Office Workstations in the Home (1985) / Chapter Skim
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Clerical Workers and New Office Technologies
Clerical Workers and New Office Technologies
Pages 112-124
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From page 112... ...
Problems for today's clerical work force include Tow wages, insufficient benefits, inadequate retirement income, and a lack of organization that contributes to and perpetuates these economic realities; a lack of affordable, available, quality child care; and occupational health and safety problems. My remarks focus on female workers, who comprise the overwhelming majority of clerical workers and are the special target for homework programs involving clerical level personnel.
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From page 113... ...
Office homework is often touted as an easy solution to the severe shortage of affordable, quality child care in the United States. An advertisement for Ranier "telestaffing" computer systems, for example, shows a working mother at her terminal with her baby standing in a crib nearby, quietly observing what
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From page 114... ...
Office homework should not be seen as a substitute for quality child care for working mothers who cannot find or afford day care or babysitters. OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH An estimated 12.5 million video display terminals (VDTs)
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From page 115... ...
Hazards associated with new office technologies are only tangentially addressed by current federal or state occupational safety and health laws and regulations. At the time of the symposium on which this book is based, legislation that would provide health and safety protection for VDT users had been introduced in 10 states since 1981; laws will be reintroduced in many and introduced in more states in the next few years.
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From page 116... ...
Employees may even rent machinery from their employer, thus the employee not only underwrites the overhead but the ability to have a job; · experimenting with productivity measures and costs of transaction- and information-processing to develop benchmarks as leverage to increase pressures and intensify control over the main office work force; · reducing hourly wages by setting Tower rates outright and by switching to piece-rate methods of pay, which means workers are doing more for less; · abdicating responsibility for long-term, much less lifetime, welfare of employees by shifting costs of health and life insurance benefits, Social Security, and retirement income to individual workersi2; · reducing the chance of union organization, and generally weakening the already limited power of women clericals; · using homeworkers as a transitional work force for corporate flexibility easy to hire and release during and after a transition period of technological change and industrial competition and consolidation. In this way, homeworkers may be similar to temoorary workers as another part of the "casual" work force.
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From page 117... ...
The 1984 9 to 5 National Survey on Women and Stress found that a number of working conditions that describe job demands are fairly "universal" among managerial, professional-technical, and clerical women, including: always having to work very fast; always having to meet deadlines; always having too much work to do; always having to pay close attention to detail. Other demands are "particular" by j ob level, more common among clericals doing automated work, and even more common among black clerical women: working under strict production quotas or averages; having one's work monitored, constantly watched, or controlled by computer systems; performing repetitious, monotonous work.
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From page 118... ...
, nor can flexibility necessarily be achieved; pressures intensify instead, particularly for working mothers.~4 Whereas professional and technical workers are typically paid on a per-project basis, clerical homeworkers are almost invariably paid per items processed, under piece-rate systems, which mean that the individual worker internalizes productivity pressures. Computerized monitoring further intensifies automated office work.
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From page 119... ...
Medical Services of Washington, D.C., has 10 "offsite keyers" in claims processing positions, all of whom converted from full-time to part-time status, from a regularly hourly rate of pay to pay per output, and from employees with employment benefits to individual contractors without coverage.20 Business Week reports that homeworkers for Blue Cross of South Carolina, who are considered part-timers, are excluded from $2,000 to $3,000 worth of benefits annually. They also pay $2,400 annual rent for the computer terminals they use.
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From page 120... ...
The dispersion of clerical homeworkers makes communications between homeworkers difficult and collective activity extremely unlikely. Employers are increasingly selecting and rejecting particular pools of workers for specific types of work according to changes in the labor process and enhanced abilities to choose new sites based on labor supply demographics.22 In a recent study of the movement of automated office work from San Francisco into Contra Costa County, Kristin Nelson of the University of CaliforniaBerkeley reports that the type of clerical labor available was a decisive factor in relocations of "Iow-contact-need" back-office work.
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From page 121... ...
The transfer of jobs from central city, low-income, predominantly minority female work forces is not an unfortunate side effect of back office relocation necessitated by land cost considerations—it is one of the major reasons for back office relocation.23 Office suburbanization involves efforts by some employers to break up conditions that might facilitate self-organization by clericals by moving work away from women for whom employment is absolutely critical to the support of themselves and their families. To the extent that companies select participants in homework programs with similar criteria in mind, office homework may contribute to the powerlessness and economic vuInerability of women in the overall work force.
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From page 122... ...
Taking the current perils of office computerization into consideration, 9 to 5 does not believe that the problems of the office work force will be solved by placing office workstations in the home. If adequate protections and fairness on-site are not always possible, it makes it less likely that adequate worker protection can be enforced off-site.
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From page 123... ...
12. Women workers suffer from inadequate retirement income due to years of low pay, patterns of alternating paid work and nonpaid work in the home, lack of coverage by pension plans and low rates of vesting in such plans due to high tenure requirements and the high turnover in women's clerical and service jobs.
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From page 124... ...
Back Offices and Female Labor Markets: Office Suburbanization in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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