Malaysia and Indonesia; there, women are hired by multinational companies to assemble circuit boards for as little as five dollars a day, suffering chemical burns and eye strain as a chronic characteristic of their employment. This off-shore relocation of dirty manufacturing work exacerbates the concentration of new employment growth in low-paying unskilled and semi-skilled service jobs in the food industry, cleaning, security and retail sales.

The trends are beginning to show up in the macro statistics. Between 1980 and 1986, the only significant increase in hours worked per week occurred in managerial-professional occupations and in-service work. All other occupations, including clerical work, showed a decline. The same trend shows up in statistics on full and part-time employment. Full-time clerical employment declined by 79,000 between November, 1980 and November, 1986. At the same time, part-time clerical employment rose by 68,000 to 418,000 hours per week.

In some excellent research on the effect of office technologies on office work, to be published shortly by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Vancouver-based Marcy Cohen and Margaret White document how the deskilling of clerical work can be offset by another trend. As layers of middle-management and the junior layer of professional work are largely obviated through expert systems and integrated information systems, some of the quasi-administrative work which was traditionally performed at the level trickles down to the clerical-administrative support staff to be done by them (with no increase in pay). So the initial deskilling at the clerical-administrative support level is mitigated by the side-effect of deskilling at more senior levels.

AISLA: Has your thinking on how technology has influenced society and particularly its impact on women changed since Women and the Chip?

HEATHER: The answer is "of course." The journey I've been on since taking up the question of technological change has been a classic illustration of learning a living. In 1981 I brought into the prevailing assumptions about technological change: that technology is an invaluable tool for increasing productivity, and that the social question was adjusting people to it through training and job bridging. I have since come to think that technological change as an economic issue cannot be separated from technological change as a social and political issue. It's essential therefore that who is involved in managing technological change be extended beyond the select circle imposed by the notion of "managerial prerogative." The technological change agenda, therefore, must go beyond the narrow economic issue of jobs to include democratic and personal control over technology.

AISLA: Ursula Franklin contends that women can change technology that women can work towards re-defining and taking control of technology. Do you agree with this perspective?

HEATHER: Ursula Franklin has evoked the immigrant metaphor very effectively here. She suggests that women moving into the quasalien terrain of science and technology must actively preserve a sense of their different vision against the risk of assimilation into the prevailing culture and value system. I agree wholeheartedly.

We must have a vision of technology arising from our own values and perspective: one might phrase it as life and life cycle-centered rather than market and military-centered, or as empowering rather than dominating and controlling. We must have cultural home bases (our women's groups and friendship circles) to which we can return to renew our vision and commitment. We must also be aware that even as we're busy trying to change "them," "they" are trying to change us. Just as the diversity of world cultures is being undermined by "the coca colonionization" of the universe, so as the technological society, we risk becoming more assimilated. The threat isn't necessarily that we will "sell out." The greater danger is the more subtle one: that we will "buy into" its perspective without even realizing it. As Jacques Ellul, author of The Technological Society puts it, there could come a point when we all think the same way. Then the technological society will be total; no one and no part of life will be outside it. We and them will be one and the same.

As CCLOW members wanting to be in charge of our own learning, we know the word educated comes from the Latin for "led out" (led out from one's self, and a sense of one's own self). Already, women who treat the office as an extension of the home are almost the stuff of folklore. The more with-it stick to the women job description, and work through the system to get a promotion where taking responsibility for the whole and looking after others will be remunerated.