Changing Employment Patterns

Overview

Chair:
Rosemary Billings

Speaker:
Patricia McDermott, Sociologist,
York University

Attempting to understand the dramatic scope of the transformation presently taking shape in the workplace is an immense undertaking. So vast is the transition, so rapid the technological advances, that most people risk being left on the sidelines, baffled or amazed, angry or in awe.

As the chip replaces mechanical parts, the labour-intensive economy collapses, leaving masses of unemployed workers and rendering current skills totally redundant. Women are particularly affected, since they are concentrated in the service sector where technology is making gigantic inroads. Secretarial work, banking, ticketing, fast food, reservations, telephone communications all require less and less human labour.

Those who remain employed face such stressful conditions as machine monitoring and homogenization of tasks. Health hazards are frequent. Those who become unemployed undergo the rapid deterioration of their buying power, a tragic fate for the individual, the family, the community, and also for the national economy.

Such shocking consequences must not deter us, however, from accepting the growing presence of technology in every sphere of life, and trying to come to grips with the issues of the immediate future. Systemic re-organization is required to deal with such pressing concerns as income distribution, quality of working life, control of the marketplace. We need to develop participative management, in which workers are part of all decision-making processes. Men and women must act responsibly by expanding their knowledge of the impact of the technological revolution, by demanding their rights in the workplace and by participating, in whatever way, in the collective questioning about the kind of world we want to create, with the help of microtechnology.