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Subject: HUMAN-NETS Digest   V6 #32
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Date: Sun, 5-Jun-83 15:19:15 EDT
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Posted: Sun Jun  5 15:19:15 1983
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>From Human-Nets-Request@Rutgers Sun Jun  5 15:19:06 1983

HUMAN-NETS Digest         Sunday, 5 Jun 1983       Volume 6 : Issue 32

Today's Topics:
      Computers and People - The Effects of Automation on Jobs
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thursday,  2 Jun 1983 23:30-PDT
From: lauren at rand-unix

(Financial Commentary)
By STEVEN J. MARCUS
c. 1983 N.Y. Times News Service

    NEW YORK - Automation is not dehumanizing, at least not for those
who buy what automatons make, says Michael Dertouzos, director of the
Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. He likes to say, in fact, that it is inherently
''re-humanizing'' because it permits the manufacture of low-cost,
high-quality goods of enormous variety with capital equipment that
need not be replaced, only reprogrammed.
    Enthusiasts, who invariably speak in acronyms, contend that CAD,
CAP and CAM, when combined in a factory to achieve CIP, may well bring
on the consumer's Golden Age. They are promoting computer-aided
design, computer-aided planning and computer-aided manufacturing to
arrive at computer-integrated production.
    Moreover, they say, the United States needs such factories to
regain its industrial leadership, and they often cite the warning by
James A. Baker, a vice president of the General Electric Co., that
American manufacturers must ''automate, emigrate or evaporate.''
    But for the worker, the factory of the future may be literally
dehumanized, with few human beings inside. And if plants nationwide
become computerized, says Stephen A. Merrill, senior research
associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington, ''the consensus in the United States is that large numbers
of workers will be laid off.''
    Merrill's remarks were made last week in Detroit during the annual
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
They were part of a major agenda item that addressed the issue of
technological unemployment.
    According to Joel D. Goldhar, dean of the School of Business
Administration at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the factory of
the future ''is already here and coming faster.'' ''The technology has
an imperative of its own,'' he said, and there is little to be done to
lessen its human impact. ''We're talking unmanned,'' he said.  ''To
suggest otherwise is to pander to current social thought.''
    Moreover, displaced blue-collar workers will hardly be candidates
for the few jobs remaining, which will require sophistication and
advanced degrees, he said.
    Some at the meeting maintained that even without a transition to
automation, job prospects would be dim. If the change is not made,
said Frank P. Stafford, chairman of the economics department at the
University of Michigan, ''jobs will be lost to foreign producers.''
    Worker-displacement conflicts have so far been confined in the
United States to the few automated facilities that exist. And they
have been addressed by collective bargaining, case-by-case, instead of
being embraced by the national political process. Even under these
circumstances, Merrill maintained, organized labor has been too meek:
''It has been more concerned with smoothing the adjustment than with
influencing basic change.''
    But the basic changes required are far beyond the abilities of any
union - or company, city or state, for that matter - to carry out by
itself, said Donald F. Ephlin, vice president of the United Automobile
Workers. ''The impact of technology would be much easier to address,''
he said, ''if a full-employment economy were the centerpiece of a
national policy.''
    The union official said that in West Germany, for example,
government and industry work together to reduce the work force, when
necessary, by attrition, and workers are either retrained for the
remaining jobs or are shifted to related industries. ''The workers
cooperate,'' Mr. Ephlin said, ''because they know there is a national
commitment to employment security.''
    There were similar observations made about Norway, Japan and
Austria.
    Federal intervention is clearly required in the transition to
automation, said Prof. Edward Blakely and a researcher, Phil Shapira,
of the city and regional planning department at the University of
California at Berkeley. But they cautioned that a powerful centralized
agency modeled after Japan's Ministry of International Trade and
Industry would serve the country no better than a policy of
laissez-faire. What is needed, they argued, is direct involvement and
control by the workers themselves and their communities, with Federal
support.
    Melvin Kranzberg, professor of the history of technology at
Georgia Tech, suggested that the ''automate, emigrate or evaporate''
choice is specious. ''We are potentially wise and creative enough to
develop subtler alternatives,'' he said. ''and the technologies give
us the options.''

By SUSAN B. GARLAND
Newhouse News Service

    WASHINGTON - The world of work today for 32-year-old Henry
Pieczynski is quite different from the din, heat and grime of the
steel mill.
    Every morning, he dons a necktie and visits the quiet, carpeted
classrooms of Control Data Institute in Pittsburgh where he and 125
other laid-off steelworkers are learning the skills they will need to
win the jobs of the future.
    Until last July, Pieczynski was a machinist for the Edgewater
Steel Co. in Oakmont, Pa. By the fall, after completing an
eight-month, state-funded program, he and his classmates will embark
on new careers, as computer technicians.
    Perhaps some will return to the steel mills to watch over the
robots that may assume many of their own former tasks.
    ''There's a trade-off. My income won't be as high, but the
computer industry won't collapse overnight like the steel or auto
industries,'' Pieczynski said in a recent telephone interview. ''The
future is what I'm shooting for.''
    The steelworkers in this small program are symbols of the winds of
change sweeping across the occupational landscape of the United
States. Advancing technology and foreign competition are causing a
rewriting of job descriptions, and frequent career changes are
expected to become common as occupations become more complex and
require different skills.
    This upheaval in the job market is a pressing issue for all of
today's adult workers because most of the emerging skilled jobs will
have to be filled by them. People who are adults now will make up more
than 75 percent of the work force in the year 2000.
    But it also is a problem facing the institutions that prepare the
workers. The education and training workers receive will determine
whether they will adapt to this stunning metamorphosis of the
workplace.
    ''The challenge is, how do you keep worker skills in an era of
fast-paced technological change?'' says Pat Choate, senior policy
analyst for economics at TRW Inc. ''It's not a question of more skills
or fewer skills. It's a question of making sure they have the right
skills.''
    Not only are technological advances creating new types of
industries and occupations - in computers, genetic engineering,
robotics, lasers and fiber optics. They also are transforming the way
people are doing the jobs they already have.
    Some of the changes are occurring gradually, although ultimately
they will mean a overhaul of the workplace. Take the secretary's job.
Within 15 years, the secretary has moved from the manual typewriter to
the electric typewriter to the electric typewriter with a memory to
the computerized word processor. Office personnel eventually will
simply dictate into a machine that will type the letter itself.
    Some of the changes are more dramatic. Smokestack industries - in
steel, automobiles, rubber and textiles - are declining rapidly,
forcing more than 2 million out of work in the past several years.
Many will never return to their blue-collar jobs. Within these
industries, the kinds of work will change as robots, computer-aided
design and manufacturing, and other forms of automation enable factory
workers to remove their hard hats.
    By the year 2000, heavy manufacturing is expected to comprise 11
percent of the workforce, down from 28 percent in 1980. Farming jobs
will decline from 4 percent to 3 percent. Jobs in the service
industries - medicine, leisure, business and finance services, real
estate and education - will catapult to 86 percent from 68 percent.
    But jobs in the heavy manufacturing and farming sectors are not
the only ones that will vanish. Choate estimates that 2 million to 3
million workers each year will be permanently displaced in every area
of the economy, including the growing high-technology and service
industries.
    ''The dimensions of the change are such that most workers will
find themselves like many workers who are now in the automobile
assembly lines: Their jobs just won't be there because their jobs are
being automated or because the market is being overtaken by foreign
competition,'' Choate says.
    Yet, according to Choate and other forecasters, the automation
that causes massive displacement is not expected also to cause
widespread unemployment. There will be enough jobs, they say, but
people will have to be ready and willing to change jobs as the jobs
change, to be retrained and to relocate.
    For one thing, technology will create millions of new jobs. A
robot may replace several human workers on the assembly line, but the
humans could become robot designers, installers, sales personnel and
repairers.
    Also, changing demographics will create new occupations. An aging
and growing population is causing an explosion in health services, and
an increase in the number of two-worker households is leading to
similar gains in the fast-food industry. Predicted shorter work weeks
and two-income families should create new occupations in a booming
recreation industry.
    But the unskilled and undereducated worker may find harder times
ahead because some form of computer literacy may be necessary for most
workers.
    ''There will be fewer and fewer unskilled jobs,'' says Norman
Feingold, president of the National Career and Counseling Services.
''There was a time in this country when you didn't need to read and
to write to work, but that's fast disappearing.''
    While many warn of a major economic transformation in the next
several years, some are more skeptical about its pace and its effect
on the average worker.
    Economist Sar A. Levitan, director of the Center for Social Policy
Studies at George Washington University, notes that 50 years ago one
out of every five Americans was a farm worker.
    ''If anybody told us in 1933 that only 3 percent of the labor
force would be in agriculture today, we would have foreseen all sorts
of cataclysmic problems in terms of what would those poor farmers do
with their skills in the big cities,'' Levitan says.
''But ever so slowly the economy absorbed them.''
    ''It's expensive to automate, plus the technology is still in its
infancy,'' says Neal H. Rosenthal, chief of the occupational outlook
division of the federal government's Bureau of Labor Statistics.
''Some of the larger companies are in the forefront, but others have
to wait until they know it's developed.''
    The question of which occupations are expected to grow raises some
debate.
    Occupations expected to have the fastest proportionate increase,
although not necessarily the largest numbers, during this decade are
in computer programming, the fast-food industry, health services,
leisure industries and engineering fields, according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics.
    However, the government agency says, most of the new jobs
generated during the 1980s will be traditional and low-paying:
secretaries, nurses' aides and orderlies, janitors, cashiers, nurses,
truck drivers, fast-food restaurant workers, office clerks, waiters
and waitresses, elementary school teachers, kitchen helpers,
accountants and auditors and car mechanics.
    Declines are projected for farmers and farm laborers, graduate
assistants, shoemaking machine operators, secondary school and college
teachers, typesetters, private servants, ticket agents, taxi drivers,
clergy and postal clerks.
    Marvin Cetron, president of Forecasting International Ltd., in
Arlington, Va., disagrees with some of the bureau's projections.
''They live in the past, not in the future,'' he says.
    For example, Cetron says, many secretaries and office clerks will
be replaced by sopisticated machines, and the need for sales clerks
will decline as consumers start using home computers to make
purchases.
    Cetron has his own list of occupations for the 1990s:
    New diagnostic tools will eliminate the need for many doctors and
create jobs for paramedics and medical-machine technicians.  Geriatric
workers will be needed to meet the social, mental and physical
requirements of the growing aging population. Mechanics will be hired
to manufacture bionic limbs.
    Jobs for energy technicians and auditors will increase as new
energy sources become available and as energy conservation systems
become more sophisticated. Hazardous-waste technicians will be needed
to treat and dispose of industrial and biological wastes.  Laser
technicians will replace today's tool-and-die makers.
    Genetic engineering will take off, requiring chemists, biologists
and lesser-trained production technicians. The computer field will
spawn hundreds of thousands of jobs in computer-aided manufacture and
design and software writing.
    The demand for housing rehabilitation technicians will grow as the
world population increases and new construction materials and
techniques develop. Battery technicians will be needed to service new
types of fuel cells used in vehicles and homes.
    Many occupational forecasters believe the jobs will be cleaner,
easier and safer; new discoveries will lead to more career choices and
variety; the workweek will be shorter and hours more flexible;
job-sharing will increase; and increasing numbers of workers will be
able to do their jobs from their homes on computers, a particular
advantage to the handicapped.
    Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist with the Urban Institute, predicts
workers will ''increasingly trade off higher wages for various kinds
of non-wage benefits,'' such as better working conditions, job
training and mobility, more flexible hours and locations and day care
facilities. These demands, she says, will be caused in part by an
increase in the number of two-earner and single-parent households,
''where conflicts between work and family responsibilities loom
large.''
    The work force also will look different. As the baby-boom
generation matures, the labor force will be older. The ranks of
younger workers (ages 16 to 25) are shrinking by about 16 percent this
decade, and a greater percentage of this smaller group will be black
and Hispanic.  Also, two-thirds of the new workers in this decade will
be women.
    Retooling the American labor force is necessary not only to ensure
that workers have the technical skills to keep up with new
developments, but also to enable them to actually set the pace of
these developments in the world market.
    As U.S. high-technology industries become targets of other
industrialized nations, many business executives, economists and
government officials are calling for a massive retraining program and
national industrial policy.
    ''If in the 1980s, these nations achieve a domination of these
industries, as they have in the past in basic metals, consumer
electronics and automobiles, the U.S. will face profoundly serious
economic problems and choices in the 1990s,'' Choate says.
    New skills are needed at all levels, economists warn. At the high
end of the scale, there are shortages of scientists, engineers and
other highly educated and skilled workers. In the middle are millions
of workers who will need retraining as their current jobs disappear or
change. And at the bottom are the millions of adults who are
functionally illiterate.
    Yet, many say, the public and private sectors are not geared up to
turn an obsolete workforce into a workable one. The Pennsylvania
program that is teaching former steelworker Pieczynski to become a
computer technician appears more an exception than the norm.

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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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