Computer Chips and Paper Clips Technology and Women's Employment, Volume I (1986) / Chapter Skim
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4. Effects of Technological Change: The Quality of Employment
4. Effects of Technological Change: The Quality of Employment
Pages 127-166
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From page 127... ...
To the exploitation of workers with limited job opportunities or to the freedom to work at convenient times and places? These issues are especially germane to women, because as clerical workers, bookkeepers, nurses, librarians, and other direct users of information technology, they are likely to be affected in large numbers.
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From page 128... ...
[T] he introduction of automated office equipment has extended management control over the work process to the detriment of workers' job satisfaction" (9-to-5, 1985:29~.
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From page 129... ...
concluded that, in the aggregate, job satisfaction had not decreased over the preceding 20 years, a time of rapid technological change, and that office automation in particular did "not appear to change the nature of work in a fundamental way." Moreover, since office automation consists of labor-saving devices that eliminate jobs that are already relatively routine, he expected to see a decline in the percentage of employees engaged in routine clerical work and a corresponding increase in more satisfying jobs in service, sales, professional, and technical work. ~ This section asks whether technology, in both its narrow sense of hardware and software and in the broader sense that includes the organizational arrangements through which it is implemented, has increased or decreased employment quality in the aggregate.
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From page 130... ...
To some degree employment quality is subjective and idiosyncratic and reflects the fit between particular workers' needs and the characteristics of particular jobs. Still, the literatures on job satisfaction, job performance, and job design suggest at least three broad factors that influence employment quality for most workers (Barnowe et al., 1973; Locke, 1976; Hackman and Oldham, 1980~: (l)
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From page 131... ...
Economic considerations include both the absolute level of wages and sala~y, fringe benefits, security, and promotion possibilities that a job offers, and the fairness of these factors compared with the norms of an occupation and industry and with the inputs, such as seniority, education, and skill, that a worker provides. As technology changes the occupational mix in an industry and the skills demanded by particular occupations, it is likely to have a direct effect on workers' perceptions of their job security.
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From page 132... ...
For example, the Honeywell Corporation, a vendor of office automation equipment, commissioned a survey comparing the reactions to office automation of 937 managers and 1,264 secretaries in a national random sample of 443 establishments in information-intensive industries. The Minolta Corporation, a copier manufacturer, and Professional Secretaries International, a worker organization, commissioned a similar survey of more than 2,000 secretaries and their managers in 22 cities.
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From page 133... ...
Respondents are likely to reconstruct the past on the basis of their current environment and their theories of the impact of information technology, so workers may believe, for example: "I like my job now and everyone knows that word processors make jobs better, therefore before the technology my job must have been worse," or, "I have occasional headaches and everyone knows that staring at a screen makes headaches worse, so I must have more now than I did before I got my terminal." In addition, the phrasing of some questions may have biased respondents' answers. For example, the phrasing of questions in the Honeywell survey probably had the effect of portraying office automation equipment in a positive light: respondents were asked to agree or disagree with statements that automated equipment made tasks easier, made tasks faster, improved work flow, made jobs more challenging, and improved the quality of work.
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From page 134... ...
; these perceived benefits of office technology were stronger for managerial and professional workers than they were for clerical workers. Health data, however, contrast with these attitudinal data: users of VDTs and microcomputers reported more frequent physical and psychological symptoms, such as eye strain, chest pain, tension, depression, and vision problems requiring a doctor's consultation, than did nonusers.
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From page 135... ...
As a result, they have undoubtedly missed some of the behavioral changes in work caused by technological change and many of the mechanisms through which these changes occur. The changes in work caused by technology can be subtle, unanticipated, and difficult to derive from any general theory of technological change or any survey of job satisfaction.
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From page 136... ...
As in a factory, office work is broken into many subtasks, each performed by a "detail" worker, who loses the integrative contact with the total product and who loses variety in the job. The consequences from the employer's perspective are to reduce the skill requirements of office workthat is, the average employment experience and education needed to adequately perform the job and therefore to reduce labor costs.
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From page 137... ...
In the insurance industry, the skilled work of assigning risks or assessing claims has increasingly been codified into computer software, so that less skilled, less experienced, and less educated clerks can perform the work once performed by skilled clerks and professionals (Baran, 1985~. In social science, sophisticated statistical analyses that once were done only by professionals are now performed by undergraduates or research assistants using a statistical analysis computer program.
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From page 138... ...
Aggregate data, although flawed, show little evidence of widescale deskilling either within particular industries or in the labor market as a whole and, indeed, show some evidence of increased skill requirements (Attewell and Rule, 1984~. Like most of the research reviewed in this chapter, the data are suspect, and the conclusions based on them should be viewed as tentative.
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From page 139... ...
. Using DOT data, researchers have found little change in the skill requirements of a sample of industrial and service occupations from 1949 to 1965 (Horowitz and Herrenstadt, 1966)
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From page 140... ...
,, Levels of Analysis A second cause of the disagreement in the research literature results from ignoring important level-of-analysis distinctions among the units of work that are being skilled or deskilled. The skills and skill requirements of tasks, individuals, jobs, occupations, firms, industries, and the labor force as a whole can change with the introduction of technology, but a change at one level has no necessary implication for changes at other levels.
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From page 141... ...
But the introduction of technology that lowers a job's skill requirements often affects new labor force entrants, rather than incumbent workers, who may retire or be promoted, transferred, or laid off (see, e.g., Rogers and Friedman, 19801. The new entrants often with less employment experience and education may
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From page 142... ...
Finally, in asking whether the skills of the labor force as a whole have been affected by technology, one must remember that occupations and industries that require many or few skills can grow or shrink independently of changes in skill requirements for particular occupations. Thus, as Simon (1977)
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From page 143... ...
Consequently, the changing skill requirements associated with technology, regardless of the direction of change, are bound to produce gaps between the skills that job incumbents and entrants have and the skills that jobs require. These gaps are a problem that require attention on their own.
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From page 144... ...
Furthermore, compared with women in nonautomated offices, women who used a computer or VDT at work were more likely to report that they were required to complete a certain amount of work per hour or day; this effect was also substantially larger for clerical workers than for managerial workers. Again, workers who were subjected to production quotas were much more likely to rate their jobs as very stressful, to report a number of stress-related symptoms and medical conditions, and to have missed work time due to health problems.
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From page 145... ...
The latter observers fear that protective labor laws, which were instituted to curb child labor and other sweatshop abuses, are more difficult to enforce when employees work at home. For this reason, the AFL-CIO and 9-to-5 have called on the Department of Labor to institute a ban on teleworking for clerical workers.
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From page 146... ...
When evaluations of pilot projects have examined conditions of work, they have found that home-based professionals (primarily men in these samples) retain their salary and benefits and job security, while home-based clerical workers (exclusively women in these samples)
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From page 147... ...
Taken together, analysis of corporate pilot projects and analysis of census data suggest that telework, if it flourishes, will be used like part-time work and contract work (Applebaum, 1985) to provide flexibility for some women to meet two sets of demands: paid employment and household responsibility.
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From page 148... ...
. But, as the Research Council panel suggested, at least some of this effect is due to occupations: clerical workers, who are the most likely to be using VDTs, have the most symptoms.
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From page 149... ...
, more than 50 percent of respondents reported that teaching others to use the word-processing equipment was a regular part of their jobs. On the other hand, employers may be using technology in order to reduce the skill requirements of jobs in an effort to reduce labor costs or may feel that technological literacy, like literacy in general, is a basic and noncompensable job requirement.
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From page 150... ...
Because innovations can be implemented in broadly different ways, the major determinant of the effects of innovation appears to be management's preexisting employee policies. The examination of several specific areas of concern about information technology changes in skills and job content, working conditions, and economic considerations does suggest that regardless of the overall direction of change associated with technology, managerial workers generally fared better than clerical workers.
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From page 151... ...
Clerical workers are more likely to be involved or at least consulted about equipment in small rather than large organizations, but they rarely serve on vendor-selection committees or make final decisions in any companies (Minolta Corporation, 1983~. Even when managers are concerned about the human elements of new technology, the scope of their concern seems circumscribed.
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From page 152... ...
In 1984 women occupied only 34 percent of managerial positions in the United States but more than 75 percent of administrative support positions (Bureau of the Census, 1985~. And, as noted above, clerical workers have much less influence in office technology decisions than do managerial and professional workers.
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From page 153... ...
In general, except in the public sector, white-collar workers are much less likely to be represented by labor organizations than are blue-collar or service workers. Within the relatively unorganized white-collar labor force, women are somewhat less likely to be in unions than are men: in 1980,14.7 percent of female white-collar workers and 16 percent of male white-collar workers were in labor organizations.
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From page 154... ...
Economic conditions, workplace cultures and traditions, technology, and conflicts between interest groups and values all influence the degree to which managers can and do emphasize employment quality in implementing technology. Economic Conditions The economic condition of a firm is central to the technological implementation process and constrains the optimal case just described.
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From page 155... ...
Organizational Culture and Behavior Of course the introduction of technology does not occur in an organizational vacuum. Even in his exemplary sample, Westin identified a minority of organizations in which top management's staffing approach was to encourage high turnover and low pay in the clerical labor force.
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From page 156... ...
As stressed above, the decision of top managers to invest in technology often stems from a desire to reduce labor costs or to increase market share or product quality. Westin (1985)
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From page 157... ...
In this case it appears that better tools made worse jobs; increased interaction with clients and their problems and the difficulty of making decisions about them decreased job quality. Of course as the urban banking example of worker participation in implementation pointed out (Center for Career Research and Human Resources Management, 1985; reported in Chapter 2, this volume)
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From page 158... ...
Worker participation affects employment quality and job satisfaction in two ways. First, it changes the contents of the decisions, because it provides a mechanism through which workers' interests are represented.
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From page 159... ...
For example, for physicians a program might accept as data a patient's symptoms and risk factors and the probability of a disease in the relevant population to categorize a patient as diseased or not. For a customer service representative in a utility company, the program might accept as data a customer's payment history with the company, the size of the current bill, and the probability of nonpayment in the general population to categorize the credit risk of a customer.
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From page 160... ...
The effectiveness of worker involvement in information system design and implementation depends vitally on the organizational context in which participation takes place and on the procedures through which it is accomplished. Mechanisms for worker participation vary in the scope of workers' interests that are represented and the degree of influence that workers have.
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From page 161... ...
, changes in the organization of work (e.g., division of labor, job composition and skill requirements, job autonomy and cooperation, pace of work, training, recruitment and promotion, grading and pay) , and the actual hardware and software technology.
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From page 162... ...
These include, among others, problem-solving groups and quality circles, whose purpose is to identify and analyze workplace problems and present solutions and implementation plans to management for approval; autonomous work groups, which collaborate in the completion of work tasks and have responsibility for implementing solutions and controlling the day-to-day scheduling, standards, and flow of their own work; and business teams, in which workers participate with managers in decisions affecting product development (Gorlin and Schein, 19841. Worker participation programs have been used primarily in manufacturing companies, generally with union representation.
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From page 163... ...
European, especially Scandinavian, countries have higher levels of unionization than the United States; relatively homogeneous societies (compared with the United States) ; a tradition of industrial democracy, with a 20-year history of worker participation in many aspects of workplace decision making; and the reinforcement of contract provisions by parallel provisions in laws and regulations.
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From page 164... ...
The BNF developed elaborate structures to guarantee workers' participation in technological development, and union representatives participated actively in the design of new computer-based systems. For example, in 1982, 80 bank employees, working in 10-person groups, developed the preliminary software specifications for a $70 million computer system for savings banks.
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From page 165... ...
Worker participation programs in both the United States and Europe have been used to improve both general organizational effectiveness and employment quality. Worker involvement in the design and implementation of technology in general, and union involvement in particular, are not panaceas, however.
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From page 166... ...
Worker participation, management interests, employment quality, productivity improvement, and competitiveness are all factors that enter into the long term viability of economic activity.
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