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Will 1990 mark the end of the will to work—or the right to manage?
42
Long
Range
Planning
Vol. 14
April
1981
Will 1990 Mark the End of the Will to Work Or the Right to Manage? Anthony Carter, Secretary-General, Nancy Foy, STC Ltd.
U.K.
The environment of the 1980s is not likely to be as comfortable as the 1970s. The combination of new technology, new economics and new social forces is likely to trigger a drastic drop in the number of jobs as well. At the same time, our education systems, the media and every other element affecting people’s expectations seem to be combining to foster something that might be called,the ‘more syndrome’-people demand more pay, more secure jobs, more amenities and more control over their working lives-but appear unwilling to commit themselves, to exhibit loyalty to an employer, or even to move in search of work. The challenge is international, the goal must be convergence between social policies, between the expectations and the realities, between the new technology and the new values. The end of the decade is likely to see the end of the work ethic and the beginning of the real post-industrial society.
Unless ways are found to bridge the gap between the expectations of working people and the work available, there will be an extremely difficult decade ahead for labour relations. In this sense, we use the term ‘labour relations’ to encompass not only the formal aspects of ‘industrial relations’ but also the wider, and ultimately more important, questions of ‘employee relations’, the ways in which organizations deal with their members. We believe that trade unions as well as employers, government bodies, and other experts involved in work-related issues will share quite similar problems or challenges as the decade progresses.
Tony Carter, Secretary-General of the U.K.‘s Council of Post Office Unions, 11 /12 Maiden Lane, London WCZE 7NE. is also known for fostering the 2-year experiment in industrial democracy in the British Post Office. He also teaches at major management centres and business schools, Nancy Foydid this workwhile a fellow at the.Oxford Centrefor Management Studies. She is now a managerwith Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd. Her ideas about networks, informal information, temporary institutions, and zest as a management motivator have just been published as The Yin and Yang of Organizations.
Cowcil
of Post Ofjce
The Astringent
Unions and
Environment
The 1980s will be characterized by a mismatch between the supply and demand for labour. On a single day recently, the Financial Times ran two perceptive and alarming articles, back-to-back on the same sheet of pink paper. Om? described the drastic effect the new technology (‘chips’) was likely to have on the number ofjobs available. The other’ described computer programming jobs that could not be filled because employers were demanding degree-level qualifications, while the actual content of the jobs was boring even for 16year-old school-leavers. In every industrialized country, structural unemployment will be one of the strongest factors in the labour relations picture in the 1980s. We are going to experience it at a higher level than we have seen since the end ofthe war-and the consequences are likely to be profound. At the same time-but much less to the forefront of public consciousness today-we are concerned about an unprecedented level of what one might call ‘structural underemployment’-a de-skilling of jobs that is taking place for psychological as well as technical reasons, while the numbers ofjobs are decreasing. New technology is one important element in the rising unemployment. There is, quite rightly, some concern that the technology is evoking polarized responses rather than a spectrum of possibilities. Many of us tend to see-saw between deepest gloom or rosiest optimism, and it is quite difficult to remain poised in the grey area between the poles. The glorious-opportunity school of thought has historical support’9*20,24 for its quite strong contentions that every advance in technology since the invention of the wheel has led to a vast increase
Will 1990 Mark
the End of the Will to Work-Or
in human activity and thence human happiness. They cite jobs that did not exist before, and resources that could not have been imagined before suddenly becoming useful. The gloomier view suggests that the current advance in technology is qualitatively different from every other advance since the wheel. Its proponents’,” see no way that the resources released by the chip can be taken up by new productive activities. Therefore, they contend, we have to look for new ways to live, and for new values to fit a new lifestyle. It is a completely new situation; people can no longer expect to work an 8-hour day, a 40-hour week, a 50-week year, for a 40-year working life. There simply is not, and will not be, enough work to go around on that basis. This picture has a certain ring of certainty. Indeed, there will be new opportunities, and the quality-oflife argument has elements of truth. But it is also obvious that in the age of ‘chips with everything’, we are entering an utterly new situation, coping with forces that have not faced us so clearly in previous technical advances. And we are having to cope with choices that we have not confronted before. Human nature is unlikely to adapt its values as rapidly as the optimists would have us believe. Even before the chips popped up to the surface of our consciousness, there has been a rising emphasis -and productivity means proon ‘productivity’ ducing more goods with the same number of people, or else producing the same amount of goods (or services) using fewer people. Researchers at the European Trades Union Institute note that in EEC countries in the decade from 1958 to 1967 gross domestic product grew by about 4.5 per cent per year, while unemployment rose only O-2 per cent per year. As the emphasis on productivity bore fruit-long before we had today’s technologyeither the goods and services rose, or the employment levels stabilized and dropped, or both. In the first half of the 197Os, in West Germany, productivity rose 3.8 per cent per year on average, while unemployment levels went from 0.7 to 4.8 per cent. Now with the march of technology accelerating, we can expect dramatic effects in many industries. Chips will be consumed in increasing numbers in the computer industry, the telecommunications industry, and the motor industry, in that order. We find them coming into television assembly, and typesetting, where the West Germans have lost more than 35,000 jobs since 1972, for example. Chips will begin to have an impact in robotics, machine tools, and goods handling. Numbers ofjobs are important, and in the coming decade the most dramatic reduction may well be in the office environment. One clerical . union estimates that if only 20 per cent of British offices
the Right
to Manage?
43
were to install word processors between now and 1983, more than a quarter of a million jobs would be lost-because these machines improve productivity in clerical and administrative work by about 50 per cent. Can we afford improved productivity when it means the too-rapid displacement of sizeable portions of the population? It is unfortunate, but true, that the groups who are going to be most affected by these improvements in productivity are those least able to cope with rapid change-the women entering the work force for the first time, and the young school-leavers who join them at the bottom of the ladder; it will be the immigrant workers, the disabled, and the elderly whose jobs will disappear. At the same time, though, the chips will be eroding the quality of many other jobs which today we think of as challenging, interesting, or even ‘professional’. But the chips will permit us to do things that we could not do before. A recent Sunday newspaper gave a graphic illustration of the social merits of chips-and the de-skilling too. It described a severely disabled child, confined to a wheelchair and unable to move most ofhis muscles; thus he was incapable of ordinary human activities, including speech. When he managed to master laborious letter-by-letter indications on an electric typewriter, a marvellous ability with words shone forth, but the effort was excruciating. Now he can use a desk computer that allows him to devise his own forms of shorthand, and he is able to type conversations, to control his environment, and to write exceptional poetry-poetry far beyond his years. The desk computer costs less than the average family car. However, the obvious social benefit to the boy, his family, and his society, carries a little sting in its tail. For years computer experts have been predicting that their hardware would get cheaper-as it has-while the computer’s march into the centre of our lives would.permit a higher level of intellectual work to be done-for its programming-while it eliminated drudgery. Instead, as more people have begun to use computers, they have sensibly demanded that the machines be capable of operation in normal terminology. Reluctantly, the computer experts have had to dress up their systems so that ordinary people could use them-including the disabled child, who can now learn to write his own programs, rather than having to depend on a highly trained computer programmer. Not only is the computer programmer one of the noutteau obsolete; what about the technical expert who used to maintain such a machine? In the next few decades the need for technologically trained staff in most enterprises will be minimal-just as we begin to succeed in brainwashing our children to master technology in order to get good jobs. But modular design and automated diagnosis- -both products of today’s generation of technologistswill soon turn their own inventors into dinosaurs-
44
Long
Range
Planning
Vol. 14
April
an obsolete breed. If a part breaks down in tomorrow’s machine, the system can diagnose the fault, then direct a machine minder to that module, which is replaced in accordance with the machine’s instructions. Even computer programmers can be supplanted by today’s machines, much less tomorrow’s. We see no way that this de-skillingalready so effectively, inexorably under way-can be avoided. Instead of computer programmers, we will need zombie-like machine-minders. The new technology can eliminate entire classes of employment that are taken for granted today. In transportation, for example, where is the need for booking clerks or travel agency people? The consumer, using only today’s technology, could phone for a reservation, talk directly to the computer, and book a trip to Hong Kong, or a nearby city, or his own suburb. Using his personal identification number and perhaps a magnetically coded plastic card at the point of entry, he is ready to travel, eliminating not only the booking clerks but also the ticket collectors, and perhaps even the conductors and drivers of trains and trolleys. In the process, of course, he has also eliminated all the human contacts that used to accompany the transactions. (We rather hope that present trends in this direction, particularly in the hotel and catering industries, will give rise to a counter-movement, with increased business for the small, human-scale hotels and restaurants, often in older buildings, where personal, well-managed service is able to command a premium.) The causes of de-skilling are as much sociological as technological. In the decades since the war the jobs of managers have more and more been constricted-for example, by the tendency to build more fool-proof organizations. Today, larger, companies and sometimes even government bodies are beginning to recognize the ‘small is beautiful backlash, and are trying to restore a sense of zest and risk-taking among their managers. However, they are finding that increasing portions of their management populations have taken refuge in management unions, which focus attention on monetary rewards to compensate for increasingly boxed-in jobs. The structure has changed. The phenomenal growth of management unions throughout the 1970s is not just a pendulum swing, but another brick in a structural difference we have to take into account as we try to rejuvenate our labour relations in the 1980s.
The ‘More Syndrome’ A significant element in this environment is what people expect, especially the people who make up the work force. In the early days of the union movement in the United States, someone from the press approached the legendary Samuel Gompers, and achieved the
1981 shortest, most illuminating interview in labour history. Discussing current unrest, the reporter asked : ‘Can you please explain to me, Mr. Gompers, what it is that the workers want?’ Gompers responded gruffly : ‘More’. Today the ‘more’ that workers want isn’t just money, or more things. It also denotes a qualitative difference. Today’s workers are better educated than ever before in history. They are healthier, and can expect to live longer. They read more; they watch television programmes from many different cultures. They fly to foreign countries for their holidays. They have income they can spend on luxuries for their homes and themselves. They have many more pictures available from which to choose lifestyles and attitudes that suit them. And among the things they want are more control of their own lives, and a better working environment. People also want more. equality of opportunity for women, for the disabled, for blue or white collar workers. They want equality of education for their children. People are expressing a whole nexus of demands that arise not just out of their traditional search for material improvements but also demands that come about because they are better educated and can afford to be more conscious of status, and the needs of others in the society around them. These demands are already manifest in every country in Europe. They will inevitably increase in the 198Os, and we will find them rapidly exported to newly industrialized countries and even to some developing countries. In every country, one aspect of the ‘more syndrome’ is the demand for participation, for control of one’s own life. The incursions of government regulations, community services, licensing bodies, tax collectors, landlords, and a myriad other bureaucratic bodies into people’s private lives are matched only by the increasing controls at work in larger and larger organizations. Sought-for ‘economies of scale’ have evaporated into a miasma of absenteeism, apathy, petty disruption or industrial larger-scale unrest. Individuals are already expressing their desires to control their own lives, but until ways are found to meet those demands in useful and creative ways, we foresee increasing uproar. _ Today there seems to be divergence, between the rising expectations for qualitative and quantitative improvement at work on the one hand, and the drastically dropping quantity and quality of work available on the other hand. The 1980s will have to be a time of stepping carefully, finding mechanisms to alleviate the effects of unemployment and new technology, of picking our way slowly into this new world so that we can gain time.9 We need that time to build bridges between people’s expectations and the real world in which they must live and
Will 1990 Mark work, to steer the divergence hopefully converging vectors.
into
the End of the Will to Work-Or parallel,
and
Work-sharing Every country in Europe is already experiencing some demand for work-sharing in one form or another. In some places this is mainly concentrated on shorter work weeks, or longer holidays; in others the term refers mainly to part-time jobs. Other approaches might include more manageextending educational life, ment sabbaticals, encouraging continued education, and so on. Many of these approaches are at the expense of the employer rather than the tax-payer or the a situation that merits careful attention consumerto make sure it does not widen the gap still further between those who have jobs and those who have none. These problems are intimately inter-related, though they may arise from discrete factors in the environment. Work-sharing demands arise from the spectre of unemployment caused by new technology, and the demands for work-sharing are reinforced by the de-skilling which people experience in their jobs. If work is less interesting, people want to compensate by working shorter hours and having longer holidays. Thus work sharing, which seems an economic question at first, becomes a factor in the quality of life as well. Another aspect of the new growth of expectations for better physical working is a demand conditions-and these are also growing in importance because of the de-skilling of jobs. We might propound a rule of thumb: the worse the nature of the work grows, the more important it becomes to do it in a pleasant environment. By 1990 people will expect their work stations to become as comfortable-and perhaps as individual-as their own homes. The urge to have control of one’s own working environment will result in demands for many kinds of participation. On every front people will expect real involvement in decision-making. In formal terms’ the demands will ultimately mean new laws, seats for workers on boards of directors, and eventually the election of managers and formal negotiation of many other factors-as we can see happening in Sweden already. It will also mean an increasing amount of self-regulation, both formal and informal. This will show up in the form of autonomous working groups, in flexible working hours (already common in macv countries and companies), in self-designing holidays and working contracts, and in a ‘cafeteria’ approach to fringe benefits. It means the final knell, for exampi-, ofthe traditional two-week August factory closure, in which every employee has obligatory holiday. iv.. the future people will expect to regulate their private lives. The employee says, in effect: ‘I don’t
the Right
to Manage?
45
care about your factory schedule. I’m taking my wife shopping tomorrow’. Today he does it in a de facto fashion by means of absenteeism, and his mates increasingly accept his ‘right’ to do so. By 1990 the factory or office will probably have found ways to adjust to the expectation and the acceptance of it. No longer will an organization be able to depend on the work ethic. That work ethic will have to be replaced by motivations that fit the individual’s own scheme of satisfactions. Workers are going to demand to be treated not as children, to be managed, but as adults, able to decide for themselves when to come to work, what degree of interest and responsibility to expect from work, and how much of their lives the work will occupy, As Volvo has already explored, it will be the employer’s task to find ways to entice workers to come in when they can no longer be coerced. The beginning of the 1980s saw the end of the management prerogative-the fabled ‘right to manage’. The end of the 1980s will see full selfregulation by workers in most industrialized countries.
Fruitful
Responses
While these problems are difficult to compartmentalize because of all the interactions among them, the responses to them, on behalf of institutions, tend to be handled in bureaucracies that draw unnecessarily tidy boundaries, to match their own sub-sections. So the small business fad, for example, with which several governments expect to ‘solve’ unemployment and industrial relations problems, occurs in one country in a department of education, and in another in a department of industry, here we find small business lurking in the ministry of trade, there it is in a finance ministry, and somewhere else it is in a central statistical office or a department of employment. But the truth is that, in most countries, what the small firms want most of all is a few less forms to fill out, and less attention from the tax man and his department. For employers, trade unions, experts, government bodies and other policy makers, there are various ways this demanding, impending, fearsome future can be coped with. All of them, though, will have to start with more flexibility than is usually found at present. Emp loyen
First and foremost, employers will have t,o learn to plan their labour relations as carefully as they plan their acquisitions or other major investments. How many corporate plans, for example, consider how far the new technology will affect their operations in terms of de-skilling as well as in employment levric? Where are the labour relations experts in the planni$ departments and boardrooms? Where are
46
Long
Range
Planning
Vol. 14
April 1981
the people at decision-making level who are willing to look clearly at the implications of the ‘productivity’ they claim to want? Employers will need to inject some technological futuroiogy into their everyday thinking as well as bringing some people thinking into their technological forecasting. We are accustomed to organizations which invest in equipment to last 20 or 50 or even 100 years. But it may become common to follow the precepts of the American chief executive who said that any manager in his firm who was not changing his equipment at least every 5 years was likely to be losing out on opportunities. How would today’s PTT’s deal with that kind of environment, for example? The employer that assesses the impact of technology on its jobs should then double every estimate-because experience has already shown that all such estimates fail to take into account the exponential growth of technology. Then employers will have to begin to think about what the estimates mean for the work force-and the best way to do that kind of thinking is to involve the work force itself in the thinking and planning: With or without such planning-and much more gracefully with it-most employers are going to be faced with demands for work sharing. There’s no way a firm can meet such demands without forethought. each industry and each region and each working .group will find its own manifestations for work sharing, but employers must expect a vast increase in demands for flexible working hours, shorter work weeks, longer Bnd benefits by individual holidays, holidays choice, management sabbaticals, worker sabbaticals, paid educational opportunities, secondments to volunteer or community groups, paid retraining and so on. What about the three mothers who share two jobs among themselves, or three students sharing one job?
people have quite new expectations. These expectations take the form of demands that depend more on individuality than on brotherhood. Just as the employer can no longer depend on the work ethic to motivate his workers, so the trade union can no longer count on altruism and tradition to inspire its members to selfless discomfort. Thus, like most companies, most unions will be looking for ways to break out of old moulds and create more fluid, flatter forms. To achieve this kind of responsiveness, many trade unions are already exploring new forms for their own organizations. They recognize that formal democracy needs to be backed up with informal trust and an air of openness. Rule books are slowly shifting so they are no longer defenccs or shibboleths and can simply become tools, to be used in the most useful ways. The
. Academic
Corr~rmtr~ity
This could be more helpful if it would stop explaining people to themselves and instead go out on a limb sometimes with suggestions of new ways in which employers and unions could resolve future problems. The academics could also report their ideas and findings in language that was accessible to more people outside their own circles. It would be useful if some of these people, with their wider views, could go out and gather insights, opinions, and ideas, not only about how to produce more or better goods and services, but also about what goods and services need to be offered. In several countries workers in imperilled industries have been involved in major restructuring along work-sharing lines; often they can participate more effectively if people from the academic community take part in the fact-finding and disseminating aspects of the project. This kind of participation in the real issues of our time can also improve the credibility of the academics themselves. Policy-makers
The quality of jobs-de-skilling-may be more difficult to assess, and is thus much less likely to get management attention soon enough. But if people’s jobs are less interesting, where will they find their compensations? Come what may, the enterprising individual with an impoverished job will find ways to enrich it, by uproar or petty larceny if more acceptable forms ofenrichment cannot be found. So employers will have to look for ways to enrich jobs, to enlarge them, to give their occupants social contact and a sense of membership in something worthwhile. That, too, involves participation in many new forms, both formal and informal. Trade
In government policy-makers can certainly help, particularly in the realms of retraining and of programmes to help young people get and hold jobs. As the Henley Centre for Forecasting points out,27 we also need to devise recognition and rewards for those who can create activities and preoccupations to fill the time previously given over to work. Too much leisure too soon, whether it happens to be the ‘unemployed’ or to ‘early retirement’ people, or even to over-age students, and generally detrimental for can be unpopular, morale. A shift from passive to active leisure demands a &ange in values that will take more than a decade to promulgate.
Uttiom
These will also have to develop mechanisms to listen to the new demands of their members and to plan accordingly. They, too, expect to be affEcted by this rapidly changing environment in which
I_J&~ models already exist for co-operation Setween education, industry, trade unions and government. In Sweden, for example, there is an obligatory 3-week work experience for every
Will 1990 Mark
the End of the Will to Work-Or
school leaver. The employers federation in Britain is putting considerable resources behind a campaign to give careers counsellors from schools actual job experience in industry, so their advice can be more realistic about what students can expect from industrial jobs. This kind of programme can eventually be built into the curriculum, with impetus from government. Careers counsellors could also play a more active role in passing information to employers about the expectations of young people entering the job market. While the dole queues grow, interesting jobs go begging for lack of people with the skills to do them, and the willingness to take their skills to the areas where the jobs exist. One of the most alarming signs of the 1980s is the earnest student registering for an undergraduate course in business ‘to make sure I get a good, secure job’, but unwilling to move or commute to a nearby city to serve a 3-month work experience element of the course. Governments can facilitate the necessary changes by buffering people against the most uncomfortable aspects of unwanted employment, and also by encouraging a climate in which the energy rcleascd from drudgery by the new technology can be usefully, actively, energetically and enthusiastically channeled into a variety of other activities, as individuals choose. National governments can also encourage the forward-looking programmes of the European con~mission8*9~*4 to cope with these rapid changes. The EEC in turn must continue to research and develop these issues and keep them in the public eye in its member countries, to give people as much time as possible to find ways to bridge the gap between expectations and actualities. EEC experts suggest that economic growth for some years to come will be less favourable than in the past-a picture amplified sharply by recent OECII reports. This means we face an even stronger need to restrucure and modernize the production apparatus, and this need will also spread into the service industries and even into leisure industries. Furthermore, old forms of investment will have to be scrapped in favour of more longsighted, integrating approaches. No longer can we permit that the training budget be the first to suffer cuts in difficult times. Training is the front line of defence against the worst effects of these changes. In the past we had more flexibility, within single organizations, and within society. Training could be traded off for less suitable employees, and new sectors could absorb people departing from declining sectors. Now that more people enjoy security of employment-by law, custom, and trade union power-few employers feel as able to undertake the task of bringing ‘marginal’ people into the labour market. They can afford to be more
the Right
to Manage?
47
sclectiveand this aspect of ‘iob securitv’ mav be particularly difficult ior ne&y enfranchised ‘and newly demanding groups such as women, young people, older workers, the handicapped, foreign workers, and so on. This may, indeed, make the ‘submerged one-tenth’ of unemployable people in the population into a de facto ‘submerged onefifth’-and no society can afford to trample on the lives and expectations of20 per cent of its members. In this drastic situation, fraught with possibilities of anger, apathy, and absenteeism, the role of public employment becomes much more central-at a time when taxpayers are clearly exhibiting their own ‘No More’ syndrome. Even so, as we deindustrialize, as entrepreneurship dwindles because of the difficulties of competing, then the public sector must take up some of the slack. We hope it can set an example for considering not just the quantity ofjobs but also the quality and nature of jobs in the future. The public sector can also see an example in recruiting, training, and motivating employees in the future. The challenge is international. An EEC official recently commented:14 ‘Any progress in one country which is not accompanied by similar progress by its neighbours will be fragile and limited’. Our goal must be convergence-between social policies in different countries, between the expectations and the realities, between the ney technology and the new values. We are all undergoing these changes. Expectations and chips exist in every industrial country. The manifestations and the pace and the responses may differ nationally, but in the end we are all going to find ourselves faced with the end of the work ethic and the beginning of the real post-industrial society.
A~knowle4~nlerzt-This Researclrj~r
Mangers-A
by VSB in Scptcmber
article
is
Bosisfk
reprinted from Futures published in Dutch
Artinn,
1980.
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(1)
lann Barron Microelectronics,
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Long
Range
Planning
Vol. 14
April
1981
Will 1990 Mark the End of the Will to Work Or the Right to Manage? Anthony Carter, Secretary-General, Nancy Foy, STC Ltd.
U.K.
The environment of the 1980s is not likely to be as comfortable as the 1970s. The combination of new technology, new economics and new social forces is likely to trigger a drastic drop in the number of jobs as well. At the same time, our education systems, the media and every other element affecting people’s expectations seem to be combining to foster something that might be called,the ‘more syndrome’-people demand more pay, more secure jobs, more amenities and more control over their working lives-but appear unwilling to commit themselves, to exhibit loyalty to an employer, or even to move in search of work. The challenge is international, the goal must be convergence between social policies, between the expectations and the realities, between the new technology and the new values. The end of the decade is likely to see the end of the work ethic and the beginning of the real post-industrial society.
Unless ways are found to bridge the gap between the expectations of working people and the work available, there will be an extremely difficult decade ahead for labour relations. In this sense, we use the term ‘labour relations’ to encompass not only the formal aspects of ‘industrial relations’ but also the wider, and ultimately more important, questions of ‘employee relations’, the ways in which organizations deal with their members. We believe that trade unions as well as employers, government bodies, and other experts involved in work-related issues will share quite similar problems or challenges as the decade progresses.
Tony Carter, Secretary-General of the U.K.‘s Council of Post Office Unions, 11 /12 Maiden Lane, London WCZE 7NE. is also known for fostering the 2-year experiment in industrial democracy in the British Post Office. He also teaches at major management centres and business schools, Nancy Foydid this workwhile a fellow at the.Oxford Centrefor Management Studies. She is now a managerwith Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd. Her ideas about networks, informal information, temporary institutions, and zest as a management motivator have just been published as The Yin and Yang of Organizations.
Cowcil
of Post Ofjce
The Astringent
Unions and
Environment
The 1980s will be characterized by a mismatch between the supply and demand for labour. On a single day recently, the Financial Times ran two perceptive and alarming articles, back-to-back on the same sheet of pink paper. Om? described the drastic effect the new technology (‘chips’) was likely to have on the number ofjobs available. The other’ described computer programming jobs that could not be filled because employers were demanding degree-level qualifications, while the actual content of the jobs was boring even for 16year-old school-leavers. In every industrialized country, structural unemployment will be one of the strongest factors in the labour relations picture in the 1980s. We are going to experience it at a higher level than we have seen since the end ofthe war-and the consequences are likely to be profound. At the same time-but much less to the forefront of public consciousness today-we are concerned about an unprecedented level of what one might call ‘structural underemployment’-a de-skilling of jobs that is taking place for psychological as well as technical reasons, while the numbers ofjobs are decreasing. New technology is one important element in the rising unemployment. There is, quite rightly, some concern that the technology is evoking polarized responses rather than a spectrum of possibilities. Many of us tend to see-saw between deepest gloom or rosiest optimism, and it is quite difficult to remain poised in the grey area between the poles. The glorious-opportunity school of thought has historical support’9*20,24 for its quite strong contentions that every advance in technology since the invention of the wheel has led to a vast increase
Will 1990 Mark
the End of the Will to Work-Or
in human activity and thence human happiness. They cite jobs that did not exist before, and resources that could not have been imagined before suddenly becoming useful. The gloomier view suggests that the current advance in technology is qualitatively different from every other advance since the wheel. Its proponents’,” see no way that the resources released by the chip can be taken up by new productive activities. Therefore, they contend, we have to look for new ways to live, and for new values to fit a new lifestyle. It is a completely new situation; people can no longer expect to work an 8-hour day, a 40-hour week, a 50-week year, for a 40-year working life. There simply is not, and will not be, enough work to go around on that basis. This picture has a certain ring of certainty. Indeed, there will be new opportunities, and the quality-oflife argument has elements of truth. But it is also obvious that in the age of ‘chips with everything’, we are entering an utterly new situation, coping with forces that have not faced us so clearly in previous technical advances. And we are having to cope with choices that we have not confronted before. Human nature is unlikely to adapt its values as rapidly as the optimists would have us believe. Even before the chips popped up to the surface of our consciousness, there has been a rising emphasis -and productivity means proon ‘productivity’ ducing more goods with the same number of people, or else producing the same amount of goods (or services) using fewer people. Researchers at the European Trades Union Institute note that in EEC countries in the decade from 1958 to 1967 gross domestic product grew by about 4.5 per cent per year, while unemployment rose only O-2 per cent per year. As the emphasis on productivity bore fruit-long before we had today’s technologyeither the goods and services rose, or the employment levels stabilized and dropped, or both. In the first half of the 197Os, in West Germany, productivity rose 3.8 per cent per year on average, while unemployment levels went from 0.7 to 4.8 per cent. Now with the march of technology accelerating, we can expect dramatic effects in many industries. Chips will be consumed in increasing numbers in the computer industry, the telecommunications industry, and the motor industry, in that order. We find them coming into television assembly, and typesetting, where the West Germans have lost more than 35,000 jobs since 1972, for example. Chips will begin to have an impact in robotics, machine tools, and goods handling. Numbers ofjobs are important, and in the coming decade the most dramatic reduction may well be in the office environment. One clerical . union estimates that if only 20 per cent of British offices
the Right
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43
were to install word processors between now and 1983, more than a quarter of a million jobs would be lost-because these machines improve productivity in clerical and administrative work by about 50 per cent. Can we afford improved productivity when it means the too-rapid displacement of sizeable portions of the population? It is unfortunate, but true, that the groups who are going to be most affected by these improvements in productivity are those least able to cope with rapid change-the women entering the work force for the first time, and the young school-leavers who join them at the bottom of the ladder; it will be the immigrant workers, the disabled, and the elderly whose jobs will disappear. At the same time, though, the chips will be eroding the quality of many other jobs which today we think of as challenging, interesting, or even ‘professional’. But the chips will permit us to do things that we could not do before. A recent Sunday newspaper gave a graphic illustration of the social merits of chips-and the de-skilling too. It described a severely disabled child, confined to a wheelchair and unable to move most ofhis muscles; thus he was incapable of ordinary human activities, including speech. When he managed to master laborious letter-by-letter indications on an electric typewriter, a marvellous ability with words shone forth, but the effort was excruciating. Now he can use a desk computer that allows him to devise his own forms of shorthand, and he is able to type conversations, to control his environment, and to write exceptional poetry-poetry far beyond his years. The desk computer costs less than the average family car. However, the obvious social benefit to the boy, his family, and his society, carries a little sting in its tail. For years computer experts have been predicting that their hardware would get cheaper-as it has-while the computer’s march into the centre of our lives would.permit a higher level of intellectual work to be done-for its programming-while it eliminated drudgery. Instead, as more people have begun to use computers, they have sensibly demanded that the machines be capable of operation in normal terminology. Reluctantly, the computer experts have had to dress up their systems so that ordinary people could use them-including the disabled child, who can now learn to write his own programs, rather than having to depend on a highly trained computer programmer. Not only is the computer programmer one of the noutteau obsolete; what about the technical expert who used to maintain such a machine? In the next few decades the need for technologically trained staff in most enterprises will be minimal-just as we begin to succeed in brainwashing our children to master technology in order to get good jobs. But modular design and automated diagnosis- -both products of today’s generation of technologistswill soon turn their own inventors into dinosaurs-
44
Long
Range
Planning
Vol. 14
April
an obsolete breed. If a part breaks down in tomorrow’s machine, the system can diagnose the fault, then direct a machine minder to that module, which is replaced in accordance with the machine’s instructions. Even computer programmers can be supplanted by today’s machines, much less tomorrow’s. We see no way that this de-skillingalready so effectively, inexorably under way-can be avoided. Instead of computer programmers, we will need zombie-like machine-minders. The new technology can eliminate entire classes of employment that are taken for granted today. In transportation, for example, where is the need for booking clerks or travel agency people? The consumer, using only today’s technology, could phone for a reservation, talk directly to the computer, and book a trip to Hong Kong, or a nearby city, or his own suburb. Using his personal identification number and perhaps a magnetically coded plastic card at the point of entry, he is ready to travel, eliminating not only the booking clerks but also the ticket collectors, and perhaps even the conductors and drivers of trains and trolleys. In the process, of course, he has also eliminated all the human contacts that used to accompany the transactions. (We rather hope that present trends in this direction, particularly in the hotel and catering industries, will give rise to a counter-movement, with increased business for the small, human-scale hotels and restaurants, often in older buildings, where personal, well-managed service is able to command a premium.) The causes of de-skilling are as much sociological as technological. In the decades since the war the jobs of managers have more and more been constricted-for example, by the tendency to build more fool-proof organizations. Today, larger, companies and sometimes even government bodies are beginning to recognize the ‘small is beautiful backlash, and are trying to restore a sense of zest and risk-taking among their managers. However, they are finding that increasing portions of their management populations have taken refuge in management unions, which focus attention on monetary rewards to compensate for increasingly boxed-in jobs. The structure has changed. The phenomenal growth of management unions throughout the 1970s is not just a pendulum swing, but another brick in a structural difference we have to take into account as we try to rejuvenate our labour relations in the 1980s.
The ‘More Syndrome’ A significant element in this environment is what people expect, especially the people who make up the work force. In the early days of the union movement in the United States, someone from the press approached the legendary Samuel Gompers, and achieved the
1981 shortest, most illuminating interview in labour history. Discussing current unrest, the reporter asked : ‘Can you please explain to me, Mr. Gompers, what it is that the workers want?’ Gompers responded gruffly : ‘More’. Today the ‘more’ that workers want isn’t just money, or more things. It also denotes a qualitative difference. Today’s workers are better educated than ever before in history. They are healthier, and can expect to live longer. They read more; they watch television programmes from many different cultures. They fly to foreign countries for their holidays. They have income they can spend on luxuries for their homes and themselves. They have many more pictures available from which to choose lifestyles and attitudes that suit them. And among the things they want are more control of their own lives, and a better working environment. People also want more. equality of opportunity for women, for the disabled, for blue or white collar workers. They want equality of education for their children. People are expressing a whole nexus of demands that arise not just out of their traditional search for material improvements but also demands that come about because they are better educated and can afford to be more conscious of status, and the needs of others in the society around them. These demands are already manifest in every country in Europe. They will inevitably increase in the 198Os, and we will find them rapidly exported to newly industrialized countries and even to some developing countries. In every country, one aspect of the ‘more syndrome’ is the demand for participation, for control of one’s own life. The incursions of government regulations, community services, licensing bodies, tax collectors, landlords, and a myriad other bureaucratic bodies into people’s private lives are matched only by the increasing controls at work in larger and larger organizations. Sought-for ‘economies of scale’ have evaporated into a miasma of absenteeism, apathy, petty disruption or industrial larger-scale unrest. Individuals are already expressing their desires to control their own lives, but until ways are found to meet those demands in useful and creative ways, we foresee increasing uproar. _ Today there seems to be divergence, between the rising expectations for qualitative and quantitative improvement at work on the one hand, and the drastically dropping quantity and quality of work available on the other hand. The 1980s will have to be a time of stepping carefully, finding mechanisms to alleviate the effects of unemployment and new technology, of picking our way slowly into this new world so that we can gain time.9 We need that time to build bridges between people’s expectations and the real world in which they must live and
Will 1990 Mark work, to steer the divergence hopefully converging vectors.
into
the End of the Will to Work-Or parallel,
and
Work-sharing Every country in Europe is already experiencing some demand for work-sharing in one form or another. In some places this is mainly concentrated on shorter work weeks, or longer holidays; in others the term refers mainly to part-time jobs. Other approaches might include more manageextending educational life, ment sabbaticals, encouraging continued education, and so on. Many of these approaches are at the expense of the employer rather than the tax-payer or the a situation that merits careful attention consumerto make sure it does not widen the gap still further between those who have jobs and those who have none. These problems are intimately inter-related, though they may arise from discrete factors in the environment. Work-sharing demands arise from the spectre of unemployment caused by new technology, and the demands for work-sharing are reinforced by the de-skilling which people experience in their jobs. If work is less interesting, people want to compensate by working shorter hours and having longer holidays. Thus work sharing, which seems an economic question at first, becomes a factor in the quality of life as well. Another aspect of the new growth of expectations for better physical working is a demand conditions-and these are also growing in importance because of the de-skilling of jobs. We might propound a rule of thumb: the worse the nature of the work grows, the more important it becomes to do it in a pleasant environment. By 1990 people will expect their work stations to become as comfortable-and perhaps as individual-as their own homes. The urge to have control of one’s own working environment will result in demands for many kinds of participation. On every front people will expect real involvement in decision-making. In formal terms’ the demands will ultimately mean new laws, seats for workers on boards of directors, and eventually the election of managers and formal negotiation of many other factors-as we can see happening in Sweden already. It will also mean an increasing amount of self-regulation, both formal and informal. This will show up in the form of autonomous working groups, in flexible working hours (already common in macv countries and companies), in self-designing holidays and working contracts, and in a ‘cafeteria’ approach to fringe benefits. It means the final knell, for exampi-, ofthe traditional two-week August factory closure, in which every employee has obligatory holiday. iv.. the future people will expect to regulate their private lives. The employee says, in effect: ‘I don’t
the Right
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45
care about your factory schedule. I’m taking my wife shopping tomorrow’. Today he does it in a de facto fashion by means of absenteeism, and his mates increasingly accept his ‘right’ to do so. By 1990 the factory or office will probably have found ways to adjust to the expectation and the acceptance of it. No longer will an organization be able to depend on the work ethic. That work ethic will have to be replaced by motivations that fit the individual’s own scheme of satisfactions. Workers are going to demand to be treated not as children, to be managed, but as adults, able to decide for themselves when to come to work, what degree of interest and responsibility to expect from work, and how much of their lives the work will occupy, As Volvo has already explored, it will be the employer’s task to find ways to entice workers to come in when they can no longer be coerced. The beginning of the 1980s saw the end of the management prerogative-the fabled ‘right to manage’. The end of the 1980s will see full selfregulation by workers in most industrialized countries.
Fruitful
Responses
While these problems are difficult to compartmentalize because of all the interactions among them, the responses to them, on behalf of institutions, tend to be handled in bureaucracies that draw unnecessarily tidy boundaries, to match their own sub-sections. So the small business fad, for example, with which several governments expect to ‘solve’ unemployment and industrial relations problems, occurs in one country in a department of education, and in another in a department of industry, here we find small business lurking in the ministry of trade, there it is in a finance ministry, and somewhere else it is in a central statistical office or a department of employment. But the truth is that, in most countries, what the small firms want most of all is a few less forms to fill out, and less attention from the tax man and his department. For employers, trade unions, experts, government bodies and other policy makers, there are various ways this demanding, impending, fearsome future can be coped with. All of them, though, will have to start with more flexibility than is usually found at present. Emp loyen
First and foremost, employers will have t,o learn to plan their labour relations as carefully as they plan their acquisitions or other major investments. How many corporate plans, for example, consider how far the new technology will affect their operations in terms of de-skilling as well as in employment levric? Where are the labour relations experts in the planni$ departments and boardrooms? Where are
46
Long
Range
Planning
Vol. 14
April 1981
the people at decision-making level who are willing to look clearly at the implications of the ‘productivity’ they claim to want? Employers will need to inject some technological futuroiogy into their everyday thinking as well as bringing some people thinking into their technological forecasting. We are accustomed to organizations which invest in equipment to last 20 or 50 or even 100 years. But it may become common to follow the precepts of the American chief executive who said that any manager in his firm who was not changing his equipment at least every 5 years was likely to be losing out on opportunities. How would today’s PTT’s deal with that kind of environment, for example? The employer that assesses the impact of technology on its jobs should then double every estimate-because experience has already shown that all such estimates fail to take into account the exponential growth of technology. Then employers will have to begin to think about what the estimates mean for the work force-and the best way to do that kind of thinking is to involve the work force itself in the thinking and planning: With or without such planning-and much more gracefully with it-most employers are going to be faced with demands for work sharing. There’s no way a firm can meet such demands without forethought. each industry and each region and each working .group will find its own manifestations for work sharing, but employers must expect a vast increase in demands for flexible working hours, shorter work weeks, longer Bnd benefits by individual holidays, holidays choice, management sabbaticals, worker sabbaticals, paid educational opportunities, secondments to volunteer or community groups, paid retraining and so on. What about the three mothers who share two jobs among themselves, or three students sharing one job?
people have quite new expectations. These expectations take the form of demands that depend more on individuality than on brotherhood. Just as the employer can no longer depend on the work ethic to motivate his workers, so the trade union can no longer count on altruism and tradition to inspire its members to selfless discomfort. Thus, like most companies, most unions will be looking for ways to break out of old moulds and create more fluid, flatter forms. To achieve this kind of responsiveness, many trade unions are already exploring new forms for their own organizations. They recognize that formal democracy needs to be backed up with informal trust and an air of openness. Rule books are slowly shifting so they are no longer defenccs or shibboleths and can simply become tools, to be used in the most useful ways. The
. Academic
Corr~rmtr~ity
This could be more helpful if it would stop explaining people to themselves and instead go out on a limb sometimes with suggestions of new ways in which employers and unions could resolve future problems. The academics could also report their ideas and findings in language that was accessible to more people outside their own circles. It would be useful if some of these people, with their wider views, could go out and gather insights, opinions, and ideas, not only about how to produce more or better goods and services, but also about what goods and services need to be offered. In several countries workers in imperilled industries have been involved in major restructuring along work-sharing lines; often they can participate more effectively if people from the academic community take part in the fact-finding and disseminating aspects of the project. This kind of participation in the real issues of our time can also improve the credibility of the academics themselves. Policy-makers
The quality of jobs-de-skilling-may be more difficult to assess, and is thus much less likely to get management attention soon enough. But if people’s jobs are less interesting, where will they find their compensations? Come what may, the enterprising individual with an impoverished job will find ways to enrich it, by uproar or petty larceny if more acceptable forms ofenrichment cannot be found. So employers will have to look for ways to enrich jobs, to enlarge them, to give their occupants social contact and a sense of membership in something worthwhile. That, too, involves participation in many new forms, both formal and informal. Trade
In government policy-makers can certainly help, particularly in the realms of retraining and of programmes to help young people get and hold jobs. As the Henley Centre for Forecasting points out,27 we also need to devise recognition and rewards for those who can create activities and preoccupations to fill the time previously given over to work. Too much leisure too soon, whether it happens to be the ‘unemployed’ or to ‘early retirement’ people, or even to over-age students, and generally detrimental for can be unpopular, morale. A shift from passive to active leisure demands a &ange in values that will take more than a decade to promulgate.
Uttiom
These will also have to develop mechanisms to listen to the new demands of their members and to plan accordingly. They, too, expect to be affEcted by this rapidly changing environment in which
I_J&~ models already exist for co-operation Setween education, industry, trade unions and government. In Sweden, for example, there is an obligatory 3-week work experience for every
Will 1990 Mark
the End of the Will to Work-Or
school leaver. The employers federation in Britain is putting considerable resources behind a campaign to give careers counsellors from schools actual job experience in industry, so their advice can be more realistic about what students can expect from industrial jobs. This kind of programme can eventually be built into the curriculum, with impetus from government. Careers counsellors could also play a more active role in passing information to employers about the expectations of young people entering the job market. While the dole queues grow, interesting jobs go begging for lack of people with the skills to do them, and the willingness to take their skills to the areas where the jobs exist. One of the most alarming signs of the 1980s is the earnest student registering for an undergraduate course in business ‘to make sure I get a good, secure job’, but unwilling to move or commute to a nearby city to serve a 3-month work experience element of the course. Governments can facilitate the necessary changes by buffering people against the most uncomfortable aspects of unwanted employment, and also by encouraging a climate in which the energy rcleascd from drudgery by the new technology can be usefully, actively, energetically and enthusiastically channeled into a variety of other activities, as individuals choose. National governments can also encourage the forward-looking programmes of the European con~mission8*9~*4 to cope with these rapid changes. The EEC in turn must continue to research and develop these issues and keep them in the public eye in its member countries, to give people as much time as possible to find ways to bridge the gap between expectations and actualities. EEC experts suggest that economic growth for some years to come will be less favourable than in the past-a picture amplified sharply by recent OECII reports. This means we face an even stronger need to restrucure and modernize the production apparatus, and this need will also spread into the service industries and even into leisure industries. Furthermore, old forms of investment will have to be scrapped in favour of more longsighted, integrating approaches. No longer can we permit that the training budget be the first to suffer cuts in difficult times. Training is the front line of defence against the worst effects of these changes. In the past we had more flexibility, within single organizations, and within society. Training could be traded off for less suitable employees, and new sectors could absorb people departing from declining sectors. Now that more people enjoy security of employment-by law, custom, and trade union power-few employers feel as able to undertake the task of bringing ‘marginal’ people into the labour market. They can afford to be more
the Right
to Manage?
47
sclectiveand this aspect of ‘iob securitv’ mav be particularly difficult ior ne&y enfranchised ‘and newly demanding groups such as women, young people, older workers, the handicapped, foreign workers, and so on. This may, indeed, make the ‘submerged one-tenth’ of unemployable people in the population into a de facto ‘submerged onefifth’-and no society can afford to trample on the lives and expectations of20 per cent of its members. In this drastic situation, fraught with possibilities of anger, apathy, and absenteeism, the role of public employment becomes much more central-at a time when taxpayers are clearly exhibiting their own ‘No More’ syndrome. Even so, as we deindustrialize, as entrepreneurship dwindles because of the difficulties of competing, then the public sector must take up some of the slack. We hope it can set an example for considering not just the quantity ofjobs but also the quality and nature of jobs in the future. The public sector can also see an example in recruiting, training, and motivating employees in the future. The challenge is international. An EEC official recently commented:14 ‘Any progress in one country which is not accompanied by similar progress by its neighbours will be fragile and limited’. Our goal must be convergence-between social policies in different countries, between the expectations and the realities, between the ney technology and the new values. We are all undergoing these changes. Expectations and chips exist in every industrial country. The manifestations and the pace and the responses may differ nationally, but in the end we are all going to find ourselves faced with the end of the work ethic and the beginning of the real post-industrial society.
A~knowle4~nlerzt-This Researclrj~r
Mangers-A
by VSB in Scptcmber
article
is
Bosisfk
reprinted from Futures published in Dutch
Artinn,
1980.
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