November 25, 1990

ON THE heels of last week’s labor showdown between unions and management at Bay Area newspapers, it seems like a good time to mention a report from MIT’s Commission on Industrial Productivity, published in 1989, which had this to say about U.S. attitudes toward labor:

“While Germany, Japan, and most other highly industrialized nations . . . have overcome conflicts over the rights of workers to unionize and to participate in enterprise decision-making, U.S. firms and unions continue to expend valuable resources battling over union organizing and the role of labor in society.”

This came from a piece called “Targeting National Needs,” about redefining U.S. research priorities, written by Joel Yudken and Michael Black and published in the Spring 1990 World Policy Journal.

The authors add this comment about the Pentagon and high-tech industry in particular: “Blinded by their faith in a “technological fix’ to solve the nation’s industrial woes, they have failed to see how integral labor is to the innovation process.”

A perfect example of how this works against us is given by author George Gilder (“Microcosm” and “Life After Television”) in a recent interview with Upside magazine. He believes today’s large, centralized databases are
becoming obsolete as we move toward the “distributed intelligence” of the personal computer and the parallel, social phenomenon of individual empowerment via technology.

Gilder says he loves to use big databases, but they’re “maddening” because they’re almost exclusively the purview of corporations dripping with money.

“It’s really a scandal,” he says. “Here you have Knight-Ridder paying its business reporters at the San Jose Mercury-News some paltry figure like $30,000 a year covering the most important industry in the world. This same Knight-Ridder paid $360 million to buy Dialog, which is a set of centralized mainframes with a lot of big dazzling disk drives . . . it’s contrary to the whole movement of the industry where intelligence is distributed to desktops.”

I am not casting aspersions on Knight-Ridder in particular. Similar events happen in corporate America every day — ask the nurses in any intensive care unit who see brand new equipment wheeled in year after year because it’s depreciable, while ICU remains critically understaffed because people are not — but Gilder’s point can be pushed further into a metaphor for what needs to change in the high-tech workplace.

On one hand, as processes become more highly technical and specialized, it is simply no longer true that your manager knows more about your job than you do. On the other hand, the increasing power of computers makes it easy to combat the movement toward decentralized authority by using computers as a tool to strip all the joy out of a corporate worker’s job. This, of course, also makes it easier for firms to move jobs offshore to cheaper labor markets that are even less educated than ours.

The latter, more common than not, is a massive waste of human potential and pretty stupid in the long run if the U.S. entertains any hope of regaining its competitiveness in the global market. If we really want to become more productive, say Yudken and Black, managers must revel in the fact that their workers can operate without constant supervision. “Workforce participation in productivity efforts must offer workers a real measure of decision-making power in technology and production planning,” they say.

But year after year, the high-tech industry spends millions upon millions of dollars trying in vain to teach machines to make decisions — maybe because computers don’t get pregnant or require medical insurance. Why not spend a fraction of that amount every year to send some promising, under-educated employees back to school for high-school diplomas or college degrees?

“Our economic future, as well as our national security, is better served by developing a large corps of technologically sophisticated workers within the nation,” author Robert Reich wrote in a 1989 issue of New Republic, “than by boosting the profitability of America’s global corporations.”

Developing such a corps of decision makers would probably automatically solve some of the more pressing problems created by technology, such as social isolation, job dissatisfaction and stress, and health and safety issues. If I had a real voice in what happened in the workplace, you bet I’d make it a powerful, pleasant place to spend one-third or more of my life.

I could get anthropological here, and hope that what might be happening is a shift from the centralized power of a male-based society to the more decentralized, cooperative power of a female-based one, but I’m going to get enough hate mail about this column as it is. Suffice it to say that there are plenty of good reasons to give workers more voice in what they do. I’d love to hear from high-tech companies who are putting policies like this into place. If any exist, I have a feeling they’re exciting places to be.