; otherwise, collective bargaining is preferable. The two sides of industry can provide for new rules to deal with new experiences on a flexible, experimental basis. Rules can be refined periodically to take into account the pros and cons of experience. Through collective bargaining, it is possible to reach a real consensus -- not a government-imposed direction, but a jointly reached consensus -- on how to take the best from the new technologies while avoiding the traps. In Italy, France, and Spain and in many other countries around the globe where collective bargaining has become a consolidated practice, I am ready to predict that it will be through collective agreements that new technologies will be regulated in the foreseeable future.

General discussion on telework and
the role of collective bargaining

Aidan White of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) stated that journalists were technology enthusiasts and welcomed the changes which brought enormous opportunities for their profession in the form of new information services. Yet the turbulence in the industry placed unacceptable pressure on journalists, with fewer full-time jobs, less attention to health and safety at work, less investment in training, and fewer opportunities for investigative journalism. These trends had been verified by studies. The percentage of freelancers had increased enormously within the last decade, reaching almost 40 per cent in Germany and 30 per cent in the United Kingdom. This development was not due to a sudden desire among journalists to become entrepreneurial, but simply to the fact that there was no real alternative. The pressure put on journalists had become unacceptable. Journalists, as authors, had a great interest in protecting their economic rights on the future use of their work, but protection of moral rights was also important in an age of digital manipulation. The ILO should continue its role in the area of intellectual property. The questions of content and quality of the new information society were of central concern to journalists. Intensive dialogue was indispensable to reach consensus and to create a new framework in order to adapt to technological change. This Symposium ought to result in a range of follow-up activities which promoted such a dialogue, supported core democratic values and led to joint research. All these activities were necessary to ensure that change would be beneficial to all and that the new industries would prosper.

Dominique Schalchli, the representative of the Government of France, noted that instead of fixing attention solely on information specialists who were confronted with the arrival of multimedia, a discussion on teleworking should examine the effects of technological change on the enterprises of tomorrow, including those which were not specialized in information services. He referred to the OIT Página de entrada Work Convention, 1996 (No. 177), in which telework was explicitly mentioned as an example of post-industrial home work. Telework should therefore be discussed within the existing framework provided by this Convention.

Walter Durling, Employer Vice-Chairman, expressed caution in discussing telework in relation to the home work Convention, bearing in mind how this Convention had emerged. The Employers' group in the Governing Body had rejected any notion of including home work as an item for discussion during the Conference for almost five years. The initial reason for examining home work through a technical committee had been the severe conditions of Indian workers manufacturing cigars. The Employers' group of this technical committee had opposed any Recommendations or Conventions, since it regarded the issue as regional in nature. Thus, the home work Convention had been approved without the consent of the Employers. The Convention did not and could not respond to present technological developments, due to a lack of sufficient data and analysis. Telework was an ever-changing subject. As equipment and software became more sophisticated, one could expect further evolution in the field of telework.

Kevin Tinsley, the representative of the Government of the United Kingdom, noted that, while home work and telework might have some common features, there was none the less a clear distinction in the fact that teleworking connected the workers electronically to their employers, whereas home work might not do so.

Jürgen Warnken, the representative of the Government of Germany, detected many similarities between Italy and his own country regarding the key issues of telework. Rigorous surveillance of teleworkers via the new media was neither possible nor desirable. When positive relations existed between employers and workers, working hours could be kept quite flexible, basically leaving the exact arrangement up to the worker. Such a stipulation was part of a proposal for a collective agreement currently being discussed in Germany. Furthermore, it was essential to give a teleworker the chance to return to a more conventional and traditional way of working if he discovered that telework did not really fit into his lifestyle. These two freedoms were necessary in order to exploit the full potential of telework, a new form of employment which could embrace not only low profile jobs, but also some rather demanding jobs with high responsibility. The greater scope for self-employment and the concomitant increase in individual contracts did not mean that collective agreements and existing industrial relations would be abandoned, but simply that they had to be adapted. Some workers were probably no longer interested in present-day collective agreements, but they might appreciate different sorts of involvement by collective organizations. More flexibility, such as the freedom to arrange the working hours according to one's own desires, could well be included in collective agreements.

Frank Werneke of the Workers' group stated that a large number of workers in many different sectors were interested in trying out telework, but it should be introduced as alternating work and organized within the framework of an ordinary employment relationship. The more detailed aspects ought to be regulated through collective bargaining. He agreed that new collective agreements had to be considerably different from the traditional ones in order to regulate new phenomena, such as telework. Nevertheless, the main problem was how to achieve these agreements. Teleworkers were usually not collectively represented, since the present type of telework was in reality not a protected form of alternating work, but organized outside the framework of the enterprise. This imbalance of forces often made it impossible to obtain collective agreements. In such circumstances, the State had to intervene to set certain minimum standards. Furthermore, workers' representation had to be organized in such a way as to include teleworkers. The interest in reaching collective agreements was not only on the workers' side, but also on the employers. The Employers' Association of Germany did not want to wait until there were massive demonstrations.

Chris Pate of the International Graphical Federation (IGF) returned to the issue of whether teleworking was actually voluntary. Whilst some groups of employees had apparently indicated a certain interest in teleworking on a voluntary basis, there had been some resistance to it from middle and junior management. Research in Europe and New Zealand had revealed that there had been incidents where economic recession had forced parents to combine telework with child care. In order to cover up the situation, these people had even hidden their children in cupboards when the company supervisors had come to their home. Telework could divide the workforce into two tiers -- a core group of employees with better social protection, payment and qualifications, and a second-tier group of teleworkers, which might even become a gender ghetto. ILO standards and the EU directive on working time should be applied to teleworkers as well. Collective agreements should ensure implementation. The ILO should monitor the application of its standards.

Kevin Tinsley noted that teleworking certainly produced costs as well as benefits. Managers needed to take these into account in the way they organized work. Teleworking could be used to cut costs and could enhance the efficiency of industry and thus preserve jobs. This would be a long-term benefit for employment. Surveys had shown widespread interest in teleworking among the workforce. It was employers who were somewhat resistant to the idea and were thus slow to adapt to the new possibilities offered by technology. The only way to ensure that telework was a freely chosen form of employment was to provide more employment opportunities. The potential impact of teleworking on regional economies was not limited to Italy, where the gap between North and South had become exacerbated, but had broader implications for regional policy elsewhere.

Response of the speaker

Marco Biagi emphasized that home work was one thing, telework another. Although telework ought to be regulated by statutory law in the long term, it was still too early to do so. Workers who opted to try out teleworking should have the freedom to go back to their previous status of conventional work or to continue teleworking. However, bearing in mind that teleworking was not always voluntary, management should make arrangements to involve, motivate and support teleworkers more adequately. Investments in terms of training, motivation and new techniques on human resource management were needed. Otherwise telework could turn out to be counterproductive. In order to avoid the risk of a two-tier workforce, it was essential to provide teleworkers with the same basic rights as those of conventional employees, particularly concerning working time. In Europe, for instance, the EU directive on working time should be applicable to teleworkers. Some of the positive effects of teleworking were the possibility of better reconciling work and family responsibilities and of ending the frustration of commuting.

Part 9

The changing nature of
employment relations

Defining the employer, the employee and the
self-employed (the cyber-entrepreneur): Implications
for the future of labour relations
Walter Durling⁽³⁹⁾

Today I invite you to take a trip, a trip of the imagination. Imagine yourselves in this same room; it is somewhat changed but you do not know why -- not yet. Imagine that I am here in front of you after a rather stressful walk from my seat over there and that I am about to speak:

Ladies and gentlemen, before I proceed any further I would like to ask every distinguished member of the audience to take a look at his or her watch and synchronize your time with mine. It is exactly 10.14 on the morning of Wednesday, 29 January in the year 2022. To allay any immediate speculations, I am able to divulge that Futura, the wonder drug of Clark and Layman, has made this trip possible and gets the credit for my bouncy demeanour. You should be aware by now that the microphone in front of me is just a prop. It satisfies the whims of members of my own generation who cannot adjust to the individual sound hemispheres surrounding the tops of your heads and generated at the base of your seats. They insist on wearing those awful heavy and inactive earphone shells. If allowed, they would be fiddling with knobs and controls instead of using the flat desktop PCs in front of them to key in their individual translation service. By the way, those hologram screens were installed just in time for this event.

I have been asked to review the advances of multimedia and its impact on the dynamics of labour relations. But before we get into that, let me review what has happened in the past 25 years. Let me go over with you all the technological developments since 1997.

The technological revolution has continued unabated since the first Symposium on Multimedia Convergence was held in this same room in January 1997. The revolution has changed the entire concept of the corporate office. Mechanical and electric typewriters now have a place in national museums around the world. The computer keyboard is only used in the Illiterate World. For this 25th anniversary of the first Symposium on Multimedia Convergence, the Office has managed to obtain a sample of the latest gadgets and innovations. You can exchange verbally with your PC or your Personal Electrovalet (or PE, if you want to use the avant-garde denomination), and you can converse in any language, including Wu, the tongue of Jiangsu Province, and Fujianese, spoken in Fujian Province. This we owe to the Beijing branch of the Microsoft Corporation.

The metallic voice you hear translating my words is not a deficiency in the Universal Translation Module (UTM), housed in the basement of this building. As you are aware the Universal Translation Module replaced human interpreters about two years ago. The metallic quality is mainly due to some bugs in the installation of the individual sound hemispheres. Defining the boundaries of each sound hemisphere still requires patient fiddling when installing the coils at the base of the seats. The coils require precise adjustment for the sound field to move as you turn your heads -- but they will be corrected shortly.

What is the actual substance of the changes brought about by technology? It is simple. All the structures of subordination have been replaced by new schemes of collaboration. Secretaries were replaced long ago by what we now call corporate assistants. Their ability to interact with corporate technical tools is the key to efficient, productive management techniques. Nowadays, most of us dictate our letters and memos directly to the Personal Electrovalet. Our corporate assistants review our instructions and are able to fill in details, but only in those areas we allow for their contribution. They can perform even while walking to the cafeteria using the hologram screens installed in the corridors. The size of the flat hologram screen installed in the corridors is 50 inches or the equivalent of 1 metre and one-quarter diagonal size and some of them have five senses capabilities. They hear, they see, they smell, they supply taste data and interactive touch. A corporate assistant can even taste the mix of coffee she has prepared for herself by licking the hologram screen. His or her taste buds are immediately activated by electronic impulses. Compare that with the tedious manual work office secretaries of the past were subjected to. Corporate assistants are no longer involved with paper documents. Words, concepts, diagrams, graphics and pictures are easily assembled and presented on a hologram screen with easy and simple verbal instructions. Only demand from the Illiterate World keeps our paper mills in production. The present techno tools give us the opportunity to stop further deforestation in the habitat of the Illiterate World.

The distinctions among managerial and administrative categories of employment continue to disappear. The so-called democratic office, which I would rather refer to as the techno office, no longer has hierarchies. The Corporate Processing Centre analyses and measures the efficiency and the value of the input from each and every corporate assistant. The CPC determines how they influence and improve the productive processes. The CPC not only registers the dates and time frames of their collaboration, but calculates their salaries accordingly. Supervisory functions and tasks, as you well know, were included in the CPC and are no longer carried out by humans. The new generation of hologram flat screens which will be on the market next fall, is set to provide complete and improved five senses data.

Quality control of verbal contributions as well as of product and services has reached such a degree of sophistication that no human senses can compete with fifth generation CPCs. The corporate assistants will be able to provide instructions by just touching the new hologram screens and by verbal command. The hologram screens provide duplex and video telephony services worldwide. The new taste and smell features offered by these flat screens have been the subject of heated debate in all media and comedians have had a field day with the invasion of privacy issues.

Security controls, such as voice recognition, fingerprint reading and personal image scanning, are built into the hologram screens. The new five senses modules are said to be capable of emulating the pheromones of those pesky summer moths. That should sell more hologram screens for the doors or entrances to camp houses or beach cottages. The hologram screens have had a tremendous impact on management-labour relations in our industrial plants. The Illiterate World is still encumbered with the old processes of collective bargaining which are time-consuming and require the personal interaction of all.

Sitting in front of their screens, corporate officers can conduct collective bargaining having at the tip of their fingers detailed financial information and production schedules on a secure one-way basis in order to assist negotiations effectively. They can sign approval on each agreement by placing their right or left hand on the screen. The union bosses have at their disposal all the financial and wage data provided by their governments and by their own organizations. It is easy to see the writing on the wall or, I should say, the screens.

The duration of union contracts is being gradually reduced; it should not surprise us to see monthly agreements being reached in order to answer rapidly changing market demands. The cost of employment processes has been greatly assisted by the latest techno tools. Personal interviews can be carried out from the office to the home of the applicant and the professional assistance of industrial psychologists, doctors and trainers can be obtained by verbal instruction with the facilities of the Net. What used to be a time-consuming process is now a matter of minutes. The doctor can perform his scanning while you conduct the interview. The psychologist can also gauge the applicant's responses and obtain a psychological profile in seconds; and the trainer can automatically detect his or her deficiencies and decide on the remedial action required, all in one sitting, which usually takes less than 10 minutes. The enormous database provided by the Net enhances our capacity to compare readings and the scanning taken of the same applicant, even by our own competitors. We have practically the entire employable population at our finger tips. Just touch the screen.

The area of professional services has increased more than five-fold during the past decade. The first generation of college-trained professionals is now making inroads in what used to be jobs held by workers and what used to be called white-collar workers. Net services and scope have boosted the use of homes as worksites and fostered independent modular processing centres in suburban shopping malls and even in housing developments.

Small and medium-sized enterprises no longer need to occupy the amount of real estate that characterized the industrial revolution and the second half of the last century. Real estate now is going at premium prices in most downtown areas and it is impossible to predict when the current upswing in downtown urban renewal is going to abate. High-rise office buildings are selling converted office-space condos like pancakes. Family dwellings have finally made downtown their habitat.

Have all these technological advances required changes in our definition of the employer and workers? No. The scope, the size and nature of capital invested in productive and profit-making ventures may have changed somewhat, but technology has spawned more varieties of small and medium-sized enterprises. The corporate assistant and the plant worker could be defined as the physical person who undertakes -- on the basis of a verbal or a written agreement, individual or collective, expressly stated or tacitly understood or presumed -- to provide his or her services manually or intellectually under the orders, control and authority of another natural or juridical person. The employer is still the physical or incorporated or juridical person who obtains the services of the workers under his control. And the controls, as I have described, can be carried out in person or electronically. We still have gurus telling corporate assistants and plant workers that they will never make any money working for someone else. There are schemes enticing people to work just a few hours a week in order to make the kind of money most people just dream about. The reality is that technological advances continue to foster creativity and a quest for independence. One needs to feel one is at the helm of the boat, your boat, my boat. These two main ingredients have and will continue to increase the number of self-employed. The cyber entrepreneurs are the prime movers and shakers in the field of technology. They use their imagination to create new goods and services that satisfy the needs and desires of a highly sophisticated Literate World. We do hope that technology will be used to meet those needs and to preserve peace for mankind. This is my trip.

The implications of changing conditions of
employment on industrial relations
Tony Lennon⁽⁴⁰⁾

From a union point of view, one of the key things that determines the nature of labour relations is the identity and nature of the employer. At the moment, we are facing what I call a collision of styles among the three main subsectors which are emerging in the new multimedia technology groups. Each group has a distinct style of labour relations.

The first group comprises the content providers. This includes much of the existing industry in the audiovisual and intellectual products fields, such as broadcasters, film companies, parts of the music industry, and publishers. In terms of ownership, these are very often a mix of public and private enterprises. Broadcasting in many countries is still a publicly owned activity, for example. If you ask those who run these companies why they do it, many will tend to stress that they believe in the quality of the product they are making and they believe in public service values. In their hearts, that is what they feel. Industrial relations in that sector, at the moment, are either good or just beginning to decline. They are fairly solid, but union recognition is beginning to give way to individual contracts.

The next group I would call existing distributors. Telecommunications companies are included here. Roughly speaking, this is a distribution chain which again, in some cases, involves both public and private ownership. People in this part of the industry are also concerned with delivering a quality product, but nowadays almost everybody in this sector worries about profit. Even in the publicly owned parts of the sector, profit is now an issue. I would argue that industrial relations in this group are on the decline in terms of their effectiveness. In some cases, they have gone completely. Many publishers have de-recognized unions -- and in television and radio a lot of private stations do not deal with unions. This is the middle group.

The third group is made up of the new operators, which might include anything from the one-person, start-up company right through to a $5 billion global alliance. One key characteristic is that they are all privately owned. If you ask them why they are in the game, they may say lots of visionary things, but the bottom line is profit. As far as industrial relations go, many of these outfits are non-union -- not necessarily anti-union, but just non-union. The collision of styles I mentioned is quite apparent in the way these three groups currently handle unions.

The industries in the first group have existed for some time. If film-makers from 50 years ago time travelled to a film studio today, they could actually name almost every job in the production process. Grip, best boy, clapper loader, gaffer and Foley artist: these job titles have not changed in 50 years.

Why has the film industry not changed? Let us go through some of the possible arguments. Has there been no development in the industry? Well, that is palpably untrue. The film industry is a very sophisticated technological industry these days. Is it because the unions are particularly tough? Well, quite a lot of film unions are tough and it is a heavily unionized area, but, no matter how tough you are, you do not sit still for 50 years. Is it because the employers are very generous and they have just been kind to the workers? You may make your own judgement about that possible explanation.

My explanation for the lack of change is buried in the production process itself. In the film industry, it takes years for an idea to come to fruition. Getting hold of money and doing distribution deals involves months and years. Post-production -- that is, editing and so forth -- takes weeks and months. Distribution goes on for years or decades. Sell-through -- that is, all the other products that spin off the film -- may last for decades. So this is actually an extremely long product cycle. In the middle of it is the thing called production.

What happens at the point of production? Anyone who has been involved in film production will tell you that while the production process seems to go on for years, it actually takes only a few weeks or months, and it is sheer panic. People who are involved in production, particularly producers and executives in the film industry, concentrate solely on the task at hand -- the panic -- rather than on the long product cycle. They may reason that it is not really worthwhile to smooth out the problems that last three months, when they actually earn their money from the other 19 years and nine months.

Let us look now at the new operators. Many of these people also tend to focus on task. That is good for industrial relations. When employers are panicking, that is great for unions. We go in, they want something done immediately, we tell them the price and they pay it. A lot of the projects in this area are new. Companies are doing creative work for the first time. They may be small, immature businesses, and they may simply not have thought about the process they are getting into. They have deadlines to meet and no time to think about anything but the task at hand.

This leads to their second characteristic. As these businesses are in many cases new, they do not have any history of industrial relations and are often staffed by people inexperienced in management. Many are small firms. That is a key point for industrial relations, because it is easier to deal with a big organization that has a personnel department, a management culture and a history.

These small operators are characterized by growth. Most of these are new starts and are on the upward curve. That makes a difference to industrial relations. Many of the new information technology companies are able to say they do not need unions because they are on a growth path and, of course, the staff are happy. The staff are happy partly because the company has never gone through a business slump. Most of the smallish, multimedia-type publishing companies creating titles have not had to downsize yet. They have not seen a decline. So staff may not yet feel the need for proper industrial relations.

What problems does this pose for trade unions? The rate of change in this sector is astronomic. This is a problem for unions because, like a lot of institutions, unions are sometimes slow to change. In order to keep abreast of industrial relations in this sector, we have got to learn to change.

The nature of the change also poses problems for unions because the contingent workforce is often regarded as self-employed. There are clearly employers who feel that contingent workers are not real employees. It is difficult to get employers to talk about a workforce which is only part-time, when there is a lack of strong commitment between the employer and the individual worker.

Sometimes we have problems identifying the employer. Once again, the film industry provides an illustration of this. The physical assets of many film companies consist of only two things: a brass plate with the name of the company on it, stuck on the door of a rented office, and a telephone list of contacts. In that sort of environment it is very difficult to spot the employer. When you do identify the employer and try to talk to him, you find that the company has either gone broke or moved on. That is a problem for us.

The age profile of the workforce is also a key point. They are young. They come from a generation which has not necessarily inherited a strong tradition of solidarity and a recognition of the need for trade unions. Of course, young people are rarely worried about pensions, security of employment, or mid-career retraining either. However, this new generation of workers may change their attitudes in 15 years' time when they have commitments and families, and when they realize that one day they are going to retire.

The next union problem involves the displacement of workers. Do not forget that workers who get knocked out are just as great a problem for us as the new workers, because they are still our members and they still want jobs. So strategies for dealing with displaced workers are key objectives on any union list.

The last problem for unions is not so much a problem as a challenge and an opportunity. Services to members are becoming a more important part of union work in almost every country. Contingent workers tend to have portfolio careers. They do a bit of work for a number of different employers and may have some regular part-time commitments as well. One of the key decisions unions have to make is how they will bridge the gap that separates their members in terms of their conditions of employment.

It is quite common today for workers in this sector to join unions in order to benefit from all sorts of union services, like professional training, insurance, legal advice and help with their taxes. Ten years ago in my country it would have been treachery -- a denial of the class struggle -- to offer these services, but today we all make sure that they are on offer to members. This indicates that people's needs and the kinds of things that unions might want to talk to employers about will be different in the future, because we are thinking in new ways about bridging those periods when people are not in full-time employment.

In my union BECTU, which is the main audiovisual union in Britain, we have tried to calculate what has happened to our members who have been displaced over the last two or three years. Between a third and a half of them remain in the industry working as freelancers, very often working for the companies which used to employ them. This is very common. Between a quarter and a third of these members change careers and leave the industry when they are displaced. If they are young, they often go back to college; if they are older, they do something more sedate. Finally, between 15 and 25 per cent of these people choose to retire early. They are able to do so, because these are people who are being displaced from permanent jobs.

This latter figure is quite worrying. In most developed countries, roughly half the population over the age of 55 is not in gainful employment. Many of them have left because of displacement and, in most instances, they do not do too badly. In the United States, by their mid-50s, they have probably earned their first pension plan or are into the second one. In my country by that age, they may have paid off the mortgage on their housing, and the agreements we have with most employers in the old sectors guarantee severance and redundancy payments. So they do not suffer too much. But what is going to happen when the current young generation gets to an age when developments displace them? They will not have pension plans. Their housing will not have been paid for. With the growing proportion of old people, publicly funded pension schemes are already facing difficulties. I think that we have a social responsibility to pay attention to this group because there are problems on the horizon.

Workers are not afraid of change, but we do need dialogue. The dialogue we want may best be conducted in the existing structures. But the dialogue must widen to cover the issues I have raised here and perhaps a few more. We are all here because we, as groups, are committed to freedom of association and collective bargaining. That is important to us because a lot of the problems I have outlined cannot be solved by individuals. They can only be solved through dialogue between the social partners.

I have drawn up a list of the issues that I see as being relevant to the dialogue we need in the emerging industries in this sector. It includes the following:

pay;
working conditions;
job security;
multiskilling;
training;
short skills lifespan;

entry to work;
health and safety;
equal opportunities;
social benefits;
intellectual property.

Some of the issues raised by unions traditionally do not change, such as pay and working conditions. Others ^are changing. For example, how will we define job security when people have portfolio careers? Training has become such an issue, because the contingent workforce is finding that the burden of training is tending to fall more and more on the individual, but the costs are sometimes prohibitive.

An example of a new problem is the short skills lifespan of people in this industry. Since the early 1970s, we have seen five or six generations of electronic graphics equipment. This very expensive equipment arrives on the market and a select group of people learn to operate it. For a period these people are immensely desirable workers. Their skills are in demand and they can charge an awful lot of money for their work. But in 18 months or two years, the next generation of equipment comes in and overnight these people are finished. A subsequent generation of equipment means that they have to start from scratch again. This problem is becoming more and more evident and should be a subject of dialogue.

The last item on the list -- intellectual property -- is of crucial importance to workers. The intellectual property rights of workers who have created information are almost as important as an agreement that says you should get paid for your work. When people contribute to new forms of information or when their old information products are used in new ways, which is common practice in the audiovisual field, they have got to have a share in the benefits. This may be a very important source of income for workers with portfolio careers, who cannot expect to work five days a week for 40 years.

Some of the problems which appear to be new for this sector are actually old problems. We have experience in handling them under collective bargaining agreements. Although a lot of the people in the workforce today may say they do not need unions, I believe this attitude will change quite profoundly when this industry begins to mature. As the industry starts going through the normal cycles and shocks and workers suffer the pain, their attitudes will change. When that happens, a framework for dialogue and cooperation will work to everybody's benefit.

General discussion on the changing nature
of employment relations

Michel Muller of the Workers' group wondered what the enterprise of the future would be, where it would be located, what new social structures and social relations would emerge and what work would be like. While these questions were not new, they should be examined afresh. Although it was a statistical fact that many new jobs would be created in small and medium-sized enterprises, the same statistics also revealed that many large corporations created such small companies in the form of subsidiaries. Because they held almost a "right of life or death" over these small firms, the conglomerates had a major social responsibility in terms of future job creation. The current trend towards more individual arrangements in sectors where traditional enterprises had started to disappear could only function because there was still a properly structured social fabric. Humanity had to ensure that a strong social fabric remained even when traditional enterprises no longer existed. The human being should remain at the heart of any future scenario in order to correct the negative aspects of technological changes.

André Nayer, an independent expert, noted that the human element was indeed central to any discussion about future employment. When he had served as a consultant for a group of virtual enterprises which had set up a "real" enterprise in Canada, all the preliminary arrangements were handled by telephone, fax, email and tele-conferencing. However, when it came to hiring people, the clients had wanted to see them in flesh and blood. Working with them side by side was different from working with them via a computer hook-up or through a tele-conference link. He wondered how tomorrow's trade unions would be structured and how employers intended to solve the difficulties caused by the increasing variety of employment situations.

Ulrich Holtz of the Employers' group stated that the high technology industries had not always prospered, but had also experienced difficult times due to severe competition. Many of today's enterprises would cease to exist in the future. Collective bargaining might have less influence on some of these high-tech enterprises. Trade unions and employers might need to show more imagination to maintain active social dialogue.

Heinz-Uwe Rübenach of the Employers' group noted that enterprises had always had to adapt to the market in order to survive and thrive. They had to structure their employment to this end. The speed and power of today's market forces required rapid reactions. Traditional systems were no longer adequate and had to be amended, but there was no uniform way to deal with the social repercussions and political implications. The problems had to be analysed and tackled on a sector-by-sector, branch-by-branch basis.

Response of the panel members

Walter Durling highlighted his key message: humanity did not have to fear technology. Technology would not change the core of human relations. More sophisticated means of communicating, new mechanisms for negotiating, and new types of conflicts would all arise, but the relationships between workers and employers themselves would continue to be the same. When film was invented, people had been afraid that it could bring theatre to an end. That had not happened. When television was developed, people had feared that it would do away with cinemas, but it had not. One should not be afraid of the future. Fear of the future should not lead us to stifle creativity with regulations. Creativity was needed to generate new employment. The spirit of enterprise had to be reinforced with the new technology in order to create jobs for those who had been displaced. Problems should not be anticipated, but tackled when they arose.

Tony Lennon argued that rapid change in working relationships was already occurring. Issues simply had to be identified and discussed. However unpredictable these changes might be, it was vital to always keep the human spirit in mind. Although it was impossible to forecast the trade union structures of tomorrow, it was likely that unions would foster more individual relationships with their members. The days of mass meetings at the factory gates were definitely over. Unions had to contemplate new ways of relating to their members. The new technologies, if used correctly, could even assist them. While it was true that the multimedia industry faced ups and downs like any other industry, one difference was that the small enterprises which predominated in the sector could not survive long crises. If those enterprises hit a crisis, they were more likely to go under.

Part 10

Multimedia convergence
and labour relations

Multimedia convergence and labour relations:
Effects, policies and prospects for economic
and social innovation
Peter Leisink⁽⁴¹⁾

Convergence is a process -- an uneven process -- and not an accomplished state of affairs. Convergence or, broader still, the birth of an information economy, is technically possible, but whether it becomes reality will depend on economic, political and social actors and policies. Major institutional adaptations will be necessary, for instance, in regulatory systems, training, the management of companies, and indeed labour relations.

My presentation focuses on these institutional adaptations. It begins with an assessment of the extent to which networking and flexibility may be observed in the media industries and then examines the effects of these trends on labour relations in general and on collective bargaining in particular.

The information and communication technology revolution is not just a technical revolution. It introduces a completely new techno-economic paradigm. The effects of the IT revolution are pervasive, affecting every industry and service and, indeed, the very design, management and control of production and service systems. A new organizational logic is emerging -- a networking logic -- which is rendering obsolete the old mass production model which was based on assembly lines, standardized products and economies of scale. That model presupposed a mass market with little variation in terms of consumer demands and technological processes. Those contextual conditions have changed tremendously. Single-purpose production is ceding to flexible production, as industry responds to unpredictable demands. New information technologies are instrumental in implementing networking logic and flexibility into all kinds of processes and organizations. An example of the organizational changes in production systems is "Toyotism", comprising just-in-time supply systems, total quality control and zero defects. Inter-firm networking is another. In the case of Benneton or Nike, this includes the licensing and subcontracting of production under the umbrella of one large corporation. A third form of organizational networking is seen in the strategic alliances of large corporations, which enable them to mobilize the massive capital investments required to develop a particular technology, such as digital decoder technology for instance. The emergence of horizontally networked corporations does not signal a shift away from large vertical bureaucracies and certainly not their complete demise. When companies like Philips and Sony cooperate, each remains a large corporation, but they become horizontally networked.

To what extent do these trends hold true for the media industry? Empirical evidence, based on national studies and case-studies, has revealed the networking logic in various sectors of the multimedia industry. Telling illustrations of the vertical disintegration of mass-production companies and the emergence of a flexible, specialized production system operating through alliances are provided by the United States film industry and the British culture industry. Public broadcasting companies are being split up into smaller units, such as technical facilities and production, which may operate in cooperation with the broadcasting company or in open competition. A recent survey of audiovisual production companies in the Netherlands indicated that half to three-quarters of them expected to become involved in the production of CD-ROMs and CD-Is in 1996 and that more than half of them anticipated forming network alliances with other companies, such as software houses, in order to have the necessary skills.

The publishing industry might appear to be an exception to the networking trend, given the emergence of large publishing transnationals such as Reed Elsevier and Wolters-Kluwer, but closer observation reveals that a great deal of internal autonomy is exercised by the various subsidiaries and divisions of these firms. The same network logic is applied within the organization to allow for flexible responses to changing market conditions, technological innovation or political pressure. It is not so much the demise of the large powerful corporations, but rather a crisis in the traditional corporate model of organization based on vertical integration and hierarchical, functional management that we are witnessing.

Of course not all parts of the media industries are confronted with the trend towards flexible production of diversified products. In many countries, newspapers are still largely a standard product for a mass market and newspaper publishers may still have a vertically integrated, bureaucratic organizational form. However, the increase in flexibility can well be observed in that industry. Automatic page make-up, for example, has led to the combination of composition and editorial tasks. In the advertising departments, commercial tasks and lay-out work have been integrated. A survey of the United Kingdom book publishing industry showed that proofreaders and editors have been externalized and now work as home-based teleworkers. The vast majority of them had entered self-employment, not as a first-choice option, but as a result of industry mergers, relocations and redundancies. These people should actually be regarded as casualized workers, rather than as self-employed, since they have little autonomy and tend to depend on only one publishing house for their work.

Thus, the general effects associated with the information and communication technology revolution -- networking logic and flexibility -- can be observed quite clearly in the media industries. What does this mean for labour relations?

My first thesis is that the information and communication technology revolution and the related process of multimedia convergence make traditional platforms of interaction, such as company or industry-based platforms of collective bargaining, increasingly inadequate as the sole platform of interaction. The sectoral level is becoming more elusive as an entity and therefore as a viable platform of collective agreements as well. Increased labour management interaction is needed at several levels, not only at the sectoral, but also at the company level, and even internationally.

In the 1970s when photocomposition machines were introduced, advertising agencies and graphic art studies started to do text and image processing work which had traditionally been done by the pre-press shops or even little graphic shops. And in many countries, neither advertising agencies, nor graphic art studios had collective agreements -- nor did they consider applying a graphical collective agreement. Lithographer shops and trade unions saw this as unfair competition and tried to impose their collective agreement on the agencies and studios, but without much success. The diffusion of desktop publishing and the simultaneous spread of copiers, colour copiers and even digital printing equipment which we are seeing today created a low investment entry cost into the industry which cannot be controlled by the unions. As a result desktop publishing shops and graphic art studios offer clients low-cost, acceptable quality pre-press and print work. The low cost is due in part to the absence of collective agreements that impose severe restrictions on working hours, for example.

It would be illusory to imagine that DTP shops will decide to apply the printing industry's collective agreement. They will not. Nor is the strategy of accepting that DTP shops do pre-press work while insisting that traditional pre-press shops continue to comply with the printing agreement a viable alternative. This example illustrates the technology-based erosion of the traditional subsector as a viable basis for collective agreements. At the same time, new sectors such as DTP and other multimedia sectors lack the organizational infrastructure, such as employers' associations, with whom unions could negotiate. The sector no longer provides a viable platform for collective bargaining.

Companies are not a viable platform either. First of all, given the predominance of small and medium-sized businesses in the media industry, it would be impossible for unions to negotiate on a company-to-company basis. Second, the increasing diffusion of the networking logic "empties out" the company as an entity and creates virtual, project-based firms in their place. For instance, when the Dutch Union of Printers had a CD-I produced on the introduction of the information superhighway, the CD-I was put together by a project team consisting of a photographer, a graphic designer and a software specialist. When the project was completed, the team was dissolved and that was the end of that. This type of temporary project-based organization is typical of the audiovisual sector. In such circumstances, the company provides no viable basis for collective bargaining either. Apart from this consideration, it is my view that the multimedia sector does not presently have an industrial culture that would make it willing to negotiate with the traditional media unions -- neither do I believe that the maturing of the industry will lead workers and companies to turn to unions in the event of a business downturn.

Since neither the sectoral nor the company level provides a suitable basis for collective agreements, the consequences of the convergence process itself must be taken seriously into account in order to maintain social dialogue. There is a need for a multimedia-wide arrangement covering at least some basic employment conditions. Any such multimedia agreement evidently could not and should not specify all employment conditions in a uniform way for all sectors. Although there is convergence, there is also wide differentiation between sectors and companies. The type of multimedia agreement I have in mind should restrict itself to some basic employment conditions. Each module of such an agreement should be adaptable to the specific circumstances of the sector and company. The set of employment conditions agreed in a specific company would be the result of multiple-level interaction between employers and workers or their representatives at various levels: at the multimedia sectoral level, perhaps at a subsectoral level, and certainly at the company level. That is what we call "articulation" in labour relations jargon.

This approach to a structural modernization of collective bargaining has been followed by the employers' associations and printing unions in the Netherlands printing industry. Right now negotiations are taking place which will finalize the joint working party's proposal for an agreement for media production companies. Initially this will cover the printing industry and various subsectors within the printing industry, including pre-press, newspaper publishing, general printing and silk-screen printing, but the structure could easily be adapted to accommodate other sectors of the multimedia industry. However its attractiveness to advertising agencies and graphic art studios has still to be proven. The culture of the industry must, after all, be conducive to joint regulation. This brings me to my second thesis.

As the entertainment and media industries become increasingly knowledge-intensive, there is a growing mutual interest in developing labour relations of what I call "resourceful cooperation", which are conducive to creating, producing and commercially exploiting cultural products. In the various industries which make up the multimedia field, there have always been sectors in which company culture was more or less alien to collective bargaining. Advertising agencies and graphic art studios in the Netherlands are examples of this. In the last decade, the determination of employment conditions on an individual basis has become more widespread and is often linked to the phenomenon of union de-recognition. There is a mistake at the heart of this type of approach, I believe, for it equates free markets with the absence of any rules. All markets, including the labour market, can operate effectively, even in purely economic terms, only within a set of rules. Intellectual property rights provide a prime example of such regulation. Cultural products -- whether journalistic texts, music, graphic images, literary texts, video games, software programmes or other products -- can only be exploited commercially when they have been juridically converted into intellectual property. Only when firms are able to prevent other entrepreneurs or consumers from exploiting their cultural products can the cultural industries survive.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry claims that every year more than 1 million illegally copied CDs flow into Europe and that more than US$2 billion worth of copyrights are lost because of them. The technical possibility of making perfect digital copies of music via the Internet threatens not only the commercial interests of content providers, but the very development of multimedia products and thereby of the multimedia industry. Indeed the tardy development of multimedia has been attributed, at least in part, to problems associated with copyrights. Regulation and control are thus recognized as vital to the functioning of the market for cultural products, which is why business organizations and States which choose to support and protect these strategically important industries and firms cooperate in protecting these rights.

Intellectual property rights are not only in the commercial interest of firms, but also in the professional interest of the creator. The disputes and conflicts to which they give rise illustrate the importance to the industry of a resolution through social dialogue or collective bargaining. The commercial issue may perhaps be solved most easily. I understand, for example, that Norwegian publishers have agreed to pay journalists about US$150 per month for multiple use. Moral rights concerning the integrity of the product are far more complex to regulate. The issue of intellectual property rights illustrates the interest of both employers and workers in joint regulation and collective bargaining.

Improving training programmes is another example of such joint interests. Training is of vital importance to the development of the media industry, yet this fact is not recognized in all sectors of the industry equally. A recent survey of workers in the printing industry in the Netherlands showed that only 15 per cent of all workers actually took part in some sort of vocational training course. Of those who took training, 70 per cent did so at their own initiative, and the remaining 30 per cent did so at the initiative of the employer. Of those who did not take additional training, 55 per cent cited insufficient time or the cost of courses as factors. One-third said they had learned enough or did not feel like training.

With this in mind, I would argue that it would be in the interest of both the employer and the worker if collective agreements stipulated the right, for example, to a week's paid leave for training. The worker who claims not to have the time for training would be in a position to partake. Employers who argue that accepting further training should be an obligation for workers might find acceptance on the part of unions if this obligation were applied to all workers and not just the skilled core. Those who did partake might also enjoy some sort of preferential treatment in terms of employment in the industry.

The example of the printing industry might lead one to see training primarily in terms of assistance to workers whose jobs are threatened. Of course it is of great social relevance to them, because the print media will continue to decline in the years to come. But it is not only an item of social policy. It is also of relevance in terms of human capital.

The Netherlands entertainment and audiovisual industry has become increasingly active on the European market over the past five to ten years. In order to be competitive, it has had to be not only cost-effective, but also able to guarantee a certain quality of product. Recognizing the economic importance of the audiovisual industry in the Netherlands, the Ministry of Economic Affairs decided to assist the industry in 1990 by donating money for the foundation of a joint institution for training. Curiously, the young industry refused the offer. By 1993, however, the time was ripe for the foundation of a joint institution of employers' associations and unions, the aim of which was to set up a comprehensive system of vocational training. An annual training and labour market survey is commissioned in order to anticipate the skill requirements of companies and initiate new training courses to meet those needs. The 1996 survey, for instance, indicated that about one-quarter of audiovisual companies had job vacancies in the area of editing, operational production and commercial jobs, which they found hard to fill because applicants lacked adequate skills or experience. The joint institution could step in to meet this demand. The mutual interest of both sides of industry in such resourceful cooperation is immediately apparent.

My third and final thesis draws attention to the particular features of collective agreements, whether they are standard or flexible. In my opinion, creating flexible arrangements and building articulation into the process are necessary because of the differentiation of sectors within the multimedia industry and because these arrangements open the door to substantive innovation. Now the fact that some sectors of industries, such as advertising agencies and graphic art studios in the Netherlands, do not have a tradition of collective bargaining, does not imply that these companies are completely opposed to joint regulation of employment conditions. However, unions have to understand that the standard character of traditional collective agreements, which spell out in detail the levels of pay, the hours of work and so on for every type of job in a standard, uniform way, is in conflict with the culture of agency and studio managements, which want more autonomy, and also with the culture of important groups of workers in these sectors.

Joint regulation of employment conditions is not unthinkable in these sectors of industry, but a certain selectivity has to be applied. Some items, such as training, or invalidity and pension schemes, might prove suitable subjects for joint regulation, whereas others, such as working hours, might not. Second, joint regulation should offer scope for tailor-made agreements at the workplace level. These might even deviate from the sectorally agreed norm if, at the workplace level, the workers agreed to them.

Why are selectivity and flexibility needed? One reason has to do, at least partly, with cultural specificity. The advertising and creative sectors have a different industrial culture from that of the printing industry, for example, and these qualities appeal more directly to cultural workers. A survey which I did of employment conditions in the advertising sector revealed that no less than 86 per cent of all workers preferred to arrange their wages on an individual basis. This attitude varied little between lower-paid secretarial and administrative staff on the one hand and art directors and account managers on the other hand. They felt perfectly able to deal with their own wages and working hours. This should not be interpreted, however, to mean that workers were unaware of their employment position. Indeed, almost two-thirds of workers in advertising agencies regarded their relationship with the agency in terms of an employer-worker relationship, and responses were split evenly between those who did and those who did not regard the interests of management and workers as running in parallel. Nor does it mean that workers in advertising agencies failed to see the need or the desirability of collective organization. They did. But the issues on which they believed collective action was desirable were different from the traditional pay and working hours demands which have traditionally been incorporated in collective agreements.

About two-thirds felt the need for collective organizations. Some wished to see more union-related services in the area of social security, but twice as many expressed concern on professional issues such as training and career policies. Unions should appeal to interests other than the traditional wage or bread-and-butter issues. They should include professional concerns, such as training and career policies, if they are to arrive at more appropriate types of collective agreements which are attractive to workers in these sectors.

One might argue that workers in the advertising sector demonstrate more varied employment preferences and a stronger wish for autonomy than those in other subsectors; however, I have come across rather divergent views on working hours and flexible working times in, for instance, a case-study in traditional, pre-press companies as well. I would argue that if unions are unwilling to experiment with what I would call "à la carte union membership" and "à la carte collective agreements", they will be increasingly out of touch with the culture of significant groups of the multimedia workforce. The combination of convergence and differentiation in the multimedia industry, not to mention the pluralization of lifestyles, clearly call for a de-standardization of employment regulation.

Collective agreements which offer some degree of selectivity and scope for flexible regulation are in the interest of business efficiency. Yet a balance needs to be struck between efficiency on the one hand and equity on the other hand. Workers' participation in determining employment conditions is necessary to achieve equity. Workers' participation is not only important for dealing with divergent employment conditions. Along with increased autonomy at work, workers' participation is increasingly seen to be a critical success factor in the utilization of new technologies and the mobilization of creativity and innovation in firms. These are vital for the multimedia industry.

As I stated at the outset, convergence is a process which moves forward unevenly. It is uneven in terms of the speed and types of change occurring in the different sectors and in the different parts of the globe. The ILO should continue to monitor this process and carry on the type of discussion we are having here at the regional level. The uneven character of convergence manifests itself in the regions -- and it is there that the policies to cope with its effects can best be developed.

Reliable comparative data about the convergence process and its effects are lacking with regard to the quantitative and qualitative changes in employment, not to mention the changes in work organization, labour relations, and skill requirements. It would be useful to carry out research to evaluate the effect of national policy in this regard. For instance, what might be the employment impact of promoting regional and national culture? What are the effects of creating an integrated multimedia training system as Germany is doing? Further studies and research could supply the information that is currently lacking and thus provide a stronger basis for policy-making and collective bargaining. Indeed, it is my hope that the analysis and suggestions presented here will help to inform governments and the social actors of policies which aim to foster economic and social innovation.

Making such information accessible is extremely important. Organizing this Symposium is one way to distribute information, but a more systematic approach is needed. Ideally, organizations should be linked together on the information superhighway, but this would obviously entail considerable assistance to developing countries.

The development of a multimedia industry and a broader information society requires institutional adaptations. It depends on social adaptations and on the way in which governments, employers and workers and their organizations articulate their policies. In my view, collective bargaining is a major instrument in supporting these changes and coping with the effects. For collective bargaining to play this role, substantive structural modernization of collective agreements is called for. The ILO could assist in this process by bringing the social partners into closer dialogue in order to explore appropriate forms of flexible collective agreements. Once again, regional activities would be most helpful in this process.

General discussion on multimedia convergence
and labour relations

Robert Zachariasiewicz, representative of the Government of the United States, observed that many issues of the multimedia industry were neither completely new nor peculiar to the sector. Bad business decisions could affect any industry. Regarding the alternative levels of labour relations, a number of the ideas mentioned had already been implemented in the construction industry, which was cyclical and decentralized and had a very mobile workforce unattached to any particular employer. Moreover, the fact that the bulk of the employees surveyed at the advertising agency in the Netherlands preferred to negotiate their wages on an individual basis, while at the same time wanting collective representation on other issues, such as training or career policies, was not peculiar to the multimedia industry either. Changes were constantly being made in the way work was organized. Unions were called upon to reinvent themselves. That meant simply that they had to adapt or die.

Bernie Lunzer of the Workers' group stressed that unions were certainly not inflexible. They had made real efforts to try new schemes and to take part in joint programmes, such as quality of work programmes. The United States newspaper industry relied to a great extent on enterprise-based contracts that were quite flexible. Unions were prepared to adapt, but the playing field had to be level.

Katherine Sand of the Workers' group pointed out the serious problems performers' unions had in enforcing even basic working conditions. These were particularly acute in the film industry, given the highly transient nature of companies which might exist only for the production of a single film -- that is, a matter of weeks. She asked how the modular approach to labour relations described by Dr. Leisink might be applied to performers' unions.

André Nayer, an independent expert, mentioned the difficulty of representing performing artists, whose professional circumstances could change rapidly. For example, if a musical group organized a temporary activity and designated one of the group members as an administrator, his or her legal status might change from that of a worker to that of an employer. Similar situations often arose in the multimedia sector as well.

José Luis Erosa Vera of the Employers' group made clear that employers had never negated the positive aspects of collective agreements. The rise of individual contracts was due both to technical specialization and to the fact that many workers in the various multimedia sectors worked in individual situations. He agreed that moral rights should not be abrogated and should remain with the author forever. However, rights which could be transferred through agreement, for example, copyright, could be part of individual negotiations. Companies and, in some countries, trade unions, did represent interests related to these rights. None the less, those issues should be discussed at WIPO. They were not directly linked to labour problems in the field of multimedia and, hence, were not part of the ILO agenda.

Jim Wilson of Media and Entertainment International (MEI) pointed out that worldwide, only three unions existed which were exclusively devoted to the advertising sector, namely in Argentina, Brazil and Japan. In two of the three leading advertising markets, the United States and the United Kingdom, advertising workers were not well organized. The workforce in the advertising sector had traditionally been divided into two groups, the so-called creatives -- at least 50 per cent of the employees -- who usually did not join trade unions, and the clericals, who more often did. Due to multimedia, however, the tasks and interests of these two groups had converged. Today, creatives did their own clerical work and the clericals did creative work as well. Whether they were organized or not, there was a high interest in dealing with issues collectively, and copyright had become a central concern. Copyright was also an important issue for many other professional groups represented by MEI, such as screenwriters, film directors, art directors and visual artists. WIPO dealt with intellectual property from the vantage point of right owners, but had never handled copyright exclusively. Other international organizations, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), had discussed it as well. The ILO had long dealt with copyright and was the only organization which examined the problems from the perspective of creators as workers. Therefore, the ILO was certainly the appropriate forum in which to tackle these questions of intellectual property.

Neal McLary of the Employers' group noted that the growth of the desktop publishing sector with its low overheads and somewhat dubious wage structure had had a detrimental effect on most Australian printing companies. The rapid fall in the capital cost of pre-press equipment, however, meant that mainstream printing companies were returning to that area. These enterprises had traditionally seen themselves as manufacturing organizations. Now they had to make a quantum leap from a product-focused ethos to one of customer service. They had to see themselves as an amalgam of both service and manufacturing. Should they make that leap, their future would be much brighter and that of the desktop publishing companies probably bleaker.

Response of the speaker

Dr. Peter Leisink made clear that while many current problems of the multimedia industry could occur in other sectors as well, it was the extent and degree of change caused by the new information and communication technology which set the industry apart. The change in character from an industrial to a service industry or from a public to a private ownership structure called for a fundamental rethinking of labour relations in the sector.

The numerous organizational and social problems raised by the convergence process and the concomitant questions of qualifications and regulation would best be tackled at a level which encompassed all the industries concerned. However, the different traditions of the subsectors involved would make harmonization at that level very difficult to accomplish.

With regard to the transformation from production to service activities, in the Netherlands one-third of the pre-press companies had not made the transition rapidly enough and had gone out of business. Those which had survived had done so not by adapting, but by innovating. One of the Netherlands major pre-press companies had engaged consultants to advise clients on the purchase of hardware and graphical software and to provide training. Consequently, the background and employment status of those employed in that firm had become quite varied. Some 80 per cent of the workforce still worked under the traditional printing agreement, while the newly recruited employees worked without any collective contract at all. These were the sort of fundamental changes in the industry that required careful attention, if they were to be handled in a socially responsible way.

Intellectual property was not only a business interest, but also an employment-related issue. In recent negotiations with newspaper employers, the Dutch Union of Journalists had sought recognition of the principle of workers' intellectual property rights. Recognizing the heavy investments publishers were making in electronic publishing and on-line activities, the union had been prepared to postpone the question of remuneration and to set aside the demand for compensation for multiple use. However, the employers had been unwilling to reach such an agreement. The issue was left unresolved, but perhaps at a cost to the industry at a later stage.

New technologies were blurring the border between creative and technical work. Technical workers were becoming more and more involved in creative tasks. That had been the case with DTP operators in graphical studios who were being used as designers and were increasingly exercising creative autonomy. The question arose as to whether their creative outputs should be recognized as an intellectual product, irrespective of their initial engagement for technical work. These were two examples of employment-related intellectual property issues which should not be left out of collective bargaining.

Regarding the employment problems faced by performers, various unions in the Netherlands had begun to work with a network-like corporation to explore new opportunities for union services for wage-earners and freelancers as well as for self-employed persons, who were not themselves employers. They had jointly set up a body which administered employers' responsibilities in terms of paying tax and social insurance. This was an effort to find a new balance between flexibility and security for those engaged in intermittent work. New sorts of union services such as these should be further explored.

Rather than adapt or die, enterprises and trade unions should decide to adapt or innovate, preferably the latter.

Part 11

Labour relations in the information age

Labour relations in the information age: The
role of government and the social partners
Nestor Roberto Cantariño⁽⁴²⁾

As the new millennium draws near, we appear to be riding a wave of thoughtless propulsion towards progress, which is supposedly harmless but is far from being so. In particular, economic powers are targeting trade and market standards, rather than the development of artistic and cultural expression. In Latin America and other so-called Third World areas, the consequences of unbalanced globalization are becoming apparent. The use of information and telecommunications technologies are a part of this. Today's challenges cannot be met with partial responses. The challenge for workers' organizations, employers and particularly for governments is to respond to these trends on behalf of all the members of the community. Above all, an effort must be made to protect workers having the greatest difficulties in readapting to the new forms of work and to provide training for those who are about to join the workforce.

It is frequently affirmed that knowledge and information are necessary materials for democracy, free trade, free communication and the active exercise of the rights of the citizens. Controlled access and the exclusive domination of systems of communication and information lead to imbalance and the abuse of economic and political power.

We reject, however, the notion that digitalization is simply a form of democratization which places information and knowledge at the disposal of everyone. There is, in fact, a danger that artists, performers and other media workers may be deprived of their main value -- that is, their originality of expression and their recognition as authors -- if their work is transformed into interchangeable parts. To consider artistic expression as merely a unit of digital information is neither fair nor ethical. When authors and performers' rights are not specifically recognized, this generates a greater concentration of power in the hands of those who exploit their work and those who produce cultural goods. The risks which arise are obvious. If the approach adopted towards such activities does not involve all participants and if, instead, there is a battle for control of knowledge, that battle would jeopardize true democracy in an information society.

Three fundamental axioms should be borne in mind. First, all means of information and communication have a social function and should be at the service of the societies in which they operate. Second, trends towards concentration and monopolization should be neutralized. Third, there is no substitute for freedom of expression in modern democratic societies. Information should be provided in an ethical manner, bearing in mind that individuals should have access to truth and knowledge.

There are those who believe that information is a modern prerogative of the exercise of power and that it should only be available to select groups. We believe, on the contrary, that there should be an international recognition that information is an elementary input to democratic regimes. It is essential that the information society -- or the informed world -- should ensure free and easy access to information. A sufficient number of networks should enable the transmission of information to take place without arbitrary monopolies of any kind.

Progress is not politically or ideologically neutral. It is not enough to ensure that we all have access to the same physical goods, such as television sets. Access alone does not eliminate the sources of discrimination or social exclusion. Indeed, a fundamental debate is now taking place in the realm of communications and artistic creation. It concerns the universal and the specific, the regional and the national, truth and appearances. We need to respect and promote national production, including all forms of audiovisual and artistic expressions. The information society should respond to our individuality, rather than impose models. This implies a permanent recollection that technology is a factor of modernization, but also an instrument for the concentration of political and economic power among industrialized nations. Particularly, when applied to communications, technology may strengthen trends towards dependency and loss of identity. Hence, the defence of the cultural environment and the rights of the workers in audiovisual media in a "technified" society focuses attention on the questions facing society and the obligations of the State towards that society.

Digitalization and the convergence between the audiovisual and telecommunications fields have run parallel to changes in the concept of the enterprise, from a goods-producing to a service-providing organization. Physical work and capital were the central resources in the industrial era, but now knowledge has become a critical resource. The capacity to use knowledge and other intangibles in a strategic manner has come to the fore. Specifically I am referring to patents, exclusive rights and so on. In the production of cultural goods, this pre-eminence of knowledge and rights over intangible goods is even more manifest when compared with the principles of mass production.

In Latin America, employers are interested in telecommunications with a view to broadcasting activities. Basically, this is due to the privatization of telephone companies which, a few years ago, were state enterprises. The challenge is to move these enterprises into a dominant position, to broadcast directly and to offer value-added services. But what have been the effects of such activities? They are numerous and include: the concentration of access to information in the hands of a few people; the establishment of single trunklines in various large areas; the disappearance of independent broadcasters, whether cable operators or local producers; the possible displacement of services from the broadcasting company to the telecommunications company; the disappearance of many forms of work, the modification of others, the transfer of some employees and the laying off of others; and, finally, the weakening of workers' organizations and the restoration of power to employers, or those who require services, who then push negotiations down to the individual level.

The misdiagnosis of these trends will result in an employment crisis which has three aspects: one, which is due to the present economic situation; a second, which is structural and linked to the new division of labour, and a third -- technological unemployment -- which not only displaces individual workers but whole categories of workers as the focus of innovation shifts. Difficulties in retraining and reinserting workers are leading to an employment crisis.

What then is the role of the State? In principle we understand that the State should foster the information society, but not generate exclusions of an educational or social nature. Workers have to benefit from these developments. Specific strategies need to be developed to create the conditions for the creation of jobs through investment and innovation. Strategies need to be formulated for the ongoing education and retraining of workers whose jobs are affected. Equitable conditions for the development of collective agreements and contracts should be guaranteed. National content and national production should be promoted. Legislation to protect copyright and neighbouring rights should be developed. The protection of labour rights of workers in the performing field should be fostered, recognizing the instability of demand in this field. The approach to indemnities or subsidies, social security, health security, and retirement should be adapted to address better the reality that performers face.

Trade unions have multiple roles to fulfil. They should increase the availability of information and knowledge and encourage the widest possible circulation; involve other sectors of society in the defence of the rights of the worker; explain the impact of technology on their everyday lives and the risks for their sources of income; have expertise among trade union leaders in using technology and managing a technological office; find appropriate structures and means to avoid isolation and loss of opportunities for displaced workers; discuss matters with the employers within collective bargaining; keep workers within their regulated activities to avoid unfair competition among employers; recognize forms of fair payment for the multiple use of work; and develop mechanisms to finance training in periods of unemployment as well as general continuing education.

We are now living in a state, we believe, which makes a cult of technology and where the success of peoples and nations is judged only in terms of how they can make use of this particular technology. Unfortunately, this does not meet the needs of society as a whole. Government, employers and trade unions must adopt recommendations and guidelines to ward off the consequences of such triumphalism. It is, after all, a triumph from which only a third of the world's population benefits. However great the efforts may be, the other two-thirds seem to be condemned to exclusion and poverty. It is thus urgent for the ILO to establish goals through Conventions, so as to set the parameters for discussion on mechanisms for introducing technology and reducing the social costs.

Audiovisual performers: Rights, collective
bargaining and multimedia convergence
Mikael Waldorff ⁽⁴³⁾

The information society will go nowhere without performers -- the people I represent. There is and there will be a great need for creative content and for that you will need performers. Entertainment is the driving force in the information society, and that is why audiovisual artists in some respects can be rather confident.

The new scenario of multimedia convergence is a big challenge for the audiovisual performers' unions. While recognizing the potential opportunities, we also believe that our traditional collective bargaining model is being severely tested by the new industrial relationships that have emerged in the digital arena. And why is that?

First, I should say that performers' intellectual property rights are part of the labour rights for performers. Indeed they are an essential part, since remuneration for the use of performances is what many performers throughout the world survive on. For this reason, payment for reuse is a crucial element of all collective agreements for actors.

Audiovisual work is no longer produced for a certain well-defined, well-known market like movie theatres or television. Today most audiovisual works are directed at both cinema and television as the primary windows, but are at the same time meant to be utilized in a huge secondary market which includes video, pay television, video on demand, Internet merchandising and a lot more. In most countries there is still a lack of collective agreements giving performers a fair payment for these uses. A real problem exists in that nobody, not even the producer, is able to estimate the economic value of these uses. Today they are referred to as secondary uses, but they might not be secondary in the near future. Yet this uncertainty about the market will fortify the traditional demand of the producers to acquire all rights for a one-time complete buy-out payment, and preferably a rather low one.

In our business it is the employers, not the workers, who are nervous about the future and this nervousness manifests itself in rather abusive contracts. For your information and entertainment I will read you one such contract.

I, the undersigned, do hereby assign to The Walt Disney Co., ... all present and future rights of any kind and character throughout the universe in perpetuity or to the maximum time allowable under law, which rights have or will come into existence out of my services, ... including the copyrights, any and all economic rights and other exploitation rights, their renewals and their extensions and for the exploitation or non-exploitation of same in all media forms now known or later developed.

I think that should include just about everything, at least in the known universe. Given the inequality in bargaining strength, performers will very often end up accepting these lousy terms in order to get the jobs. So, the producers will continue to make a profit on the performances, often for decades, without ever having to pay the performer any further remuneration.

It is not that performers are not flexible. Our agreements are based on the possibility that the individual actor can negotiate specific conditions, but still with agreed minimum terms for all actors. We should not forget that Robert de Niro, Sharon Stone and Arnold Schwarzenegger all work at present under a union collective agreement.

Vertical integration is also causing problems for performers. When a company controls not only production, but also distribution chains of movie theatres, sound studios and even television satellites, two things happen. First, the dominant position of the corporations undermines the more traditional areas of audiovisual production. This has happened to public service television all over the world. Second, collective agreements based on royalty payments become much more difficult to enforce. One striking feature is the non-arms' length deals between television producers and broadcasters, who are often owned by the same company. These allow programme prices to be fixed at artificially low levels, which then affects the performers' royalties. Another feature is the subcontracting of production to numerous small entities.

Business relationships are also changing. International co-production is becoming more and more common, for two reasons. The big companies find local partners useful in order to have easier access to certain national markets and certainly small national companies need the big companies for financing. But the price to be paid is that the big companies are the ones to set the terms. That is why all over the world, performers' organizations are experiencing violations of their agreements. If the union makes a fuss, they are told that no local actors will be employed. So, if you want the jobs, you have to accept a total buy-out of all rights and often also accept exploitative contracts without health and safety or other basic provisions.

But the problems go further than that. Often a transient firm is set up as a local co-producer for a single production. When shooting is done, the company disappears and gone are the rights -- and gone is the money for pension schemes, holiday allowances, etc. In Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa, we have even seen companies disappear before paying the basic fee for a day's work. One example -- not very flattering to my home country -- involved a Russian actress who did not get any money. She got a refrigerator. Talk about individual contracts! In fact, she did not have a contract either. The Russian agent on the other hand, who was probably a former party official, made a very lucrative deal for himself. Of course we would not want to stop co-production. We just do not want it to happen at the price of exploiting performers in developing countries and elsewhere.

Multimedia convergence brings with it a powerful industrial model from the English-speaking world. It brings increased demands for the transfer of rights -- known as the copyright model -- which protects the producer, not the artist. This constitutes a major threat to the existence of the performer and production in small countries; this is not just because the payment for user rights is a precondition for maintaining the necessary skilled labour force in a labour market of sporadic work but also because national cultural production will decline if it is forced to function on the same conditions as the buy-out system. It is simply not possible to produce art cinema movies for an uncertain, small market on the same terms as an English-language film with guaranteed access to a vast international market. The Nordic model, which provides a smaller initial payment to the performer and then, as a royalty, a fair share of the possible income, is our only option and has become necessary for cultural policy reasons.

Facing all these problems, we have to review our strategy in collective bargaining. We are looking now towards international agreements. Our employers are often the same companies all over the world and it is obvious that we must have agreements for international co-productions, guaranteeing an acceptable minimum protection. It should be emphasized also that artists and producers do have common interests in a number of areas. The new media are difficult to control and abuse, such as piracy, has become a very big problem to all parties. We have a common task here. Also we have a joint interest in introducing legislation on levies for private copying, for cable re-transmission and other public uses to be split between the interested parties -- as is the case in the Nordic countries, Germany and France. I do believe that traditional enemy images have become as outdated as the recording techniques of the 1920s.

Governments must also understand this. International society must set some standards for the protection of performers. It is really absurd that a new WIPO treaty has been concluded which fails to cover audiovisual rights, when we all know that the future is audiovisual. We insist that the ILO must continue its long-standing work in this area, which is more appropriate now than ever -- and we thank it for its recent vigorous support of these rights at WIPO.

Finally, beginning a dialogue as we are doing here, under the auspices of the ILO, is extremely important. The workers we represent are ready for the multimedia future, but they are also extremely vulnerable. Producers can just dip into a pool of flexible and motivated talent and then drop the performers back in when they have finished with them. The responsibility must not be allowed to end here. Performers need respect for their rights by employers, and protection of their rights by governments. Only by working together to this end will we establish an acceptable modus vivendi in the digital area.

Implications of convergence on the trade
union movement
Carlos Alberto de Almeida⁽⁴⁴⁾

Technological convergence has hit Brazil hard in terms of workers' rights, democratic values and even national sovereignty. Analysing the Brazilian situation is important because, although it is a developing country, Brazil is considered to be an emerging power with good prospects in the world economy. Technology offers the opportunity to rationalize work, to reduce working time and to encourage intellectual pursuits and even entertainment. But so far none of this has happened. On the contrary, media professionals -- whether executives, journalists or others -- are working longer and longer hours. If one were to rigorously observe the labour legislation and the rights of professionals, then the extraordinarily positive aspects of these new technologies would emerge. This has not been the case in Brazil. Journalists can be easily phoned on weekends to do extra work without extra pay.

The problem of a technological revolution should always be looked at within a political social environment. In countries where legislation protects workers, there may be a problem of adjustment; but when these innovations occur in the context of a general suppression of labour rights and infringements of the national constitution in favour of the oligopolies, the problem is quite different.

In the 1980s in Brazil, when the trade union movement emerged from a period of dictatorial suppression, the situation was very favourable for regulation and the legal protection of workers. The Constitution was in the process of being drawn up. There was a considerable debate on technology and many constitutional acts were passed which were favourable to the workers. For example, when companies introduced technological innovations such as computers, video text and so on, it was ruled that a joint commission should be set up. Professionals could not be removed from their posts and they were supposed to be assigned to jobs compatible with their previous tasks. Up to now, however, the new Constitution has not really been applied. Fourteen years after these rulings, the journalists' trade union in São Paulo has not managed to obtain more than a non-binding recommendation stipulating that when new technologies are introduced, employers should free journalists for professional retraining. There is no guarantee that the professional will be re-employed, nor that the retraining will be taken on board by the enterprise or by government.

Article 7 of the federal Constitution of Brazil states that workers should be protected in the face of automation. However, the necessary complementary regulations have never been implemented. The employers have put pressure to ensure that no regulations emerge from the Constitution, implying that there is no legal value to this constitutional protection. As far as technological innovation is concerned, only the employers' interests are borne in mind. Workers cannot express their views concerning their adaptation to and integration in this process. There are often lay-offs.

More technology, more work. The journalists' trade union affiliated to the national federation in Brazil has seen a decrease in the number of journalists along with a significant increase in the amount of work. This has been due to the growth of a whole range of information services disseminated by enterprises, many of which are supplied by new technologies. According to the São Paulo trade union, the professionals who have just completed university are too numerous for the number of jobs available in the media. Some journalists have joined the ranks of the unemployed. Those remaining are ready to work five or six hours beyond the legal working day for fear of losing their jobs. Technological innovation has thus led to an increase in the working day of journalists who produce more, but have fewer labour rights and weaker trade unions in a situation of economic recession and chronic unemployment.

The technological revolution and decrease in labour rights. In Brazil there are clear signs of decline in the situation of the media. Previously the collective agreement stipulated that journalists would be remunerated for each additional use of their work -- but today the employers have had this provision withdrawn. Structural unemployment, the increase in the working day without proper remuneration, and the lack of respect for labour rights have created an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear regarding technological innovation and retraining needs. Vocational retraining is obviously imperative; but because the public education system is insufficient and trade unions have been weakened, retraining for new jobs is dependent upon the will of the big companies. The Government has no programme to meet the needs of workers. This is a very serious situation for a country such as Brazil where barely 12 per cent of the working class has gone beyond the first grade of primary education. This is the case, perhaps, in other Third World countries as well.

Technological innovation. In order to meet the challenge of the new communications technologies on a large scale, a lot of capital is needed. Technological convergence therefore is governed by monopolies which promote privatization and deregulation at the world level. One of the most serious consequences is the elimination of national research centres. The probable domination of the Brazilian market by these big international groups will be to the detriment of national production. Technology will be purchased from foreign countries and many of our own skilled researchers will go abroad. Their years of work on appropriate technologies for the tropical climate will be lost and our technological dependency on foreign countries will continue, if we export skilled jobs from Brazil to the major technology producing countries.

Further to that, the Federation of Telecommunications Workers has denounced the refusal of the Government to have dialogue and fora for workers' participation in order to discuss the impact of technological convergence on democracy and culture. Free competition for the control of the market lies in the hands of a few companies. Technology does not imply democracy irrespective of the form of ownership; neither do new technologies and deregulation generate more freedom. On the contrary, they give rise to oligopolies and the concentration of ownership.

The case of Brazil is strange. Brazilian TV has its own production capacity, and Brazilian movies are well known throughout the world. But instead of extending their production and presence on the world market, there has been an increase in foreign productions to the detriment of national production. Thus the new technology in cable television or direct-satellite television has not resulted in greater diversity and freedom of choice. Indeed, there is less cultural diversity in Brazil. For example, it is not possible to listen to the delightful salsa music of Argentina. Of course, technologically it is possible, but the oligopoly is imposing a dictatorship on programme content. Labour rights are being destroyed and one and the same story is published in newspapers, magazines and on-line. This is the death of diversity. It is the modern religion to believe that the market is the measure of all things.

In the United States journalists have joined the television workers, because industrially they are united through digitalization. In Brazil workers from different branches of the communications industry are also in the process of uniting. The ILO should sponsor research, studies and symposia, to examine this trend in depth, without overlooking the special features of each branch.

Since public bodies have failed in their tasks and the trade unions are weak, it is up to the ILO to defend the public good. A study should be made as to how and when the new technology should be applied, and how workers' consultation can ensure that the proper conditions prevail when these technologies are adopted.

Lack of regulation is a negative approach. The truth is that legislation is a result of a democratic process and should be constantly perfected. The labour heritage of mankind, which has been growing through centuries of hard work, should not be whittled down.

General discussion on labour relations in
the information age

Shinji Matsumoto of the Workers' group emphasized that performers were neither afraid of nor negative towards technology, but progress ought to be achieved in a very balanced way in order to really benefit people. The fact that computers could already overcome the physical limits of human beings as well as those of traditional instruments, enabling them to do things which musicians could not, required some philosophical thought. Creating sufficient training and retraining opportunities was very important in order to meet the new challenges with which performers were confronted. These should be especially targeted to include freelance workers over the age of 40. While workers' organizations in the performing sector still existed, it was very difficult to identify organizations on the employers' side. Since employers were no longer limited to the traditional ones, such as recording and film companies or broadcasters, it was increasingly burdensome to determine who represented them and, thus, with whom to negotiate. The ILO had already held a meeting on the conditions of employment and work of performers in 1992. It should continue to promote dialogue in the field of multimedia and the information society.

Wilfred Kiboro of the Employers' group confirmed that training was essential. In order to keep workers loyal to their companies, employers had to provide training for their staff wherever possible and they should not consider the over-40s as too old or untrainable. The relationship between employers and employees had to be redefined in order to protect workers' rights and to ensure that workers got a fair return for their input. History had shown that there was an interdependence between employers and workers, and most employers recognized that they would have no business without motivated employees. However, for their part, workers had to show more interest and understanding for the increasing pressure to which companies were exposed. Competition was the driving force for change and the whole process of multimedia convergence. Therefore, enterprises had to react to this severe global competition in order to survive. Should they fail, workers would suffer as well. This was why workers might sometimes work longer hours without any fair compensation. None the less, employers were aware of the problem that technology caused a displacement of some jobs.

Walter Durling, Employer Vice-Chairman, observed that the performing arts had benefited most from technology. Theatres worked with computerized stage scenery, the film industry made heavy use of computer technology. Movies could nowadays be sold as compact discs with several translations, enabling the customer to select the language and even the shape of the screen. In short, new technology enhanced the performing arts. The World Wide Web provided fast and cheap global communication which was undreamed of a decade ago. Its potential and advantages should be appreciated.

Chris Warren, Worker Vice-Chairman, underlined the importance of examining the impact of technology on work and working relations within the information industries. It was appropriate for the ILO to tackle new labour issues in the converging industries, such as training, safety and other social needs of employees. The ILO should take up future activities in this area which would be of enormous assistance, not only to the employees and employers within the information sector, but for all people who sought to inform.

Tony Lennon of the Workers' group noted that workers were concerned about the potential development of a two-tier world in which some could afford access to new technology and its benefits and others could not. Ways had to be discovered to avoid social exclusion due to technological development. Since multimedia technology, such as electronic mail and the World Wide Web, had become a dominant form of communication, employers should be less reluctant to allow union representatives to operate their systems in order to discuss issues with the union. Employers should accept the right of workers to associate by using those means of communications. It was part of freedom of association.

John Morton of the International Federation of Musicians (FIM) noted that performers and particularly musicians had had flexible collective agreements for decades, but that the multimedia convergence process made the achievement of such agreements increasingly difficult. While some musicians were still employed on a permanent basis in operas, orchestras, or ballet companies, the bulk of them found themselves in unusual work relationships. Many musicians recorded and mixed their songs in their own studios or garages before they entered into a commercial relationship with a large record company. Others were in a "quasi employment relationship" with a studio on a session-to-session basis, i.e., they were legally regarded as self-employed but were, in fact, employees. Whenever the law treated those musicians as self-employed, it was very difficult to organize them to fix standard conditions and rates. The mixture of types of employment relationships caused a fragmentation of the role of employer. On occasion, it was difficult to detect the employers and some of them were not very conscious of their obligations and responsibilities. The ILO should further examine the situation of musicians with regard to atypical employment relationships. Furthermore, the development of collective bargaining in this particular field ought to be encouraged in accordance with ILO principles.

Dominique Schalchli, representative of the Government of France, stated that the issue of secondary or multiple reproduction of performers' and, indeed, other professions' work was not so much a question of intellectual property, but rather about working tools. Consequently, these issues had to be discussed at the ILO.

Walter Durling urged participants not to be too pessimistic about the social effects of technological development and multimedia convergence. He recalled the negative vision of an enslaved workforce portrayed in the movie classic "Metropolis" which had never become reality. It was simply a pessimistic dream. Employers wanted freedom of action just as much as workers did. They wanted dialogue between the social partners without governmental intervention. While unions certainly had the right to use modern means of communications, such as email, in order to bring about more freedom of association, ethical problems would arise if workers were to use employers' equipment during working time on employers' premises.

Response of the panel members

Mikael Waldorff noted that new technology and computerization did not really change the basic work of actors. From the perspective of an audiovisual artist, making interactive video games was not very different from working in movie or television production. All of them were, after all, multimedia. However, what changed was the use of a performance and its distribution. This issue was therefore an increasingly important part of labour relations and had to be appropriately tackled in collective agreements and individual contracts.

Nestor Cantariño stated that as technology advanced, it increased the responsibilities of governments and employers. Those who managed knowledge and information had greater social responsibilities as well. Globalization was creating a flood of information and putting pressure on young countries in the developing world which struggled for cultural identity. Permanent access to knowledge and technology provided by the Western world led to a trans-culturalization and made it difficult to preserve the history and customs of these young countries. If technological development did not serve to raise people's standard of living, then it was of no use at all. It was important not to increase the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots".

Carlos Alberto de Almeida noted that freedom of association was very difficult to realize in his country, Brazil, where employers dismissed and persecuted workers simply because they were trade union members. Future development ought to take place in a more humane way, with appropriate respect for labour rights. Since mankind had proven itself capable of so many great achievements and innovations, why should it not be possible to foresee some of the changes that new technology would bring and help people adapt in the most humane and reasonable way?

Part 12

The role of the ILO

Mr. Marc Blondel, the Chairman of the Symposium, opened the session by setting out the context of the ensuing discussion. The Symposium was not a standard sectoral meeting or a joint committee, the objective of which was to reach negotiated conclusions. It was none the less important that the Symposium should offer certain guidelines or orientation for appropriate follow-up activities.

Concern had been expressed that there might be some effort made towards a possible Convention on multimedia, but the Chairman made clear that it was not at a symposium that one could possibly embark upon sectoral negotiations leading to a Convention. The Governing Body would first have to agree to initiate such a discussion on the basis of a text -- and that was clearly not the case.

The Chairman noted also that concern had been expressed with regard to the mandate or terms of reference of the meeting. He did not believe that the question of mandate or terms of reference was pertinent in the current circumstances. The purpose of the discussion was simply to observe whether consensus emerged on the follow-up proposals already put forward -- or on those which might arise in the course of debate. These would not be negotiated conclusions to be voted upon, but rather the points on which the meeting was in agreement. The positions of the groups on other points would remain distinct.

He further pointed out that not all parties had been in favour of the Symposium formula. Some had preferred a more traditional approach. If the results of the Symposium were not effective, the meeting would not have rendered service to the ILO either internally or externally. Nor would the concerns expressed, inter alia, by the Workers regarding such a format be allayed. The impact on developments in the multimedia field might be reduced. It was in the interests of all parties that some basic consensus arise so that the ILO could conduct its work.

The Chairman then opened the floor for discussion of the statements included in the following document (SMC/5):

Role of the ILO

A.Statement from the representative
of the Government of France

The ILO should carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of telework as it exists today and as it is foreseen for tomorrow in order to carry on the work accomplished at the 1996 International Labour Conference with the adoption of the Home Work Convention, 1996 (No. 177).

B. Statement from the Employers' group

The Employers' group participating in the Symposium, as a result of their debates in their group meetings, wish to make the following statement:

1. Multimedia is a generic term which presently tries to describe a variety of activities within the context of technological development, mainly in the field of communications. To assume that such a term will always be appropriate for such a definition would indicate ignorance of the true nature of the advances under way.

2. The ILO could review existing standards with a view to ensuring that they do not stifle creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit needed for employment creation and the full use of the technological advances that benefit mankind.

3. In view of the pace of actual technological progress, the ILO could find it useful to compare the working and social conditions which existed at the time when most of the present standards were adopted with those currently prevailing in the advanced societies and developing countries.

4. The Employers participating in this Symposium do reserve their right to express whatever other views or opinions they may consider desirable or opportune in the light of the rest of the proceedings and before their conclusion.

C. Statement from the Workers' group

^{1. Programme of sectoral meetings}

The ILO Governing Body should hold a technical tripartite meeting in the next biennium, given the importance and profound nature of the changes now taking place in the multimedia industries.

^{2. ILO regional follow-up activities}

Regional and subregional activities to bring together partners in social dialogue to explore and establish coherent associations and structures for collective bargaining in the multimedia industries.
Regional and subregional seminars to raise awareness among social partners on the implications of convergence and to encourage structures for dialogue within the multimedia industries to examine methods for cooperation in addressing the process of change.
Regional seminars to highlight the need for social security systems and their applicability to all classes of workers in the multimedia industries.
Regional seminars to highlight the dangers of social exclusion and to prepare, in cooperation with governments, proposals for regional action plans to promote wider access to and use of information and communication technologies.

^{3. Intellectual property}

The ILO should continue and develop its involvement in the field of intellectual property rights related to the work of performers, authors, journalists, directors and other worker right holder in the context of multimedia convergence.
^{4.Training in the information society}
The ILO review of skills training needs in the multimedia industries with the objective of setting common industry standards for entry and mid-career training and retraining of workers.
The multidisciplinary teams of the ILO regional offices (MDTs) should be developed accordingly.
ILO analysis of needs of contingent workforce for training with proposals for establishment of education and training facilities available to all employees.

^{5. IT networks}

Support for the creation of IT networks involving social partners in the multimedia industries.

^{6. Studies and research to be undertaken}

A study on the current and anticipated effects on employment and labour relations of the geographical imbalance of growth and development in the multimedia industries.
ILO study and review of impact on the workforce involving:
(a)investigation of changing nature of work, including new forms of employment;

(b) analysis of the effective application and implementation of existing labour law, social security systems and relevant ILO standards as they affect the contingent workforce in the multimedia industries;

^{7. ILO review of changing media landscape}

Report on restructuring of industry and process of merger, acquisition and new transnational alliances in telecommunications, information, financial services, computer software and hardware, media and entertainment sectors.
To examine needs of industry and workforce and to encourage a joint approach with regard to governments in preparation of programmes of action and to foster:
best conditions for the development of the multimedia market;
preservation of national culture;
development of public service provision;
highest level of social protection.

Mr. Dominique Schalchli, the representative of the Government of France, wished to withdraw the reference made to the Home Work Convention, 1996 (No. 177), in the proposal of his Government, in order to reduce the chance of misunderstanding. In 1996 the question of tele-commuting or telework had not been a central concern of the debate on home work. Because telework was an important issue, however, it would be very useful for the ILO to focus serious attention on that question. He urged caution with regard to point (c) in section 6 of the Workers' statement. It was too early to consider the preparation of standards for teleworking in the multimedia industries. At this time, a more precise study of the matter was required.

Mr. Walter Durling, Employer Vice-Chairman, referring to the mandate of the meeting, cited paragraph 14 of Governing Body document GB.265/STM/1 on the Symposium on Multimedia Convergence, which read as follows: "The Committee may wish to recommend that the purpose of this Symposium should be to exchange views on the social and labour issues related to multimedia convergence and that its output be a document comprising a summary of the discussions and abstracts of papers presented". Nothing in that document called for a basic consensus on any given issue. He therefore expressed the position of the Employers' group when he stated that the members of that group did not have a mandate to negotiate any basic consensus on any given issues on multimedia. The reasons for coming to the Symposium were to exchange views, be informed, get educated -- but not to sit down and negotiate any paper. An exchange of views was the final objective of this Symposium. A summary of the discussions and abstracts of the papers presented would be useful for everybody.

Mr. Valentin Klotz, Secretary-General of the Meeting, first thanked all the participants for their interventions and for the stimulating exchange of views which had occurred over the previous three days. He recalled that in 1995 the Governing Body had undertaken an evaluation of the Sectoral Activities Programme. This Symposium was the first meeting of the media, culture and graphical sector as defined by the Governing Body at that time. This was not an ad hoc meeting of the multimedia industry ^{per se}. It was a meeting held within the framework of the Sectoral Activities Programme for the media, culture and graphical sector. As a result of the evaluation, the Governing Body had also decided that to ensure regular treatment for each of the 22 sectors defined in the programme, greater attention should be paid to follow-up activities, such as technical advisory services, seminars and research. The resources allocated to a sector in the biennium following a sectoral meeting should be devoted to such activities. As this Symposium had been held in the 1996-97 biennium, no provision had been made for an additional meeting in the Programme and Budget proposals for 1998-99. The Office had, however, fully expected this meeting to provide guidance for follow-up activities for that period.

Mr. Tony Lennon of the Workers' group noted that the Workers had briefly summarized their suggestions as to the areas in which the ILO could usefully undertake further activity. Everything suggested was an activity or analysis which would remain under the control of the ILO. It was critical to bring up the level of awareness and the ability of the social partners in all parts of the world to adapt to the changes that lay ahead. It was in that spirit that the Workers' group had put forward suggestions on future activities. He urged the Employers' group to offer guidance to the ILO on the issues of importance to them.

Ms. Barbara Motzney, the representative of the Government of Canada, expressed her Government's view that further ILO effort in this area was important. In three days a tremendous amount of knowledge and a variety of views had been put forward. It was appropriate for the meeting to provide some direction to the secretariat for its activities in the next biennium. While not consensus positions, some very clear themes and key messages had recurred in the debates. Therefore, with the support of the representatives of the Governments of Egypt, France, Germany, Hungary and the United States, the representative of the Government of Canada wished to complement the Workers' statement regarding training in the information society. The Governments acknowledged the critical importance of training in the information society and the responsibility shared by all the social partners. They therefore encouraged the ILO:

(a) to develop, collect and disseminate widely, information on training and retraining initiatives and programmes. This should include both success stories and lessons learned; and

(b) to explore the ways in which individuals, business, labour, communities and institutions can collaborate to promote a culture that values lifelong learning. It was particularly important to foster this culture of lifelong learning through education, by acquainting young children with the tools of information, i.e. computers, software, multimedia applications and all other media sources and tools.

Speaking only as the representative of Canada, she then expressed her appreciation for the statements made by both of the other groups. She urged the ILO to devote the necessary effort to developing a framework for further discussion, debate and research, better defining the scope of issues and industries involved in multimedia convergence. This framework would be of great use not only to the ILO, but also to other organizations coming to grips with a very multidisciplinary and multisectoral phenomenon.

Mr. Jürgen Warnken, the representative of the Government of Germany, reaffirmed his support for the common proposal just expressed. He further suggested research and the development of activities in the broader field of information technologies with particular attention to regional distinctions.

Mr. Kenji Tsunekawa, the representative of the Government of Japan, urged the ILO to examine the links between the development of multimedia and the creation of employment. The Office should make use of its multidisciplinary teams and technical cooperation activities to do so. The ILO should also evaluate the shift away from collective labour relations to individual labour relations, which would inevitably grow with the multimedia industries. It was indispensable that the ILO should collaborate with other United Nations agencies in its work on the issues facing the information society, notably ITU, WIPO and WTO. The representative also stressed that every ILO constituent expected the ILO to be a centre of excellence in labour issues and he urged the Office to raise the level of expertise of ILO staff. He noted that the Symposium had been rather different from other ILO meetings. In other sectoral meetings, only those participants who were selected as members of the Drafting Committee were kept so busy, and other members were not able to join those interesting debates. However, on the last day of the meeting, participants could adopt some resolutions and conclusions which indicated the future direction for governments and the ILO. To the contrary, in this Symposium, every person could join in the discussion, but no final document was adopted. Both styles of meeting had their merits and disadvantages. Perhaps the defects of both forms could be corrected.

Mr. Lennon formally associated the Workers' group with each of the statements of the Government representatives. The Workers' group had enjoyed and appreciated the Symposium, but the difficulties encountered in the final discussion had led him to believe that the standard tripartite meeting, where the rules were clearly understood and negotiated conclusions were the output, would have been preferable.

Mr. Durling reaffirmed his position that the Employers' group would not engage in negotiations. The Office had received a wealth of information in three days. Bringing people from all over the world with prepared papers on a given issue already constituted a lot of guidance for the Office to make use of in the coming two years. The statement provided by the Employers' group had been solicited by the Office. The Employers' group had provided the Office with a statement -- not a conclusion, not recommendations, just a statement -- based on observations made during the Symposium. That document should remain a statement, nothing less, nothing more.

The Chairman asked the Secretary-General to note the positions of the various sides.

Mr. Klotz observed that many suggestions had been made during the meeting by members of all three groups. These would be summarized in the final report along with the statements and discussions which had taken place. Together these would guide the ILO in its future work for the media, culture and graphical sector.

Mr. Blondel thanked all participants for taking part in the Symposium and for having facilitated his task as Chairman. Finally, he expressed the hope that there would be other symposia of this kind in the future, although preferably with clear, precise conclusions as well. The Chairman then declared the Symposium officially closed.

* * *

The relevance of such principles as freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining, the elimination of discrimination and the promotion of equality of opportunity was reaffirmed in the course of discussion. Rapid change under way in the sector, however, challenged the social partners to find appropriate mechanisms to reinforce these basic human rights in practice and to extend social dialogue.

The following is a brief summary of suggestions put forward by participants in the course of the Symposium for further ILO activities:

urge ratification and implementation of international labour standards;
carry out a comprehensive, detailed and analytical review of the emerging characteristics of the information society, including:
quantitative and qualitative changes in employment;
work organization;
structure of jobs;
salaries;

employment contracts;
working hours;
skill requirements;
training needs; and
labour relations;
develop reliable, comparative data on the convergence process and its effects;

analyse the various trends regionally and by sector;
examine the employment impact of national policy with regard to those trends, especially noting cultural policy and training policies;
analyse the impact of information technology on employment, the workplace and labour relations;
urge governments to carry out training and retraining programmes for new technologies;
encourage employers to inform trade unions in advance about the introduction of new technologies in order to provide an opportunity for collective bargaining and the smooth adaptation of the workforce;
examine the characteristics of new content jobs which distinguish them from jobs in the traditional cultural sector: Who is creating these jobs? What government policies could support further job creation in this sector?;
continue to support the protection of intellectual property rights for media, culture and graphical workers;
distribute information on these matters systematically, for example, by linking organizations through the information superhighway;
develop an international consensus on how best to combine the necessary protection for teleworkers with the flexibility required by enterprises;
monitor the application of international labour standards with regard to teleworkers;
in conjunction with other United Nations agencies, call attention to the development gap between information haves and have-nots, support national policy development which would lessen the gap in information technology resources between the rich and poor nations, and assist developing countries to develop the human resources needed for modern media industries;
organize regional seminars to better prepare policy-makers, employers and workers to cope with the impact of multimedia convergence; and
hold a tripartite meeting for the media, culture and graphical sector with resolutions and conclusions.

Evaluation questionnaire

Summary of the replies to the evaluation
questionnaire

A questionnaire designed to elicit participants' views on various aspects of the meeting was made available to all members, advisers and observers before the end of the Symposium. Of the 61 participants who attended, 32 responded to the questionnaire. Replies were received from four Government representatives (three delegates and one adviser), ten Employers' representatives, 17 Workers' representatives (11 delegates, three advisers and three observers) and one NGO observer. The response rate was thus 52 per cent.

The vast majority of respondents seemed to be more than satisfied with both the topic of the meeting and the themes for discussions. Ninety per cent found the choice of agenda item excellent or good and 94 per cent were satisfied with the themes selected. With regard to the quality of the discussion, 30 of the 32 respondents were satisfied.

The issues paper prepared by the Office was rated as excellent or good in terms of the quality of analysis by 88 per cent of respondents, with the remaining participants declaring themselves satisfied. Twenty-eight of 32 respondents expressed satisfaction with its objectivity and judged its presentation and readability as excellent or good.

Concerning the time allotted for discussion, most of the participants generally felt that sufficient time had been made available for the panels and for the group meetings, but a large minority (41 per cent) felt that too little time had been devoted to general discussion.

The practical and administrative arrangements were considered excellent or good by 30 of the 32 respondents.

A large number of participants expressed appreciation to the ILO for having organized this meeting on such a timely theme. Many felt that they had learned a lot about the concerns of subsectors with which they had not been familiar in the past. The feedback received so far from participants, whether orally or in writing, has been positive.

Among the additional comments received were the following:

A Government representative urged the Office to continue to focus on topics of relevance to the future of labour relations, calling this Symposium a good first step towards a more forward-looking approach. Several participants suggested dealing in greater depth with specialized topics or issues of importance to particular subsectors within small tripartite discussion groups, which would then report back to the meeting as a whole. Concrete follow-up activities would be of benefit to the social partners. A number of Worker representatives expressed disappointment with the lack of conclusions and resolutions. Several noted that not all subsectors were equally represented in the Employers' and Workers' groups. Two participants suggested that in future, papers should be submitted, translated and distributed to participants in advance of the meeting to ensure greater preparedness for in-depth discussion. One participant strongly urged the Office to update its computer equipment. The questionnaire and the tabulated results are reproduced hereafter.

EVALUATION QUESTIONNAIRE

Symposium on Multimedia Convergence

The Office, in an ongoing effort to evaluate sectoral meetings, is seeking the opinions of participants in order to have basic data for assessing the quality, usefulness and effectiveness of these meetings. As the success of such an exercise is critically dependent on an adequate rate of response, we should appreciate it if you would take time to answer the questions below and submit any other comments that you may have concerning the meeting.

1. How do you rate the meeting as regards the following? (tick one box in each case)

Excellent

Good

Satisfactory

Poor

Unsatisfactory

The choice of agenda item (Multimedia Convergence)

(19) 59%

(10) 31%

(2) 6%

(1) 3%

( )

The themes for discussion

(5) 16%

(21) 68%

(3) 10%

(2) 6%

( )

The quality of the discussion

(4) 13%

(14) 44%

(12) 37%

(2) 6%

( )

The meeting's benefits to the sector

(5) 17%

(8) 28%

(12) 41%

(1) 3%

(3) 10%

2. How do you rate the quality of the discussion paper in terms of the following? (tick one box in each case)

Excellent

Good

Satisfactory

Poor

Unsatisfactory

Quality of analysis

(7) 23%

(20) 65%

(4) 13%

( )

( )

Objectivity

(6) 19%

(17) 53%

(5) 16%

(4) 13%

( )

Presentation and readability

(12) 38%

(16) 50%

(4) 13%

( )

( )

3. How do you consider the time allotted for discussion? (tick one box in each case)

Too much

Enough

Too little

Panel discussions

(3) 9%

(26) 81%

(3) 9%

Discussions

( )

(19) 59%

(13) 41%

Groups

(2) 7%

(21) 72%

(6) 21%

4. How do you rate the practical and administrative arrangements (secretariat, document services, translation, interpretation)? (tick one box)

Excellent (18) 56%, Good (12) 38%, Satisfactory (1) 3%, Poor (1) 3%, Unsatisfactory ( )

5. In what capacity did you attend the meeting?

Government:

Delegate (3)

Adviser (1)

Observer ( )

IGO observer ( )

Employer:

Delegate (10)

Adviser ( )

Observer ( )

NGO observer ( )

Worker:

Delegate (11)

Adviser (3)

Observer (3)

6. Other observations (please continue overleaf if necessary)

^{Thank you for your cooperation.} ^{Please place the questionnaire in the box at the Registration and Information Desk.}

Revised list of participants
Liste révisée des participants
Lista revisada de participantes

Representative of the Governing Body
of the International Labour Office

Représentant du Conseil d'administration
du Bureau international du Travail

Representante del Consejo de Administración
de la Oficina Internacional del Trabajo

Workers' Group/Groupe des travailleurs/Grupo de los Trabajadores

M. Marc BLONDEL, secrétaire général, Confédération générale du travail/Force ouvrière (CGT-FO), Paris

Experts
Expertos

Mr. Peter LEISINK, Associate Professor, Department of Social Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht

M. André NAYER, directeur, Créations et recherche pluridisciplinaire (CRP), Université libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles

Members representing governments
Membres représentant les gouvernements
Miembros representantes de los gobiernos

Canada Canadá

Ms. Barbara MOTZNEY, Senior Policy Advisor, Broadcasting Policy Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage, Hull

Colombia Colombie

Srta. María Francisca ARIAS, Ministra Consejera, Misión Permanente de Colombia en Ginebra

Egypt Egypte Egipto

Ms. Nagwa ABDALLA ABD-EL HAFEZ, G.M. of Computer System, Egyptian Radio and Television Union, Cairo

Advisers/Conseillers techniques/Consejeros técnicos

Ms. Islah AMIN, Counsellor of Labour Affairs, Permanent Mission of Egypt in Geneva

Mr. Hassan ABDELMONEIM MOSTAFA, Second Secretary, Permanent Mission of Egypt in Geneva

France Francia

M. Dominique SCHALCHLI, chargé de mission, ministère du Travail et des Affaires sociales, Mission internationale, Paris

Germany Allemagne Alemania

Mr. Jürgen WARNKEN, Referent, Bundesministerium für Arbeit und Sozialordnung, Bonn

Adviser/Conseiller technique/Consejero técnico

Mr. Werner RINGKAMP, Adviser, Permanent Mission of Germany in Geneva

Hungary Hongrie Hungría

Ms. Eszter GERECZ KERTESZNE, Director, Ministry of Culture and Education, Budapest

Italy Italie Italia

M. Marco BIAGI, professeur de l'Université de Bologne, Bologne

Japan Japon Japón

Mr. Kenji TSUNEKAWA, Counsellor, Permanent Mission of Japan in Geneva

Malaysia Malaisie Malasia

Mr. AZLAN YUSOF, Counsellor, Labour Affairs, Permanent Mission of Malaysia in Geneva

United Kingdom Royaume-Uni Reino Unido

Mr. Kevin TINSLEY, Principal, Department for Education and Employment, London

United States Etats-Unis Estados Unidos

Mr. Robert ZACHARIASIEWICZ, Director of Public Affairs, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, US Department of Labor, Washington

Adviser/Conseiller technique/Consejero técnico

Mr. Nicholas STIGLIANI, Labor Attaché, Permanent Mission of the United States in Geneva

Members representing the employers
Membres représentant les employeurs
Miembros representantes de los empleadores

Mr. Ahmed AL-QAIZI, Deputy Director, Federation of UAE Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Dubai

Ms. Luz Anselma "Luchie" ARGUELLES, Member, Committee on Women and Special Concerns, Employers' Confederation of the Philippines, OP-ED Editor, Manilla Bulletin, Manila

Mr. Walter DURLING, Director, AT&T Global Information Solutions, NCR Corporation, Manager of Human Resources, Charter Communications International, Inc. and Phoenix Data, NCR Corporation, Panama

Sr. José Luis EROSA VERA, Vicepresidente, Radio Fórmula S.A., Presidente, Grupo Ero, S.D. de C.V., México

Mr. Ulrich HOLTZ, Director of Human Resources Europe, Microsoft G.m.b.H., Unterschleissheim

Mr. Adzhar IBRAHIM, Representative, Malaysian Employers' Federation, Binariang Sdn Bhd., Kuala Lumpur

Mr. Wilfred KIBORO, Group Managing Director/Chief Executive, Nation Printers and Publishers, Nairobi

M. Jean-Pierre LEHR, directeur, délégué général, Fédération des industries et métiers du multimédia (FIMM), Paris

Mr. Neil McLARY, Manager, Queensland Region, Printing Industries Association of Australia, Newmarket

Mr. George MENSAH ARYEE, Managing Director, New Times Corporation, Accra

Mr. Philip O'REILLY, Executive Director, Newspaper Publishers' Association of NZ (Inc.), Wellington

M. Etienne REICHEL, directeur suppléant, Association suisse pour la communication visuelle, Viscom -- Direction suisse romande, Pully

Mr. Heinz-Uwe RÜBENACH, Bundesverband Deutscher Zeitungsverleger e.V., Bonn

Sr. Eduardo SALINAS, Director, FEDECAMARAS, Caracas

Ms. Marie-Louise THORSEN LIND, Expert, Adviser, Swedish Employers' Confederation, Stockholm

Members representing the workers
Membres représentant les travailleurs
Miembros representantes de los trabajadores

Sr. Carlos Alberto de ALMEIDA, Presidente, Federación Nacional de Periodistas (FENAJ), Brasilia

Sr. Néstor CANTARIÑO, Secretario General, Confederación Sindical de Trabajadores de los Medios de Comunicación Social (COSITMECOS), Buenos Aires

Advisers/Conseillers techniques/Consejeros técnicos

Sra. Adriana ROZENZVAIG, Secretaria Regional, Federación Gráfica Internacional, Asunción

Sr. Damian LORETI, Asesor Legal, Confederación Sindical de Trabajadores de los Medios de Comunicación Social, Buenos Aires

Mr. Sithembele KHALA, General Secretary, MWASA, Johannesburg

Mr. Tony LENNON, President, Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph Theatre Union, London

Adviser/Conseiller technique/Consejero técnico

Mr. Jim WILSON, General Secretary, Media and Entertainment International, Brussels

M. Thomas LUKUSA TSHIANANGA, Secrétaire national/Département information et presse, Confédération syndicale du Zaïre, Kinshasa

Mr. Bernard LUNZER, Secretary Treasurer, The Newspaper Guild/CWA, Silver Spring, Maryland

Mr. Mohamed Shafie BP MAMMAL, Deputy President, Malaysian Trade Union Congress, Wisma NUTE, Kuala Lumpur

Mr. Shinji MATSUMOTO, General Secretary, International Federation of Musicians, Musicians' Union of Japan, Tokyo

Adviser/Conseiller technique/Consejero técnico

Mr. John MORTON, President, International Federation of Musicians, Longfield, Kent

Mr. Stellan MATTSSON, Fachet for Sercic och Kommunikation (SEKO), Stockholm

M. Michel MULLER, secrétaire général, Fédération des industries du livre, du papier et de la communication, Montreuil

Ms. Katherine SAND, British Actors' Equity Association, London

M. Pier VERDERIO, responsable du bureau international, FIS-CISL, Rome

Mr. Mikael WALDORFF, General Secretary, Danish Actors' Association, Frederiksberg

Mr. Christopher WARREN, Federal Secretary, Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Redfern

Adviser/Conseiller technique/Consejero técnico

Mr. Aidan Patrick WHITE, International Federation of Journalists, Brussels

Mr. Frank WERNEKE, Bundessekretar, Industriegewerkschaft Medien, Stuttgart

Adviser/Conseiller technique/Consejero técnico

Mr. Christopher PATE, General Secretary, International Graphical Federation, Brussels

Others
Autres
Otros

Representative of member States present at the sittings
Représentant d'Etats Membres présent aux séances
Representante de Estados Miembros presente en las sesiones

Turkey Turquie Turquía

Mr. Midhat SEREF, Counsellor for Labour and Social Affairs, Permanent Mission of Turkey in Geneva

Representatives of United Nations, specialized agencies
and other official international organizations

Représentants des Nations Unies, des institutions spécialisées
et d'autres organisations internationales officielles

Representantes de las Naciones Unidas, de los organismos
especializados y de otras organizaciones internacionales oficiales

Arab Labour Organization (ALO)
Organisation arabe du travail
Organización Arabe del Trabajo

M. Adnan EL TELAWI, chef de la délégation permanente, Genève

European Commission
Commission européenne
Comisión Europea

Mr. Mikko HUTTUNEN, Administrator, DGV, Brussels

Universal Postal Union
Union postale universelle
Unión Postal Universal

Mr. James GUNDERSON, Head of Communications, International Bureau, Bern

Representatives of non-governmental international organizations
Représentants d'organisations internationales non gouvernementales
Representantes de organizaciones internacionales no gubernamentales

International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU)
Confédération internationale des syndicats libres (CISL)
Confederación Internacional de Organizaciones Sindicales Libres (CIOSL)

Mr. Dan CUNNIAH, Assistant Director, Geneva

International Federation of Commercial, Clerical, Professional and Technical Employees (FIET)
Fédération internationale des employés, techniciens et cadres
Federación Internacional de Empleados, Técnicos y Profesionales

Mr. Gerhard ROHDE, Head of Department, Chatelaine/Geneva

International Federation of Journalists
Fédération internationale des journalistes
Federación Internacional de Periodistas

Mr. Aidan WHITE, General Secretary, Brussels

International Federation of Musicians
Fédération internationale des musiciens
Federación Internacional de Músicos

Mr. John MORTON, President, Longfield, Kent

International Graphical Federation
Fédération graphique internationale
Federación Gráfica Internacional

Mr. Chris PATE, General Secretary, Brussels

Ms. Martina GENDELMEYER, Assistant, Brussels

Mr. Anders SKATTJAER, Norwegian Union of Graphical Workers, Oslo

International Organization of Employers
Organisation internationale des employeurs (OIE)
Organización Internacional de Empleadores

Mr. Jean DEJARDIN, Deputy Executive Secretary, Cointrin/Geneva

Media and Entertainment International
Internationale des médias et du spectacle
Internacional del Espectáculo y de los Medios de Comunicación Social

Mr. Jim WILSON, General Secretary, Brussels

Postal Telegraph and Telephone International
Internationale du personnel des postes, télégraphes et téléphones
Internacional de Correos, Telégrafos y Teléfonos

Mr. Philip BOWYER, General Secretary, Le Lignon/Geneva

World Confederation of Labour
Confédération mondiale du travail (CMT)
Confederación Mundial del Trabajo

Mme Béatrice FAUCHERE, Représentante permanente, Genève

World Federation of Trade Unions
Fédération syndicale mondiale (FSM)
Federación Sindical Mundial

M. Albert POTAPOV, Représentant permanent, Genève

1. This sum includes expenditures on TVs, radios, cable fees, gambling, etc., as well as media products. See "Welcome to the entertainment economy", in Business Week, 14 Aug. 1995, p. 41.

2. R. Snoddy: "A publisher who had a global electronic dream", in Financial Times, 16 Oct. 1995. See also T. Jackson: "The biggest story in the book world", in Financial Times, 31 July 1995.

3. The "big five" recording companies are PolyGram, a subsidiary of Philips, the Dutch consumer electronics group; Sony Music, part of Sony, the Japanese electronics and entertainment group; Warner Music, a subsidiary of Time Warner of the United States; BMG, a subsidiary of Bertelsmann of Germany; and EMI Music, part of Thorn EMI of the United Kingdom. See "Recorded music sales bound towards $40bn", in Financial Times, 17 Apr. 1996.

4. A 1989 figure cited in L. Gray and R. Seeber: "The industry and the unions: An overview", in Under the stars: Essays on labor relations in arts and entertainment (ILR Press/Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1996), pp. 26-27.

5. For an extensive analysis of structural change in the American film and television industries and its impact on employment and labour relations, see S. Christopherson: "Flexibility and adaptation in industrial relations: The exceptional case of the US media entertainment industries", in Under the stars, op. cit., pp. 86-112.

6. ITU: TeleGeography, as cited in G. de Jonquières: "WTO needs telecoms deal for its credibility", in Financial Times, 18 Mar. 1996, and "Shifting allegiances", in "International telecommunications", a Financial Times survey, 19 Sep. 1996.

7. "Shifting allegiances", op. cit.

8. Sweden has 68, the United States has 63, and Switzerland and Denmark each have 61 main lines per 100 inhabitants. See "International telecommunications", op. cit.

9. International Telecommunications Union (ITU): The telecommunications development gap, Annex A (Geneva, 1996).

10. "A World Wide Web for tout le monde", in Business Week, 1 Apr. 1996, p. 32.

11. "The new music biz", in Business Week, 15 Jan. 1996, pp. 20-25.

12. See, for example, P. Vittet-Philippe: "The Frankfurt Book Fair: A showplace for cyberpublishing", in I&T Magazine (European Commission, Brussels), Apr. 1996, No. 19, pp. 17-21, for a discussion of the European approach to multimedia and electronic publishing.

13. J. Verity: "A company that's 100% virtual", in Business Week, 21 Nov. 1994, p. 47.

14. The observer is Jeremy Thomas, chairman of the British Film Institute, cited in J. Tagliabue: "European films: The sequel", in the International Herald Tribune, 27 Feb. 1996.

15. A. Rawsthorn: "Here's looking at you, kid, x 1000", in Financial Times, 19 June 1995. See also N. Andrews: "Pixillating the pixels", in Financial Times, 30 Jan. 1995, and "Computers come to Tinseltown", in The Economist, 24 Dec. 1994-6 Jan. 1995, pp. 89-91.

16. See H. Katz, (ed.): Telecommunications: World-wide restructuring of work and employment relations (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, forthcoming) for further analysis of these trends.

17. See, for example, ILO: Security of employment and income in the light of structural and technological change in the printing and allied trades, having regard to other media, Report II, Third Tripartite Technical Meeting for the Printing and Allied Trades (Geneva, 1990); G. MacDonald: The emergence of global multi-media conglomerates, Multinational Enterprises Programme Working Paper No. 70 (Geneva, ILO, 1990); the reports for and of the Tripartite Meeting on the Conditions of Employment and Work of Journalists, (Geneva, ILO, 1990); the reports for and of the Joint Committee for Postal and Telecommunications Services (Geneva, ILO, 1991); the reports for and of the Tripartite Meeting on Conditions of Employment and Work of Performers (Geneva, ILO, 1992); B. Bolton et al.: Telecommunications services: Negotiating structural and technological change (Geneva, ILO, 1993); and P. Chesnais: The impact of the new global communications society on professions concerned with copyright and neighbouring rights, ILO/UNESCO/WIPO/ICR.15/5/III, prepared for the 15th Ordinary Session of the Intergovernmental Committee of the Rome Convention.

18. Senior policy analyst in the Broadcasting Policy Branch of Canadian Heritage.

19. Of the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Germany.

20. Joint Federal Secretary of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance of Australia.

21. Head of the External Affairs Unit of the International Telecommunication Union.

22. President of the National Union of Telecoms Employees, Malaysia.

23. Managing Director and Chief Executive of Nation Printers and Publishers Ltd., Kenya.

24. Head of the Central Department of Computers in the Broadcasting Engineering Sector of the Ministry of Information of Egypt.

25. Research and Development Department of the Swedish Employers' Confederation.

26. Principal, Labour Market Analysis Division, Department for Eduction and Employment, United Kingdom.

27. Acting Director, VISCOM, Swiss Association for Visual Communications.

28. Managing Director of the New Times Corporation of Ghana.

29. Secretary-Treasurer of the Newspaper Guild, United States.

30. Of the German Newspaper Publishers Association.

31. Sage & Schreibe, special edition, 5/1996.

32. General Secretary of the Musicians' Union of Japan.

33. Executive Director of the Newspaper Publishers' Association of New Zealand.

34. Of Industriegewerkschaft Medien (Media Workers' Union), Germany.

35. General Manager, Human Resources, Binariang Sdn Bhd, Malaysia.

36. Chargé de mission at the International Mission of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, France.

37. Director of Public Affairs, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, United States Department of Labor.

38. Professor of Labour Law at the University of Modena, Adjunct Professor of Comparative Human Resource Management at the John Hopkins University Centre in Bologna, and President of the Italian Industrial Relations Research Association.

39. Director of AT&T Global Information Solutions and Manager of Human Resources for Charter Communications International Inc. and Phoenix Data. Mr. Durling is an Employer member of the Governing Body of the ILO.

40. President of the Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph and Theatre Union (BECTU) of the United Kingdom.

41. Associate Professor of Labour Studies, Utrecht University, Netherlands.

42. Secretary General of COSITMECOS (Trade Union Confederation of Social Communication Media Workers).

43. Of the Danish Actors' Association.

44. President of FENAJ (the National Federation of Professional Journalists), Brazil.

SECTORS | ACTIVITIES | MEETINGS | PUBLICATIONS

Puesto al día por BR. Aprobada por OdVR. Ultima actualización: 18 de octubre de 2000.

1. How do you rate the meeting as regards the following? (tick one box in each case)
	Excellent	Good	Satisfactory	Poor	Unsatisfactory
The choice of agenda item (Multimedia Convergence)	(19) 59%	(10) 31%	(2) 6%	(1) 3%	( )
The themes for discussion	(5) 16%	(21) 68%	(3) 10%	(2) 6%	( )
The quality of the discussion	(4) 13%	(14) 44%	(12) 37%	(2) 6%	( )
The meeting's benefits to the sector	(5) 17%	(8) 28%	(12) 41%	(1) 3%	(3) 10%
2. How do you rate the quality of the discussion paper in terms of the following? (tick one box in each case)
	Excellent	Good	Satisfactory	Poor	Unsatisfactory
Quality of analysis	(7) 23%	(20) 65%	(4) 13%	( )	( )
Objectivity	(6) 19%	(17) 53%	(5) 16%	(4) 13%	( )
Presentation and readability	(12) 38%	(16) 50%	(4) 13%	( )	( )
3. How do you consider the time allotted for discussion? (tick one box in each case)
	Too much	Enough	Too little
Panel discussions	(3) 9%	(26) 81%	(3) 9%
Discussions	( )	(19) 59%	(13) 41%
Groups	(2) 7%	(21) 72%	(6) 21%
4. How do you rate the practical and administrative arrangements (secretariat, document services, translation, interpretation)? (tick one box)
Excellent (18) 56%, Good (12) 38%, Satisfactory (1) 3%, Poor (1) 3%, Unsatisfactory ( )
5. In what capacity did you attend the meeting?
Government:	Delegate (3)	Adviser (1)	Observer ( )	IGO observer ( )
Employer:	Delegate (10)	Adviser ( )	Observer ( )	NGO observer ( )
Worker:	Delegate (11)	Adviser (3)	Observer (3)
6. Other observations (please continue overleaf if necessary)