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Techno-Science
and the Labor Process INTRODUCTION Longshoremen on the Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) are paid even after their work is technologically redundant within the shipping industry because they are guaranteed work or income when containerization of cargo eliminates their specific jobs. In effect since 1966, the GAI assures a full year's salary (2080 hours) at $45,000 a year to workers. The Union's premise in gaining this concession was that the cost of technological changes should not entirely rest upon the employees in the industry. In the 1950s the New York-New Jersey docks were being worked by 48,000 men who worked a total of 46,000,000 man hours and moved a total of 22,000,000 tons of general cargo. Their work was concentrated on the Manhattan and Brooklyn docks where Italian and black longshoremen moved cargo on the Brooklyn waterfront and Irish and Slavic longshoremen worked the Manhattan docks. By the mid-70s, 12,000 longshoremen were working 22,000,000 man hours and moving 27,000,000 tons of cargo. In short, one-fourth the men moved more cargo tonnage. Longshoremen had increased their productivity by 400% in twenty years. With the increased "productivity" of the past two decades there has been a continuous decline in longshore job opportunities. The work has moved out of New York City to the modern container facilities in New Jersey, but no new job creation is occurring in New Jersey. In 1985, 10,100 longshoremen still worked the port of New York-New Jersey. Three thousand of these men on the GAI with high seniority who have been displaced by container technology rarely work but they receive a full salary. Even with the GAI this is a very profitable industry, generating $14 billion in economic activity and $2.3 billion in business income. Faced
with the technological elimination of their jobs, Brooklyn longshoremen
attached themselves to a nonproductivist ideology. They collectively struggled
for wages without work and bargained for free time as opposed to work
time. No longer is their well-being attached to hard work as it was in
the past; now it is attached to managing their own time away from work.
They perceive that productivity in the workplace is opposed to their interests.
The economists who argue the opposite do not represent them and they know
it. Productivity means increased The longshoremen's struggle is one for repossession of their time. Time has always been a contested terrain in the clash between labor and capital. In the past, the assumption that a hard day's work was both a necessity and a moral obligation undermined efforts to reduce the workday. In the workplace of computer-mediated production, robotics and information systems --workers must struggle to make both technology and time negotiable issues. But the longshoremen's struggle was shortsighted because they only struggled for their own immediate needs. They didn't understand that universal featherbedding is the only way to guarantee jobs at the wage and benefit levels they had achieved. They didn't struggle for a guaranteed permanent workforce in the port of New York-New Jersey, nor for work-sharing, nor for a shorter work day without a decrease in pay, and thus longshoring is an increasingly redundant occupation.1 The Second Story: White Juvenile Delinquents in Greenpoint, Brooklyn In 1979 to 1980 I was hired by Terry Williams and William Kornblum to do a study of violent, white juvenile delinquents which ultimately became part of their book Growing Up Poor.2 Basically I studied white, male teenagers who were raised to be factory workers in the small- to medium-sized factories which dotted Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Long Island City, Queens. However, these factories had closed or left New York to hire non-union workers at lower wages in the south and out of the country. In the United States from 1979 to 1984, 1.7 million manufacturing jobs were lost. From 1988 to 1992 another 1.4 million were lost. The factories that remained in New York paid low wages, so many teenagers preferred to sell drugs, rob, and murder for their livelihood. In 1994, two-thirds of these teenagers, now adults, were prisoners, career criminals, heavy drug users, or dead. The Third Story: White Male from a Soup Kitchen in Brooklyn This white, forty-year-old male of the middle class, with twenty years of experience as a warehouse manager, hasn't worked in a year. "You should see the people that I have to compete with. I'm waiting for a job interview in a moving company. A beautiful operation. They liked me but they said they didn't want to train me. It's not because I'm obese, at least not this time. It's a computerized operation, and I would have to be trained on the computer. But, I'm sitting waiting for the interview. The other guy waiting to be interviewed is an MBA, also my age, knows how to use the computer but was laid off from Wall Street and a $80,000 a year job. He's competing with me. I told him I just applied for a warehouse job at Bush Terminal. He asks me for the information and if I mind that he'll apply for the job, too. I have all on-the-job experience but only a two-year college degree. How can I compete for warehouse jobs with MBAs?" The Director of the Bread and Life Soup Kitchen at St. John the Baptist Church in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, is trying to get him a job through their five job counselors but they have not been successful. The Fourth Story: Angela and Flexible Specialization in the Garment Industry Angela is a floor girl in a Seventh Avenue factory in New York's garment center. "I check the operators' work. I've worked here for thirty-eight years. It's very bad here now. The work is all done outside of the United States and then we put it together here and say it's made in the USA. We do very little in the New York area. Everything is done outside. You pick up a blouse and it's made in China. And they pay them terrible wages, fifty cents an hour. How can you live on those wages? And you know who sets them up all over the world? We do, American manufacturers, all of the shops, all over the world. We only assemble them here. You can't be a garment worker and have a decent life. At one time you could, but not any more. Now more and more of the work is by machine. The machines do everything: rolling, piping, felling. They put a gadget on the machine, like a funnel and it rolls and stitches at the same time. Now piping, we used to call it French piping, is done by machines. We used to do bottoms by hand and now the machines do the felling. We used to do everything by hand, but now it's like an assembly line. In the old days it was all custom made. We did everything by hand, now everything is by machine. They call it progress. They used to have twenty people do the work, all by hand. Now they have three people doing the same work and all by machine. The only new work they create is in the sweat shops in Chinatown, Greenpoint, Brighton Beach. I don't know what we're going to do. These people work for peanuts. They can't collect unemployment, they have no benefits, and they work harder than we did. People need to make a living wage, people got to live. But it's always the same baloney. The immigrants are afraid, and everybody else wears blinkers."3 The Fifth Story: Computer Aided Design and the Decentering of Skill In 1984 Stanley Aronowitz and I started our studies of Computer Aided Design (CAD) use in the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the Transit Authority. CAD had just been introduced and only a few architects and engineers were working on the machines. We observed that the architects, engineers, and drafters who were doing manual design work always looked busy. They were at their boards continuously drawing. Those few engineers and architects who were working on CAD never looked like they were working. They were sitting, staring at the screen of their machine, using their mouse and continually staring. They weren't drawing, they were thinking. This represents a major change, a shift from continuous drawing to continuous conceptualization in the "knowledge society." Over the last ten years we have studied architects and engineers in New York and New Jersey in both the public and private sector. We have observed the transformation among architects and engineers who do design work with CAD. Drawing, the physical skill in doing design, has become secondary to the knowledge component. Conceptualization has become primary. Engineers and architects using CAD have significantly changed the object produced. Though there is much evidence that the departments are doing more work, with fewer workers, and with greater accuracy and more creativity, the notion of productivity itself is changing. Can one talk about productivity when the product itself is changing from what it was in the past? An architect for the Department of Environmental Protection says, "With CAD we can build a functional and beautiful city." For him any notion of productivity would now have to include not only cost and function but aesthetic considerations as well.4 The Sixth Story: Theoretical Biophysics, Where Theory Is Not Skill A theoretical biophysicist (TBP) described his research: "My research is entirely theoretical. I used to have an experimental component to my research but now I leave this to colleagues. Molecular biophysics is an exploration of the molecular basis of biological mechanisms based on physics, mathematics, and theoretical chemistry and is performed with computer simulations. What I'm interested in are the most basic mechanisms of life, biological structures. I work on the structure of DNA, the regulation of gene expression that is the interaction between DNA and protein, the structure of protein, and the function of protein. My oldest roots are in research on neurotransmitter receptors from the point of view of the structure of neurotransmitter receptors, what allows them to perform the signaling process. And more recently, because it's become available from experiments, is the structure of the receptors that recognize those neurotransmitters and transduce the signals. And so it covers in fact an enormous amount of cellular and molecular biology. It covers most of the physiological mechanisms that are understood at the molecular level. But it deals with all of this computationally through simulation and theory. There is a difference between theory and simulation... I call theory those things that are based on laws which then are extrapolated either numerically or analytically to specific formulations. Simulation, on the other hand, is taking specific formulations, equations that govern a certain process, and propagating them as if you were the system and accumulating the knowledge of the behavior of the system within a given formulation. To come up with a formulation you do theory. To make this formulation work and give you data on how the system evolves you do computational simulation. One is purely theoretical and is close to theoretical physics, theoretical chemistry, theoretical geology, and theoretical astrophysics. And the other is closer to experiment in fact but it's a computational experiment, because you design a system, although it's theoretical, and then you make it work, and observe it, and try to measure things on it."5 There is an increasing dependency of practitioners in the biomedical fields on scientists doing basic research, but the scientists are unable to communicate this complex knowledge to the practitioners. Medical doctors rely on this knowledge but must take it on almost religious faith because they do not have the scientific background to understand it. This is the same contradiction that existed for the engineers and architects who use computer aided design in which theoretical knowledge increasingly replaces the skilled knowledge of the old engineers and architects. In this sense medical doctors are like craft workers. While still highly rewarded, they are being displaced by theoretical scientific knowledge and by technoscience. CONCLUSIONS AND CHALLENGES: The Jobless Future These stories provide an overview of technological trends that have been evolving and now are occurring at an increasingly rapid pace. They affect the workforce from the manual and skilled laborer to the scientific researcher. Not only do they change the traditional world of work and challenge definitions of productivity, but they tear at the social fabric of the nation. The experiences contained in these stories suggest the following two conclusions for workers and for unions which traditionally have safeguarded the rights of employees: 1. In general, new high-tech production regimes are labor destroying. As a result, increasing numbers of workers are becoming permanently redundant. The wave of the future is more workers in a global labor market with fewer opportunities. Workers "of all collars" are increasingly being forced into greater competition with each other. In light of this situation, the initial struggle of longshoremen for the Guaranteed Annual Income has to become the struggle of all workers in all labor processes: manual, skilled, and intellectual. That is the struggle for basic income, independent of work. 2. Technological and scientific knowledge has become the principal productive force in late industrial societies. Not only has manual work been displaced but skilled work has been displaced as well. In the new workplaces technoscience is dominant and skilled work is moved to the margins of production. Both skilled and industrial unionism face an increasing dilemma in view of these developments. If unions are to survive, they must reconceptualize their organizing strategies, with an increasing emphasis on knowledge work. This is already beginning to occur. With more and more workers now faced with the technological elimination of their work, and the lack of emerging occupations to sustain a good life for all, two challenges and responses emerge. First, the work ethic is no longer a central organizing principle for social life, and second, there is a general decline in wages. This suggests two responses. We must actively participate in the creation of a new public ethic of social responsibility around which life now can be organized. Second, the struggle for the decommodification of basic needs: medicine, housing, education, food, etc. has to be initiated. In this age of new social movements, Foucault is right that microstruggles are everywhere. From communitarianism to new socialists, from the new right to pro-choice, micro-politics is everywhere. None of these struggles offers an alternative to the present situation because each is focused against the consequences of a problem and never against the premises of the political, economic, cultural order. They have not created an alternative discourse that can nourish a movement to reconstruct the world. Micro-struggles are insufficient for the task. They may help to define a new situation, even provide some innovations, but their language is pluralist, never offering anything more than temporary reform. A world which can no longer be organized around the work ethic requires a new organizing principle -- an alternative discourse. A new public ethic of social responsibility is an attempt at constructing this alternative discourse. This new public ethic of social responsibility does not ask for a "return to family values" or identify the cause of social problems as "compassion deficit." It doesn't speak of social problems because it doesn't speak the language of consequences. This ethic of social responsibility speaks the language of change which has as its first premise understanding the enormous human and environmental costs of disorganized capitalism and an unrestrained global free market. An ethic of social responsibility assumes that market based solutions which reward some are much too expensive for the great majority of the world's population. These costs include the perpetuation of all forms of class, race and gender oppression. The "jobless future" negates any possibility that the capitalist marketplace can end the current misery of many in the world. The International Labor Organization measured worldwide unemployment and underemployment in 1994 at 820 million and growing. It also states that "in total some 1.1 billion people around the world live below the poverty level of their own country because of a lack of a good paying occupation."6 The "jobless future" requires an alternative to a world based on work and jobs. Thus the proposed public ethic of social responsibility understands that there is work to be done but it has been deemed too costly under capitalism. Thus schools aren't built, housing isn't built, health care isn't guaranteed for everyone, the air isn't made clean, people aren't fed even though we already have the capabilities of accomplishing these human necessities. Only in a world where persons come before economics can we rebuild and guarantee a right to a decent life to all. To achieve a worldwide ethic of social responsibility will require struggle in the workplace. A thirty-hour week and a six-hour day with no overtime and no decrease in income is important. This is required to create new opportunities and for the health of the worker. Survival for too many today requires overtime or "two-job existence" and this means a reduction in the standard of living. Decommodification-- removing health care, housing, education, food from the marketplace-- would enable all to have the "good life" not as a privilege but as a right. Decommodification then is not just removing central human necessities from the marketplace but, more importantly, it is the removal of humans as workers from their own status as commodities. Decommodification as a central component of the new ethic of social responsibility is the struggle for a world in which people's lives are no longer dominated by jobs and trying to "make ends meet." Free of this they can now be citizens who can participate in their world. Politics requires free time, once only available to the few, but ideally made possible to everyone. Citizenship should not be centered on voting alone but on participation and governance. For this to occur women and men must struggle for a world in which there is freedom from work and want and freedom for human life. REFERENCES 1. William
DiFazio, Longshoremen: Community and Resistance on the Brooklyn Waterfront,
MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1985. top
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I'm
going to tell a few stories of work and non-work in post-industrial, post-modern
America. These fragmented and incomplete narratives, including some interview
transcriptions, describe a world of work that is increasingly "up for
grabs" with the grabbing controlled by those who own and manage the techno-science
based labor process. Techno-science continues to change the world of work
and the social and cultural relations within that world. After these stories,
I am going to point in a few directions where "intellectual activists"
must look if we are to move toward a global society respectful of each
human person in that community.
