Computer Chips and Paper Clips Technology and Women's Employment, Volume II: Case Studies and Policy Perspectives (1987) / Chapter Skim
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The New Technology and the New Economy: Some Implications for Equal Employment Opportunity
The New Technology and the New Economy: Some Implications for Equal Employment Opportunity
Pages 373-394
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From page 373... ...
More significantly, the role played by socioeconomic status may be growing in importance because of its implications for access to formal schooling and higher education. While our economy places increasing value on formal education as a criterion for hiring, our society continues to lag behind in providing equal access to quality education.
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From page 374... ...
enforcement in the workplace must continue, the reach of EEO enforcement must be widened from an almost exclusive focus on the workplace to one that links the workplace to the educational arena. At the federal level, this may require a redefinition of the scope of activities of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
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From page 375... ...
, black females, Hispanic females, white females, black mates, bind Hispanic males. For each group, employment growth (or decline)
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From page 376... ...
The positive and negative "shift" is distributed for each group on a percentage basis. The normalized shares of major groups of workers shown for 1970 and 1980 are computed by dividing the share of employment held by each group in each industry by that same group's share of employment in all industries combined.
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From page 377... ...
Other goods~ 0.88 1.30 -37.8 12. Manufacturing, 1.29 1.21 +52.9 1980 Employment 4,674,871 Turnover-f 4.3 Hispanic Male Normalized Black Male Normalized Share Shift _ _ 1980 1970 (percent)
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From page 378... ...
Among black males and Hispanic mates, there were limited positive shifts, overwhelmingly concentrated in some of the leastdynamic and sIowest-growing sectors of the economy: manufacturing and TCU for black males (+71.4 percent) , and manufacturing and construction for Hispanic males (+92.8 percent)
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From page 379... ...
The data show white women advancing out of clerical positions and making large gains in professional ranks; black women and Hispanic women, respectively, moving out of service worker and laborer positions while, in both cases, gaining in clerical positions; and black men and Hispanic men shifting out of laborer positions and into operative and craft positions. Despite some scattered gains, minority males in general continue to trail considerably in the fast-growing white-collar occupations.
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From page 380... ...
380 OF oO so ~ _ _ so us 0 so co ~ ~ o' c~ ~ .
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From page 381... ...
By late 1984, white males, for the first time, no longer constituted the majority of the labor force: their share of the employed had dropped from nearly 55 percent in 1970 to 49.5 percent by late 1984. THE EARLY YEARS OF EEO: OPENING INTERNAL LABOR MARKETS TO WOMEN AND MINORITY WORKERS The aforementioned statistics mean little until one analyzes who gets hired, for which jobs, and through which mechanisms.
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From page 382... ...
In turn, these were used to restrict mobility opportunities available through internal labor markets to white males, by channeling women and minority workers into dead-end jobs. A good deal of the mid-1970s literature on internal labor markets sought to account for many of these differences and the way they contributed to discrimination among different groups of workers.
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From page 383... ...
The efforts of the federal government to accelerate the promotion of minorities and women withm its own agencies, as well as within the private sector, through major consent decrees such as those secured in 1973 between AT&T and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (Northrup end Larson, 1979) , and in 1974 between the Commission and the steel industry (Ichnowski, 1983)
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From page 384... ...
Only in the case of the lowest-level occupations primarily laborers, service workers, and low-level sales and clerical classifications has the new technology, thus far, had little or no direct impact on work and skills. It may be relevant to note here that these low-skilled occupations, including sales clerks, building janitors, guards, orderlies, cooks, and others have been among the fastest-growing areas of employment and that mobility ladders are conspicuously absent in these occupations (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1984~.
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From page 385... ...
As the new technology changes skill requirements for many jobs, it also leads to the homogenization of skills across a wide range of industries, encouraging the externalization of training for many m~le-leve} workers. This means that the jobs of bank clerks processing letters of credit or fund transfers on a computerized system, of insurance examiners processing claims, of airline agents processing reservations and ticketing, or even of telephone switchmen routing and managing traffic flows through switches are becoming not only more demanding in terms of skills, but also increasingly similar in terms of skills required (Appelbaum, 1984; Noyelle, 1984~.
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From page 386... ...
In addition, the new technology makes it increasingly feasible and cost efficient to separate geographically so-called back-office functions (dominated by clerical and service worker occupations) from Front-office functions (dorn~nated by technical, sates, professional, or managerial occupations)
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From page 387... ...
By forcing companies to do away with these practices, EEO, for a time at least, opened new avenues of opportunities to women and minority workers. Yet, no sooner had these avenues been opened than their access was considerably curtailed as the result of the tendency toward the weakening of internal labor markets, and in particular the delinking of nonexempt from exempt jobs.
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From page 388... ...
The new generation of computer-communications technology permits geographic separation of back offices from front offices of the firm and permits the parent organization to seek new locations away from the central districts of very large cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other places where back-office jobs have traditionally been located. The greatest impact of this new trend appears to fall on minority women, who had made great gains in entering clerical ranks during the 1970s but who may now be left behind in the inner cities where they reside, while back-office jobs are being moved elsewhere (Noyelle, 1986, especially Ch.
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From page 389... ...
The postwar period saw a rapid growth of multiunit organizations in foods, dry goods, hardware, gasoline, and many other areas, penetrating markets traditionally dominated by ~mom-and-pop" businesses. The resulting shift in the scale of operations made possible substantial rationalization, with accompanying major productivity gains in buying, inventory control, and accounting, facilitating the further growth of large sales organizations with relatively thin administrative staffs.
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From page 390... ...
POLICY IMPLICATIONS For more than 20 years now, this nation has had a policy of equal employment opportunity enacted into law, administered by a specialized federal agency, and enforced through the courts. Because EEO was shaped under specific historical circumstances, namely, as an outgrowth of the civil rights and, later, women's movements, and because it was shaped in response to the reality of the labor markets of the 1960s and early 1970s, the principal emphasis of early EEO policy was to stress the elimination of sex-based or race-based discrimination in the workplace.
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From page 391... ...
a stronger assessment of the changes that have occurred in the labor market as a result of earlier EEO efforts, the increasing importance of education, technological change, and the structural shift from manufacturing to services; (2) a stronger assessment of the impact of these changes and their role in bringing to the fore factors of discrimination other than sex or race, especially age and socioeconomic status; and (3)
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From page 392... ...
and often lacking flexibility- makes it difficult to find workable continuingeducation solutions that are increasingly necessary in order to progress upward in the labor market during one's work life. In addition, to the extent that employers may partly control access to higher education, for example, by financing retraining programs at the community college level or tuition reimbursement programs at 4-year colleges, there may be room for discrunination to creep back in.
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From page 393... ...
1984 The Impact of Technology on Skill Requirements and Occupational Structure in the Insurance Industry, 1960~1990. Working Paper.
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From page 394... ...
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
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