Blog Editor's Note---The following Op Ed Piece reprinted from the NY Times recounts this historical problem. When technology replaced workers during the industrial revolution, workers shared in the productivity gains from technology improvements through reduced work hours at growing salaries as the work week reduced from 100 hours per week to the present 37.5 hours. Is it time to further reduce the work week to 20-25 hours to allow for fuller employment for workers whose wages provide for consumption of our productivity? If not, a reduced workforce will result in reduced consumption and an ever-downward spiral of job losses and company failures to further devastate the economy. At present, the trend seems to be for the pocketing of all productivity gains to the corporate elite, burgeoning corporate bank accounts, and record investor returns. This concentration of wealth in the hands of a few on the backs of the workforce is a recipe for disaster!
In 1786, the cloth workers of Leeds, a wool-industry center in northern
England, issued a protest against the growing use of “scribbling”
machines, which were taking over a task formerly performed by skilled
labor. “How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for
their families?” asked the petitioners. “And what are they to put their children apprentice to?”
Those weren’t foolish questions. Mechanization eventually — that is,
after a couple of generations — led to a broad rise in British living
standards. But it’s far from clear whether typical workers reaped any
benefits during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution; many
workers were clearly hurt. And often the workers hurt most were those
who had, with effort, acquired valuable skills — only to find those
skills suddenly devalued.
So are we living in another such era? And, if we are, what are we going to do about it?
Until recently, the conventional wisdom about the effects of technology
on workers was, in a way, comforting. Clearly, many workers weren’t
sharing fully — or, in many cases, at all — in the benefits of rising
productivity; instead, the bulk of the gains were going to a minority of
the work force. But this, the story went, was because modern technology
was raising the demand for highly educated workers while reducing the
demand for less educated workers. And the solution was more education.
Now, there were always problems with this story. Notably, while it could
account for a rising gap in wages between those with college degrees
and those without, it couldn’t explain why a small group — the famous
“one percent” — was experiencing much bigger gains than highly educated
workers in general. Still, there may have been something to this story a
decade ago.
Today, however, a much darker picture of the effects of technology on
labor is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as
likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and
devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as
it solves.
I’ve noted before
that the nature of rising inequality in America changed around 2000.
Until then, it was all about worker versus worker; the distribution of
income between labor and capital — between wages and profits, if you
like — had been stable for decades. Since then, however, labor’s share
of the pie has fallen sharply. As it turns out, this is not a uniquely
American phenomenon. A new report from the International Labor Organization
points out that the same thing has been happening in many other
countries, which is what you’d expect to see if global technological
trends were turning against workers.
And some of those turns may well be sudden. The McKinsey Global Institute recently released a report
on a dozen major new technologies that it considers likely to be
“disruptive,” upsetting existing market and social arrangements. Even a
quick scan of the report’s list suggests that some of the victims of
disruption will be workers who are currently considered highly skilled,
and who invested a lot of time and money in acquiring those skills. For
example, the report suggests that we’re going to be seeing a lot of
“automation of knowledge work,” with software doing things that used to
require college graduates. Advanced robotics could further diminish
employment in manufacturing, but it could also replace some medical
professionals.
So should workers simply be prepared to acquire new skills? The
woolworkers of 18th-century Leeds addressed this issue back in 1786:
“Who will maintain our families, whilst we undertake the arduous task”
of learning a new trade? Also, they asked, what will happen if the new
trade, in turn, gets devalued by further technological advance?
And the modern counterparts of those woolworkers might well ask further,
what will happen to us if, like so many students, we go deep into debt
to acquire the skills we’re told we need, only to learn that the economy
no longer wants those skills?
Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).
So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the
only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a
society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of
maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the
rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that
guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an
ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that
safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on
profits and/or investment income.
I can already hear conservatives shouting about the evils of
“redistribution.” But what, exactly, would they propose instead?
The post-war bargain between labour and capital is unravelling, and Ontario teachers are the test case says Toronto Star National Affairs Columnist, Thomas Walkom, in his Fri. March 15, 2013 column
ANDREW FRANCIS WALLACE / TORONTO STAR file photo
At its heart, the fight between Ontario teachers and the Liberal government is about work, writes Thomas Walkom. It is about the implicit deal struck between governments, employers and employees more than 50 years ago to make the workplace a fairer place.
The festering Ontario teachers’ dispute is not about wages and extracurricular activities, although these are the current flashpoints.
It is not about whether teachers should be forced by law to coach soccer in their off hours as Tim Hudak’s Conservatives demand.
Nor is it about eliminating the province’s deficit as Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne suggests.
It is not much about teachers at all.
At its heart, this fight is about work. It is about the implicit deal struck between governments, employers and employees more than 50 years ago to make the workplace a fairer place.
It is about the unravelling of that deal.
When the teachers’ unions say this dispute is about collective bargaining rights, that’s what they mean.
Yet the anodyne phrase “collective bargaining rights” does no justice to a complex system born literally out of bloody strikes and cracked heads — a system devised to adjudicate disputes between labour and capital that, until recently, worked tolerably well.
Modern labour relations did not come to Ontario until World War II. For industries under federal jurisdiction, like railways, trade unions had been legal since the 1870s.
But in Ontario, matters were fuzzier. Until 1943, any union attempting to organize a workplace could arguably be liable to conspiracy charges under the common law.
The system set up in 1943 was a compromise based largely on the Wagner Act, a path-breaking U.S. labour relations law enacted under president Franklin Roosevelt’s administration eight years earlier.
Ontario’s law established criteria under which unions could organize a workplace. Employers, in turn were required to at least talk to a union that had met this threshold.
Each side was allowed to use the ultimate sanction, a work stoppage. A union could strike. An employer could, by locking out its employees, bar them from working.
But there were rules to this game. Bargaining had to be conducted in good faith. Strikes and lock-outs could take place only when a collective agreement had lapsed. A government board was established to act as umpire.
Employees deemed essential, such as nurses and police officers, were barred from striking. In return, decisions on their wages and working conditions were set by neutral arbitrators.
Throughout, the legislature always retained the right to end, through back-to-work laws, any labour dispute it deemed harmful. In virtually all such cases, though, those ordered back to work received wages and benefits decided by a neutral arbitrator.
Which is why so many teachers have resorted to withdrawing their volunteer labour instead.
Many Ontarians, including many trade unionists, do not sympathize with teachers. Teachers are a well-paid lot who can’t decide whether they are professionals like lawyers or workers like miners. They get summers off. Their grammar can be irritatingly correct.
But the attack on teachers is significant. It is part of a trend.
Stephen Harper’s Conservatives are whittling away union rights at the federal level. Hudak’s Conservatives have declared war on unions provincially. The New Democrats at all levels are subtly distancing themselves from their erstwhile labour allies.
Most important, the inability of unions to organize the growing and precarious workforce of contract, part-time and casual employees leaves organized labour with fewer friends.
The great workplace compromise is coming apart. Who knows what, if anything, will replace it?
BILL LONGWORTH is a graduate of both Queen's University and the University of Toronto and has been a resident of Oshawa for the last 40 years.
He has been a long time political observor and activist in Oshawa and was Oshawa's Federal Conservative Candidate in the 1990 Federal By-election.
He was founder and chairman of Ward System Now, the activist organization that brought the ward system to Oshawa. He personally presented the winning case to the Ontario Municipal Board in 1985 in a 21 day hearing, the longest of it's type in Ontario History.
In his spare time, Bill likes to cottage, paint and sketch, write stories, and play his guitar.
Bill writes a weekly political news column in the Oshawa Central Newspaper and reprints his published columns at www.eyeoncityhall.ca...and he hosts a weekly political radio program on The WAVE radio...which you can hear every Monday from 6-9 pm EST at www.ocentral.com
In Bill's spare time he enjoys painting, writing, jamming and singing to his guitar accompaniment, cottaging, antiquing, and travel, and sunny drives in the country in his 2000 BMW M3 Roadster.
Posts
