TRENDS IN EMPLOYMENT

TRENDS IN EMPLOYMENT
The tendency to fit a new technology into established structures, rather than to start afresh every time, has often been documented. It is one reason for the absence of the huge office job losses that were being predicted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when word processing first began to be taken up on a large scale. However, this is no reason to assume that existing structures will endure. Industrial interest in new forms of organization, such as novel management structures, coordination of activities over large distances by means of telecommunications, teleworking, and other forms of distance working, indicates willingness to consider change.
The “hollow firm” is one effort to gain flexibility. The company attempts to dispense with the direct ownership and operation of many facilities that would traditionally have belonged to it, instead outsourcing production, distribution, and other tasks to other firms. Many computer companies, for example, buy in many or most of their components from specialist suppliers, and some firms do little more than design the computer for others to assemble.
A related idea is “de-layering”, or “flattening”, in which the company tries to do away with the numerous layers of middle management and administration that have traditionally processed information, and communication flows between the senior staff and the shop floor or fieldworkers. New information systems are typically used to allow rapid communication across a reduced number of organizational layers.
By the late 1990s the integration of office IT is becoming apparent: material is increasingly exchanged by e-mail (which has finally established itself); many professionals use personal computers directly, often at home and while travelling, as well as in the office; and increasingly, personal computers are networked. Whether a loss of clerical jobs will result remains much debated. Some commentators point to job losses in office-based sectors such as financial services, which use IT intensively, as a harbinger of things to come. Others argue that the unemployment problems of industrial societies are related more to political and economic changes than to the use of new technology. Indeed, new information-related services are emerging, creating new jobs. While some office jobs may have gone, some other traditional clerical jobs have been upgraded to involve new functions made possible with new IT, such as desktop publishing, database management, and customer services.
A similar debate has concerned the quality of working life—whether skills have been enhanced or reduced, and whether working conditions have been improved or degraded, in the information revolution. Evidence to date indicates a mixed picture. There are certainly some areas in which conditions have worsened and skills have been lost, and many low-skill jobs have been created—for example, in cooking and serving fast food. Yet there is also a tendency for more jobs to be upgraded, and new technical skills and skill combinations are in demand. Large-scale deskilling has not taken place.Polarization of the workforce in terms of quality of work and levels of wages has ensued; at the same time a gulf has been opening between employed and unemployed people. Whether this is a result of the information revolution, or of more or less coincidental economic and political factors, the threat is evident of a widening social gulf between the “information-rich” and the “information-poor”. The former have information-processing skills, access to advanced technologies in their work, and the money to invest in IT at home for themselves and their children; the latter do not.