Labor, Technology and the Future
This year, at the 40th anniversary of the historic merger that created the AFL-CIO, trade unions are back in the news. Two new mergers--one joining the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Assn., and the other linking the machinists, the steelworkers, and the auto workers unions--promise to change the shape of labor in the coming century. And the AFL-CIO leadership election next month features an unprecedented insurgent challenge to traditional leadership of the “unions of unions.”
These developments give trade unions an opportunity to shed their sometimes-deserved reputation as obstacles to innovation and progress, conservative organizations obsessed with work rules, grievances, contracts and hierarchy, and entirely ill-matched to the “lean and mean” imperatives of business in an international economy. Trade unions today, in fact, are on the brink of an immense transformation prompted by the central role of innovation in today’s corporations and on the shop floor.
Some unions are ahead of others in this transformation, but all will either change or die. “In a high-performance economy, we need high-performance unions,” says Brian Turner, director of the Work and Technology Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank on labor and new technologies.
A small but growing core of U.S. labor activists and intellectuals are trying to rethink how labor can survive and thrive in the new high-tech economy. At the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Frank Emspak is promoting an idea--well developed in Europe--called “skill-based automation.” Instead of using machines to replace workers or their skills, Emspak says, engineers can instead design machines that enhance skill, improve productivity and preserve jobs.
U.S. engineers and managers often regard labor as a mere “factor of production” that will eventually be eliminated. In contrast, Emspak points out that what we call “expert systems,” computers used to simulate and replace expertise, the Scandinavians call “systems for experts,” an important turn of phrase.
Ray Marshall, Secretary of Labor in the Carter Administration and now a professor at the University of Texas, notes that the Japanese have a saying that workers “give wisdom to the machines.” But it’s a lesson most American companies have been slow to learn. General Motors, Marshall notes, invested nearly $70 billion in automation technologies in the 1980s, trying to “leapfrog” the Japanese in automobile production. The company lost all that money and more because of a poor understanding of the central role of workers. Ford, on the other hand, succeeded with a comprehensive “Employee Involvement” program that pushed Ford’s profits ahead of the much larger GM.
Genuine worker participation in technology deployment and factory-floor restructuring clearly has benefits all around, but it requires a reorientation of engineers, management and labor, and a thorough rethinking of who is involved in the process of innovation.
Specialists in the “human-computer interface” are exploring methodologies for interface and systems design based on principles of “participatory design,” an idea also imported from Denmark and Norway. Participatory design assumes that workers know best how to do their jobs and that computer engineers should take this knowledge into account. The slogan for participatory design is: “Not for the user, not by the user, but with the user.”
Several companies are pursuing participatory design experiments, including Steelcase, the office equipment manufacturer, and American Airlines.
Union officials need reorientation in their political efforts too. They are typically focused on the government agencies and organizations they know, such as the Department of Labor and the labor committees in Congress. They have tended to ignore public debates about technological innovation, such as those in interagency technology task forces or the science and technology committees in Congress. Too much union money goes to lawyers and not enough to people who think creatively about technology.
In 1993-94, Emspak spent a “disappointing” year, he says, working as a labor representative at the National Institute of Standards and Technology trying to get an innovative labor-management project started as part of the Clinton Administration’s Advanced Technology Project. The AFL-CIO wasn’t interested, and NIST officials didn’t know what to do with Emspak; they called his ideas “too sociological.”
Clearly a lot of education is required. Currently there is no rational connection between the nation’s technology policy and its labor policy. Without such a connection, conflict and poor judgment will continue to sap the nation’s real economic potential. Labor leaders tell employers that unions are the best guarantee for an educated, skilled, disciplined work force--for a work force that is neither dumbly docile nor overtly hostile, both anathema to effective innovation. If labor leaders and management will listen to the ideas of people who understand both the imperatives of high tech and workers’ needs, a new transformation of trade unions could revitalize the labor movement and improve both U.S. industry and the lives of working people.
Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached by e-mail at Gary.Chapman@mail.utexas.edu
