Automation, as it begins to disrupt the established patterns of labour in factories and offices, has received precious little attention from the unions. An exception is the Technical and Supervisory Section (formerly DATA) of the AUEW, which represents many of the designers and draughtsmen who produce the blue prints for technological change, and have themselves experienced at first hand Many of the changes brought about by automation.
In Computer-Aided Design - Its Nature and Implications, Mike Cooley, past president of TASS, traces the evolution of calculating techniques, describes in detail so the typical examples of computer-aided design, and goes on - in a self-contained section to examine the human, social and industrial consequences, analysing these in the context of technological change as a whole.
Cooley's analysis reveals the profound changes which are beginning to take place in the more technologically advanced industries and the potential which exists for organising whole layers of Jechnicians. The first piece of received wisdom he challenges is that automation and computerisation will eliminate routine, soul-destroying tasks, and automatically lead to a shorter working week longer holidays, and increased leisure. Since advanced capital equipment now becomes obsolete in about five years as against 25 years or so in the 1930's, the cost of the equipment is so enormous that employers are seeking to exploit it for 24 hours a day, eliminating all so-called noit-productive time. Members of TASS are therefore being pressed to accept shift-work, along with stopwatch and work-measurement techniques, which is not the kind of approach to which designers and mathematicians are accustomed. "When technical staff work in a highly synchronised, computerised environment, the employer will seek to ensure that each clement of their work is ready to feed into the process at the precise time at which it is required. A mathematician will find that he has to have his work ready in the same way as Ford workers have to have the wheel ready for the car as it passes on the production line *When one looks at the total system, the "man component" is slow, inconsistent and unreliable, but highly creative; whereas the computer is fast, consistent and reliable, but totally non-creative. When the two are interfaced there is a perfect unity of opposites.
and the load on the man as he attempts to respond to the system is very great indeed."
This subordination of the man to the machine accounts for the increasing proletarianisation of white collar workers, further promoted by the fragmentation of skills which results from increased specialisation. Cooley points out that older workers are among the principal victims of technological change.
"In the past, as men built up experience, this was part of the bargaining power with the employer, and in many ways it was part of the defence mechanism of the working class.
A designer, for example, would have his little design book and he would not let anyone see how he arrived at his answers. When these people retired, everyone would try to obtain these calculation books so they would know how to do it.
"But when the man is interfaced with the machine this knowledge is absorbed and soaked from him at an enormous rate, and it is then readily available to everyone else.
So that man's prestige and standing is decimated. In a Socialist society, in which he would not regard himself as being in frantic competition with his fellow in the office, this would be excellent because all that information would be available to everyone. But it now means that an up-and-coming technologist of 22 can use it quite brutally against an older man, and employers play upon this contradiction."
For mathematicians, engineers, physicists and others, "peak performance age" has been estimated to be as low as 29 or 30, after which a "careers de-escalation" can be expected.
Cooley refers to the productivity agreement in the steel industry where medical checks are used to examine the response rate of workers and their ability to interface with