sebarber@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steve Barber) (04/19/87)
Last night I attended a meeting of the Computer Professionals for Social Repsonsibility (CPSR) / Boston chapter. We watched a videotape tape called "Computers in Context" which showed some examples of how some technological innovation is done with the affected workers in mind. It all looked like fairly nice and reasonably empowering stuff, having rejected the Taylorist model of the rationalization of production and instead trying to use computer systems as tools to assist expert workers and craftsman do their traditional jobs more effectively. All the examples in the film were drawn from Scandinavia, where 80% of the workforce belongs to labor unions, and where they have "co-determination" laws that require worker/management co-operation during the development and introduction of technologies that affect the workplace. They seem to be light-years ahead of us in social policy on this issue. The questions people raised afterwards focused on how well this really worked, and whether anything like this could happen in this country. The answers seemed to be that it worked well where the market situations allowed it, and that doing worker-sensitive computer systems in this country is hard because our social institutions don't encourage this. So, while it would be nice to be able to apply this kind of technological fix, the socio-political infrastructure must be adapted to require these kinds of solutions. In short, American workers need more power, but I guess we kind of knew that already. The discussion was led by Bob Howard, who has written a book called "Brave New Workplace" which deals with these very issues, so I'm told. -Steve Barber sebarber@athena.mit.edu