Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!genrad!wjh12!n44a!ima!cca!human-nets From: human-nets@cca.UUCP Newsgroups: fa.human-nets Subject: HUMAN-NETS Digest V6 #32 Message-ID: <4817@cca.UUCP> Date: Sun, 5-Jun-83 15:19:15 EDT Article-I.D.: cca.4817 Posted: Sun Jun 5 15:19:15 1983 Date-Received: Tue, 7-Jun-83 02:20:36 EDT Lines: 289 >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. ------------------------------ End of HUMAN-NETS Digest ************************