TUC backs computerised jobs massacre

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Technician inspects microprocessors at Bell Labs Micro-electronics threaten millions ofiobs standards." their position through massive "This is by no means Private manufacturers also cutting policies and pious hope. inevitable however and want to break the Post Office The Labour Government, shortly before its election defear called in a public relations agency to boost the introduction of microelectronics into British Armed with a budget of £10m the company has the task of contacting the top 50,000 "decision makers" in industry and winning them to a programme of the rapid introduction of the silicon chip industry, which reaches deep into every corner of the labour market.

What is particularly interesting is that the 50,000 "decision makers" include not only management but also trade union officials.

Judging from the luc report published and launched last week, Employment and Technology, not a penny of this money will be wasted.

• For the TUC has come out as chief cheerleader for the biggest attack on jobs internationally this century.

The document produced by the TUC as an 'interim' study stands as one of the most monstrous acts of betrayal that this body has yet managed to produce.

Under the guise of 'responsible' • trade unionism it has declared its position firmly against any section of workers that seeks to defend jobs.

•Yet the massacre of jobs on a scale that most workers have not yet begun to comtemplate, is not something for the future. It has already begun.

Invaluable

The TUC report (Published by the Trades Union Congress at 75p) should be read side by side with a report from the Counter Information Services The New Technology. (also 75p) an invaluable guide to its real effects.

Although produced before the TUC report it effectively exposes it as a compendium of lies, half truths and distortions.

Silicon chip technology is not mysterious. It has reduced the computer to a tiny, cheap. mass-produced item which can be used in a multitude of ways.

The major uses planned and being put into effect cover virtually every industry and most jobs.

In the print industry, the technology has the capacity to do away with composing rooms. with written words stored on computers where they can be recalled for editing and set automatically.

In telecommunications the Post Office plans a fully electronic system (System X) which dispenses with telephonists for routine calls and which automatically prepares accounts. It would also drastically reduce the number of engineers.

In office work word processors now can cut the number of typists by 30% or more, with typists forced to spend much larger percentages of their time actually typing.

Correct spelling

Computers can even correct spelling and thus do away with corrections. Letters can be automatically transferred between word processors, hundreds or thousand of miles apart, cutting out the postal system.

Since 40% of women workers work at office work, whether in banks, insurance companies, council offices or private firms, this, least publicised, piece of new technology can be expected to have a savage effect on unemployment among women.

German trade unions have estimated that two million of that country's five million secretaries, typists and clerical workers, will be thrown out of work.

Warehouses: Fully computerised stores are now fully operative. Fork lift truck drivers selecting items according to a typed list of orders could be obsolete in a few years.

Production lines offer employers a fruitful source of cutting jobs. Already robots which can reproduce assembly techniques are on the market and every year sees their cost fall.

Leyland are introducing robots for parts of the new Mini production line at Birmingham, and Leyland has also announced a major investment in numerically controlled machine tools.

A computer aided design system (which once programmed by a draftsman can reproduce designs exactly and be used to produce the tools themselves) cost a company in 1969 the equivalent of one worker's wages for 900 years.

But in 1978 it costs that same worker's wages for just 13 years.

That is not an exceptional decline in cost for computer technology. Silicon chips have brought about a position where managements can expect to recover the costs of capital equipment in very few years.

The TUC is not shy about mentioning & the Government financed propaganda campaign it intends to run. In a chapter headed Trade Union Education we read:

"The Government has agreed to fund a programme aimed at 1e9* providing key trade union officers and representatives with a general understanding of the technology, its implications, and key union policies.

"The TUC proposal is to model the programme on the very successful campaigns to inform the Movement about the the 1971 Industrial Relations Bill, and more recently about the HSC's Safety Representatives and Safety Committees.

'On these occasions, the TUC designed teaching and learning packs, trained professional tutors to instruct full time officers and convenors in their use, and conducted extensive short programmes to train officers."

Bureaucratic weight The basis on which the full weight of the bureacracy will creak into action is made clear from the very first paragraph of the TUC report:

"Technological change and microelectric revolution are a challenge but also an opportunity. There is the challenge that the rapid introduction of new processes and work organisation will lead to the loss of many more jobs and growing social dislocation.

"Equally however there is the realisation that new technologies also offer great opportunities-not just for increasing the competitiveness of British industry but for increasing the quality of working life and for providing new benefits to working people."

Of course the TUC has long seen it is às its role as increasing the 'competitiveness of British ONE COMPI:: industry'-or to put it another way, increasing the amount of work done by each worker, and reducing the number in work.

The general, nationalist, tenor of the report is that Britain is 'lagging behind' Japan, America and other capitalist states.

The TUC go on to claim that new jobs created by the micro-electronic industry could equal or outweigh jobs lost by thei introduction.

This is a barefaced lie. The CIS report points out that the best estimate of the number of jobs that the NEB-backed firm, Inmos, could create is 4,000. The number of jobs lost through new technology will run to several millions.

The 1978 TUC resolution on technology set the tone of this pamphlet.

In point one it called on the Government to : "establish and develry a viable and soundly financed British research development and substantial manufacturing capacity in the field of microelectronics and allied computer systems.

In point seven it asked Government to "declare publically their concern at the prospects of the resulting unemployment and support the move towards a shorter working week, month, year or lifetime with no deterioration in living The new report builds on this mixture of support for job "If the British economy is to benefit fully from technological change our [!] industry must be in a position to make the right products, with the right processes, at the right time.

"Broadly speaking the "successful' countries are those with corporations or industries that have developed strategies based on high output, low unit profit margins, and a high rate of plough-back IntO nei machinery, research and development and product innovation."

The TUC also promises to help the Government identify "the constraints on growth and improved performance and work towards their removal* This can only mean collaborating to remove the 'obstacles' of workers' opposition.

The UPW has a formal position of opposition to System X-the all electronic exchange system which could reduce jobs by between 40 and 50%.

The TUC report however blithely accepts that this system will be introduced. Tom Jackson, who sits on the General Council, last year gave the Post Office full permission to take a demonstration of ACRE and CIR (computerised directories) around the country and to paint it in glowing light to telephonists who were paid overtime to admire its perfection.

This was in order to sell it to the membership before a Special Conference last year where Jackson was Keen for trials to go ahead and for previous Conference policy tying the Post Office to a shorter working week before trials took place being overturned.

Statistics can be devised sector by sector to show the kind of cut in jobs that managements, lashed on by competition are contemplating.

But in its key section on "The Trade Union Response to Technological Change" • the TUC says:

"Clearly no accurate forecasts of the net affects on employment can be drawn from these considerations, On the one hand the extent of job creation will depend in part on factors such as the overall level of demand in the economy, the speed at which new technology is introduced and the actions of our [!] competitors.

"On the other hand the destruction of jobs can occur in a more sudden, concentrated and substantial manner than the longer term creation of new jobs, through the development of new products.

PHOTO: Laurence Sparham, IFL TUC leader Murray experience shows that positive trade union action is essential in gaining the maximum benefit for employment from technological change."

This "trade union action' consists of pointing out new markets, a few quibbles over health, and desperate pleas to be taken • into management's confidence.

Managements and the Government have not been slow to seize on the TUC's desire to co-operate in creating mass unemployment.

A Department of Industry report predicted that the technology would increase unemployment in Britain from 1.5m to somewhere between 2.5m and 3.5m.

A report from ASTMS for the TUC estimated that five million unemployed would be the most optimistic figure to hope for by the mid 1990s.

It is not because the TUC does not know the effects that it pretends the future is uncertain. It is precisely because it does know the effects, and that there is no reformist answer to them.

Perhaps the most vivid example of the TUC approach given in the CIS report comes not in mammoth statistics of jobs already lost in hundreds of thousands in such fields as cash register manufacturer and telecommunications-or even in the 100,000 jobs lost by garage forcourt attendants-but in one tiny example in Bradford Bradford Council reduced typists in one section from 44 to 22 by buying nine word processors.

The smaller department increased output by 19%, and the council saves nearly £60,000 a year.

When the machines were unveiled, the women in the department, who were all members of NALGO, wanted to fight.

They could not get support however from their NALGO branch, because one of the senior branch officers had been on the working party which recommended their introduction!

Now the council wants to introduce the word processors more widely, with a loss of 200 jobs in the education department alone.

Employers are driven on by the most frantic competition between the tirms which produce the duce the technology, in which the world leaders IBM, won US military budgets.

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