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DISCUSSION The meeting was opened to questions from the floor directed to the panel of speakers. Question: I was interested in the fact that we all know that there is a push toward a 35-hour week, and in addition we recog- nize there is a considerable retraining program necessary in many cases. Perhaps a reorientation or perhaps an upgrading of train- ing is necessary. Is there any possibility that some industries might be able to combine these two by maintaining a 40-hour week and devoting a segment of time towards retraining that would aid people within that particular industry? Dr. Clague: Yes, indeed. Nany industries do indeed have detailed training programs for their own employees; perhaps more often in the white collar field than among blue collar workers, but in either case this is a well-known phenomenon. Professor John Dunlop of Harvard University, when he was talking before the American Bankers Cassock tion here in Washington a week or ten days ago, stressed this point particularly. He was trying to emphasize to the employers who were attending that con- ference their responsibility for training, retraining, and de- veloping their own personnel and not requiring government activity to do this. So this suggestion is certainly very appropriate. What we find in the Department of Labor, in the administration of the Manpower Development and Training Act, is that we have on _ hands as candidates for training workers who are unemployed, who are not attached to any employer, and who therefore constitute a community responsibility. The great bulk of the trainees that are now undergoing training in the manpower training program were unemployed at the time. They were not workers already employed. The program agencies do take workers who are employed part time, but the bulk of the trainees are unemployed. Question: I would like to ask a question which points up a con- flict~between the several speakers, so I do not know who to put it to; perhaps each may wish to comment. The first speaker pointed out that engineering did not include management. The second and third speakers told us the 33
things in management that the engineering profession had to do. It seems this is a direct conflict that the speakers should under- take to resolve. Dr. Calhoun: There is a science to engineering and a science to management. There is a management to science and a management to engineering. I was using the science' management and engineering , triumvirate In a functional sense, not In a su~Ject-matter sense. The function of engineering is different from the func- tion of management. When you try to combine these two, you are in for trouble. The manager might have been an engineer, or he might also have been a scientist. Rarely will the engineer have been a manager. The flow of people among functions or from one function to another is generally in the direction of scientist to engineer to manager, rather than the reverse. The reverse can take place, but generally does not. I was speaking from a functional point of view, not a subject-matter point of view. Does that clarify it? Dr. Clague: Sucrose I Live vou mv version of it. I hinted" particularly when I was talking about collective bargaining, that the engineer might find himself drawn in from the wings into the actual analytical work involved in hammering out the economic decision on wages, fringe benefits, shorter hours, etc.-all within the confines of that particular agreement in the company or the industry. In that sense, I can imagine him being brought in for his technical capacity. In the other illustration, such as with respect to training and retraining by Federal law, in the educa- tion funds which we have, I thought of the engineer as being inter- ested only as a citizen, taking a position and having an under- standing of these problems. Perhaps this would be something like the atomic scientists with their Bulletin, 'sThe Atomic Scientists." Having invented the atomic bomb, and at the same time being concerned about the con- sequences of it they have therefore started the magazine and are taking public positions with respect to the social, political, and economic aspects of their activity. In that sense, I was urging the engineering profession to think in terms of studying economics and sociology, and participating with their studies in relation to the decisions of some of these questions. Dr. Sherwin: There is a tradition that management is sort of a special thing by itself, and there has been growing up in the country, people who are sometimes called general purpose managers. The general purpose manager says, "You name it, I will manage it." They will manage anything. 34
I think that most of the business schools and management schools have fallen into this trap. To me, it is a trap, the idea that you can learn management as a separate thing. You can learn to manage engineers. You can learn to manage research. You can learn to manage any complicated thing you want. I certainly agree that management requires a lot of extra information and skill which is not included in science and technology, but I am of the opinion that there is an urgent need for a new style of scientific and engineering manager who follows in the following career pattern. He goes into the practice of his technical subject for a number of years, 10 or 15. Then he moves into the line in the management of scientific operation for another decade or so. Then he moves to the higher policy positions whenever the organization has a highly technological nature. For example, the Bell System has a large number of their managers who came up through the technical ranks. This is true in many of the scientific industries. It is urgently needed in government. I believe that the top technical jobs in government can only be performed by people who have had not just an education in science, but have practiced it for many years and then have proceeded up the line. It is possible in mid-career to add management skills to technical skills. The reason you cannot go the reverse is that learning science and engineering is something which is a highly systematic affair. You cannot pick it up after hours. Therefore, you cannot take a general purpose manager who has a B.A. in some college, went to a business school' learned the principles of management in general' to take over a complicated technical program because he simply does not have tools by which he can understand what is going on unless he goes back and spends four to eight years in systematic, scientific learning. Even so, he will then lack the firsthand experience of practicing science and engineering. If a lawyer takes over a railroad, in a few weeks t time he can learn the essential points. Up until recently, railroading has not changed very rapidly. Its technology is relatively simple. But if a lawyer would have to take over an organization which is developing the latest type of computer in terms of what designs are needed and so forth, this would be a different situation. So, I say, it is an essential thing for the scientific people to face up to the fact that they are going to have to take a step into management of a new type. Dr. Calhoun: I don't think we are so far apart, and yet there is . a basic dichotomy here. The salesmen used to have a phrase for it: "You have to know the territory.' His is basically what you are saying. But you can still be a salesman and come into a new territory. You can be an engineer and come into a new system of engineering and learn it 35
However, there is as I understand it, a function of managing which is separate from the function of doing engineering, and I think it is possible to learn management as a science. Also, I think it possible to deduce some management principles in the abstract. I think it is possible to lay out some concepts which apply to all kinds of management. Also, I think it will be possible to have better managers, whether they are managing one kind of an institution of man or another kind of institution of man. There is rarely any institution of man which consists solely of one kind of functional element. Any institution you can name, even a scientific institution has elements other than science. So, the only point I was trying to make is that this is one of our problems. We do have a fuzziness between these functions of carrying out science, carrying out engineering, and carrying out management. We do not see any one of them clearly and they are different. And it pays, I think, to think of them differently. I might say that some of the poorest managers I have seen in engineering are managers who have been engineers. Some of the worst educational administrators are people who have been teachers. Too often, these people do not have the capacity to forget the practice of their art the way they knew it when they were practicing it. Consequently, they perpetuate an outmoded version of what they are supposed to know. This does much more damage than not knowing much about a function in the first place. So, there are two sides to this question, and I prefer to hope that we can get some science into our management which we can build separate and apart from engineering. Dr. Clague: I want to tell you that we have the same problem in economics and statistics. I conduct a large research bureau, in which we have the same problem, namely' whether the managing skills of the professional manager can be any help, or whether they will be a hindrance to us. I find myself very much in agreement with Dr. Sherwin Ts position, that I need an economist or a statistician, and not blueprints. This does not mean, however, that there is not a real science of management-how to manage research and make it effective. That is a real job, which transcends the mechanical management of turning out a mass of statistics. From the Floor: If anybody disagrees with what Dr. Sherwin has said, I suggest he examine the prosperity of RCA over the last eight years, where they have experimented with two types of manage- ment. 36
Question: I would like to put this question to Dr. Clague, because his topic, "Automation and Society," referred briefly to the time it takes for certain types of automation to have its impact felt upon the labor force. I have heard recently there is some concern that com- puters, because they are being introduced in industrial society on a different basis from other forms of automation, come in so much faster than, let us say, the Bessemer function has come in, as to have a very serious impact on employment. Do you believe this is indeed a possibility in the computer business? Dr. Clague: Yes. The projections that were made some years ago, six or seven years ago, as to the number of electronic computers that may be in operation by 1965 turned out to be much too low. have already passed the number they thought would be in existence by that time. There seems to be no question that the computer is having an impact on a wide variety of businesses, not only in re- search and industrial activity, but even in the solution of administrative problems. We At the same time, we find that the computer does seem to be a terrific job creator. I am referring to the fact that, in a certain sense, it invites further production. We are projecting, for example, in the Bureau Occupational Outlook Handbook, the amount of employment in 1970. We could be wrong as we sometimes miss the trends in particular industries. But you might be surprised to know we anticipate a considerable expan- sion in that direction. The computer has become very effective in making it easy to develop a whole system of planning, and it processes things so quickly that it has stimulated the number of checks written in the United States, and the volume of accounting has been increased. So far as we can see now, the increased employment associated with the computer has exceeded the amount of displace- ment. Whether that will continue indefinitely, I do not know, but it should be watched and, you may be interested to know, we are still continuing to make studies along that line. One of the things that has interested us in the Bureau of Labor Statistics is the impact in communities where a computer has not previously been introduced. So far, increased unemployment has not resulted; there is not a great deal of unemployment in the areas where com- puters have just begun operating. Question: Dr. Clague, I was not quite clear regarding the 200,000 persons you said were displaced by automation per year; I gathered that was in static industries and there would be a similar number displaced within growing industries, and, similarly, those would be inclining.
~- - Dr. Cla~ue: You are correct. We made an assumption. We said, . ttIf an industry is expanding its employment' there may be displace- ment taking place within that industry, even though the total of jobs is increasing." mat is your point. That is true. Individual pa ants may be going bankrupt and unemployment created, while the leading automation concerns are doing very well in expanding their employ- ment and their markets. However, within an industry, it does look as if the workers' opportunity for reemployment will be increased under those circumstances; of course, if he loses his specific skill, it may not be. But there are collective bargains that cover an industry as a whole. The first question is, is this industry having expanded employment or not? If it was, we then said that there is no inter- industry disemployment; that industry is not contributing unemploy- ment to the economy. It is creating as many jobs as it is dis- placing. Then we look at the other industries where employment was declining. m eve was a point at which this impact had a socio- economic effect. At that point, workers are concerned about their jobs in a way they seldom are when the industries are expanding. So this 200,000 was the measurement of the annual rate of inter- industry displacement due to technological change. Does that answer your point? From the Floor: Not quite, from the viewpoint of the labor map, the expanding~industries are not now employing as many as they otherwise would. So its total impact on unemployment is bigger than the 200,000. Dr. Clague: Yes. Well, that gets you into a circle if you follow it too far. You could not get an expansion to seven million automobiles a year if we were producing automobiles the way we did in 1920. In other words, the functioning of the machine as a machine, and its operation in production, is what makes it possible to get the growth of production. In fact, it is very dangerous to imply that you would get the same production if you were doing it by the old fashioned method. That is why we say that the machines themselves created additional work. You would not get the additional work, if it were not for that multiplying factor. The real trouble is that when automation displaces an occupation or unemploys a man, we then get a socio-economic response on the harmful side of the case. How can we translate the enormous benefits of the machine over to some of the workers who bear the brunt of the transition? 38
That is the basic problem. I think we need not interfere with technology in any way whatever, except when we are left with unemployment. Then we need take account of that and see what can be done about it. From the Floor: I think we all recognize the economic impact of the pressures brought to bear on industry by the three per cent normal raise in wages every year which insists that those who are going to come out even at the end of the year are going to take three per cent out or get more productivity by that amount. Therefore, with this built-in circle you speak of, we have to have a long-term shift, say away from profits toward the men or some other kind of big factor coming in if we are going to solve this problem. What do you see in the future of a big important shift that is going to make this kind of change? Dr. Clague: First, all these women are coming into the labor force. mat is partly due to automation. The housewife now has the automatic dishwasher, the automatic garbage disposal, and many other automatic appliances. She has to go to work to earn the money to pay for the machine that displaces the work at home. There is mechanization of the home in a very real sense. My wife, who is a pediatrician' says there is no machine that will put a diaper on a baby without sticking him with a pin. But this development does have a kind of circular effect. The expansion is causing some problems in our unemployment residual. About half of our unemployed every month, are out of work less than five weeks, so some of this unemployment is mere turnover. It is not a large factor of displacement. Some unemployment is seasonal. In three weeks the work will open up and those employed will go back to work. So there are probably a million to a million and a half who are really residual unemployed. These are the people who re- ceived the full force of the displacement. These are the workers unemployed more than six months, those whose occupations are gone and who can not find other work. They are the workers who retire early. There is a steady downward trend in retirement age towards 60 and even 55. We are losing some of these workers permanently from the labor force; probably it would be desirable to keep some of them. But they have limited capacities in terms of education, training and adaptability. These are not the kind of people who fit very well into the pattern of employment that is expanding in this country. Perhaps early retirement may be as easy a way out as any other. 39
Question: Dr. Clague, you mentioned the depth of the labor long- shore study on the Eastern Gulf Coast. I have three items in re- gard to that. One, when will it be completed? Will there be recommendations and will it be made public? Dr. Clague: I cannot answer any of those; however, I will be glad to tell you what I can. To those of you who are not familiar with the situation, this is the result of the recommendation of the Morse commission last year. The Department of Labor, Secretary Wirtz, accepted responsibility for this threefold study of the waterfront. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is the responsible research agency that has been conducting the field surveys. One ; ~ the Ct1~11~17 of man; Ala; en en the If - end ·- ~1~ I ~' J1L~'L'~-Vt1 ~1~ -~1_ YE Tilde It is analyzing the various methods of loading and unloading goods on the piers. The second survey relates to the turnover of labor, the employment experience of workers in the industry. When we talk about industry cutting back on its surplus labor, we need to have some statistics on length and continuity of service. On the West Coast, where labor and management did make arrangements to cut back the number of longshore workers, the productivity on the waterfront was increased substantially. One of the findings out West was that a great many of the casuals were part-time workers on the waterfront who had other jobs besides. When they left longshoring, they still had another job. The third survey is the study of the types of protective devices-carly retirement, supplementary unemployment benefits, etc.- which might be adopted to take care of those who would be dropped. These studies are being made for the purpose of assisting the parties in collective bargaining, so that what we in the Bureau of Labor Statistics will do is to turn over our research results to the Labor Department. ~ special team of experts will make the findings available to the parties to help them reach a settlement. Whether anything will be published and in what form cannot be decided before an agreement is reached. Therefore, there will not be any details available to the general public in the immediate future. We hope there will be some parts of these studies that can eventually be published. Question: I have a question for Dr. Sherwin. Dr. Sherwin made the point that the engineers are not meeting their responsibilities by entering into the government to the extent the legal profession has. However, it is my observation as a layman, that the lawyer by and large has much greater incentive and motivation to get in public life. It furthers his own career. We find so many lawyers in state legislatures and in our own Congress who carry on their own businesses back home and obviously their activity in government does help their personal business back home. 40
Now, the question is, it seems to me, not what we do as professional engineers or scientific professions, but what can be done to provide incentive for the individual to enter into govern- ment and political life. Dr. Sherwin: This is certainly a problem. The legal people who have entered the government service serve as professionals in the legal work or entered the Federal or state governments as fulltime Civil Service people or judges. They do work on government salaries. Though, I must say, legal people have done pretty well in one regard. The Supreme Court justices have both honor plus government salaries of 35,000 dollars per year. One thing that would help is for the scientific and engineering societies to get together and devise means to build up a tradition of public service. Recently in DOD, we have noticed that an increasing number of people from the defense industries want to come into government for a period of several years-two or three years-just for the experience. This is valuable, just as a Congressional tour is important to a lawyer in a small town. He is marked thereafter. He has an opportunity he otherwise would not have had. Thus, government service can give to people-at least in certain types of industry-an unusual advantage. I think this should be exploited for all it is worth. The universities need the same kind of interchange-except they don't seem to realize it. Even more important, however, is the need for the govern- ment to build its own career patterns in public service. For this goal they need to develop management material from among the scientists and engineers in the laboratories in the various parts of the government to get them to progress to other organizations and then move on to other points in the government. The best organizations seem to obtain their main leader- ship from within. They only recruit from without when absolutely essential, and in this regard, the government system seems to be at fault. There is simply not enough of a career plan and a tough enough selection process. Question: I would like to go back to the first question, because I think it particularly important for us to realize that perhaps the closest contact scientists and engineers have in American government is in the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council and the Division of Engineering and Industrial Research within the National Research Council. It seems to me, in reading the publications of these several organizations that are represented here today, and in listening to what has been said by both Dr. Sherwin and Dr. Calhoun, 41
that we tend to identify a person as either an engineer or a scientist or a manager. Or if he has partaken of one or more of these, it is a separate extension of his career. This has been brought out by both of the speakers today. Yet I think all of us can recall in recent history one or two perhaps particularly gifted generalized men in our own laboratory staffs or in our businesses who are in fact capable of being scientists or managers or engineers, by turn, in the same week. I think of several people in the laboratory I directed for ten years who could do this and were therefore very valued. It seems we should pay less attention to whether a person is a scientist or an engineer or manager, and more attenti,on to the general ability he can bring to the type of problems that arise today in this particular occupation. might disappear. to comment. If we could breed this more general type, the difficulties I wonder whether Dr. Sherwin or Dr. Calhoun would like Dr. Calhoun: It is true, there are exceptional individuals who can do all of these things. But they are very rare. Once in a while, we find even a person who can operate at all three of these levels in three or four different systems, and this is even more rare. I do not think we are going to build our society and our institutions on this kind of person. When we find them, we are lucky, and let us try to make the most of them. But I think we will be lucky when we find one man who can do one of these jobs well. I was speaking to this sort of thing. The question of how we bring the engineering design or the engineering knowledge to bear on the decision-making process within government is a very tough one. It is basically the reason I decided to come to Washington. I did as Dr. Sherwin suggested. I took a leave from my industry, namely, an educational institution, hoping that the time I spent in Washington would be of some value after I got back home, and I think it will. But it is going to take more than this. The analogy with the lawyer and the legal profession has some merit, but yet it is not fair analogy. It would be if we had achieved the kind of dissemination of information that we ought to achieve. This is the role that is really basic. It is the last point I was trying to make in my talk. We do not have a broad understanding of technology and its meaning to us in the same way we have an understanding of democratic processes and their meaning to us, and when we do, the engineering profession and the scientific profession will be able 42
to take their places along side of lawyers and others in our legislature and Congress, and there will be just as many engineers as lawyers in the House and the Senate, and perhaps a few on the Supreme Court bench itself. It is going to take a really long time until we achieve this. Basically, we are forming our judgments and making our decisions in a world which no longer exists. The world that we live in is directed and controlled by technological forces as much as by any other kind of force. This is what directs us, and yet we base our decisions on more or less outmoded checks and balances. This is basically what has happened, in my opinion, to our Federal structure. We have upset our traditional check and balance system. Unless you have checks and balances on the things that count, you might just as well not have any. Well, we do not have checks and balances today on the things that count; namely, on technology and economic development. These are made in a more or less closed circuit and are made in a special way. They are not subjected to the same broad discussion. They are not subjected to the same broad look. We do not under- stand them. We do not open up the question, for instance, that because computers or automation will put people out of work, should we therefore not have them. We do not even admit this question. We would admit a similar question if we brought in monkeys and taught them how to do this work, namely-should we bring in the monkeys? We would admit and argue this question, and we might decide not to bring in the monkeys and teach them all these things. We do not admit these questions regarding computers. We take for granted this is desirable and we adjust ourselves accordingly. I think we have to have a much broader appreciation of what the forces are, and what the parameters are behind those forces, before we can achieve what you are driving at Question: To go back to Dr. Clague; about three weeks ago the Wall Street Journal, I believe, carried a front-page article that in- ferred there was a surplus ~ ~ a director of a placement service stated full of Do your TV panel program he had three or four files were trying to find jobs. this regard? ot engineers, and coincidentlv. on a that applications from engineers who statistics show anything in Dr. Clague: No. That development is not large enough to show up in any of the employment data we get from employers, or in the over-all employment and unemployment data we get through the house- hold survey, which we conduct in cooperation with the Census. 43
This may very well be happening. In fact, when you have closings of some of the major developmental projects in aviation, or in missiles or whatever it might be, you can have a situation in which many workers are laid off, including top-level engineers. As someone said earlier, an engineer probably becomes obsolete in ten years. The technology changes so fast that it is hard to keep up to date. I recall five or six years ago I had a letter on that very point. This was a mechanical engineer who had lost his job. He said, "What I need is one more year at the university in order to acquire the necessary electrical engineering background so that I could get a good job." Any gigantic shift in employment can produce unemployment for specific professions. I am not aware that this has affected engineers yet. Dr. Jordan: You hit on a somewhat sensitive spot, Dr. Clague. I must tell you that during the past year there has been a big migration from electrical back to mechanical and civil engineering. The afternoon session adjourned at 5:00 P.M. 44
