This leads me to a larger more philosophical current running through all the workshop discussions. Workshop leaders reported back a common frustration with the narrow circle of established interests which thwarts dialogue in a common frame of reference on the adjustment challenges we face. Instead, educators are over there, management industry is over there, lab our is over there and God help you if you're not represented in one of the little boxes. A related concern dealt with the set stages of antagonism and confrontation between government and industry and, particularly, lab our and management. Many people lamented this antagonism and how it compounded the difficulties of dealing with technological change. The solution lies in the direction of "interface". This was the word used most often by participants, who called for dialogue and cooperation among the major actors in our society: government, educators, industry and labor.

I think this speaks to the most pressing need of our time: the need for a new model of society -- One not of isolation, separateness and alienation but one of infinite inter- connectedness. I think this was what Dr. Fulton was getting at in her speech when she talked about the threat of nuclear annihilation as our most pressing global concern. It is when we make the connections that we move to the point of rejecting the application of science and technology in ways that threatens life, and we also begin to manage technological change properly - that means, by harmonizing and reconciling the technical and economic priorities with the social and human priorities, by combining compassion with competition.

I wonder if the tone of confidence at the conference was valid, since we spent so little time talking about job losses for men as well as women, deskilling, the health and safety issues and so on. The upbeat note may have been achieved at the expense of full participation by labor at this conference, at the expense of looking at all the items in our management-of-change mandate.

We didn't deal with THE issue of the 1980s: jobless economic growth, an issue which has been well documented by Russel Wilkins among other researchers.

But most importantly, we didn't really bring the discussion down to earth by dealing with real people in real time, now. I was reminded of the importance of this on Monday evening when I had the pleasure of sitting next to Mr. Johnston at diner and he asked me: but what about the bank teller working down at the corner of Dorchester and Greene in my riding? Yes, that's where it starts. Well, let me contribute a small story on this line. I went up to Ste. Agathe last year to talk to some of the 40 women (now displaced) who used to work for Bell Canada as telephone operators there. I met with four of them, spent a good five hours listening to their story. Oh I got all the background too -- how there were still people around who used to get the operator to call, to wake them up to go hunting in the fall; to find out what time it was. I also found out that they learned of the impending closure (which had been in the works for years) just a few months before it was to happen, and then it was by chance, through the grapevine. Then, well, the contract called for them to get retraining and to be redeployed. But then they found out the reemployment guarantee was only for another operator job, and of course there's not many of those jobs opening up. Then they found that to get retraining they had to qualify for another job, and to qualify they had to go through a humiliating batch of tests designed to screen new recruits. But these women had 15 or 20 years with the company. It hurt their pride. But the worst, in their opinion was what happened at the very end. The local manager arranged a farewell luncheon. It was held in the office, half empty of furniture and equipment. Recalling the day, the women told me about the sandwiches that were served, and then as a final gesture, they were each given a rose. A plastic rose, the women told me. They priced it, this their final humiliation.

In telling that story, I am not trying to rain on the parade and of the conference, but to test the hypothesis that we have reason to be optimistic at how we are managing this transition period. Despite the rather bleak note I have just introduced, I am confident that we will succeed, that we will turn the modern technologies into opportunities for Canadians. But we won't succeed if we hide away from some of the tougher aspects of the challenge we face: the full social adjustment challenge. Some Canadian business managers are acknowledging that to put the new technologies to work, you have to involve the people whose work is to be affected by them; involve them in planning the change process, reorganizing work and identifying reeducation and training needs. With a purely technical focus on change, you might get a computer system up and working. But it requires a socio-technical approach to put that computer system to work, to really exploit it.

Finally, trade unions have begun to extend their focus from jobs to broader employment and economic questions. If Jean-Claude Parrot had been at this conference, he might have talked about the survey that the postal union conducted among its members to get their ideas on what new work postal workers could take on. They got quite a list. I am told everything from meter reading to electronic mail services. Now they've trying to use those suggestions as the basis for negotiating new employment opportunities for their members.

I like to think that if we had had a better representation of labor, and of women too we could have begun the dialogue that we need. We need to trust one another a lot more. The times require it.