Chris Harman

Is a Machine After Your Job?


9. A challenge to the system


ALL THE above demands point in the same direction – they insist that those who labour in the factories and offices are the beneficiaries of any new technology, not the small minority of the population who own or control industrial wealth at present.

On the face of it these demands are not revolutionary. They start from the worries which the new technology creates among workers who in the past have taken the present organisation of society more or less for granted. Indeed, the starting point can be the false promises which management often give in order to con workers into accepting the new technology. Yet when they fight for the full implementation of those demands, workers soon find themselves challenging the whole basis of control of industry in present day society.

The employers will always say that acceptance of demands like these is ‘impossible’. Many trade union leaders will say they are ‘impractical’. Yet they are neither ‘impossible’ nor ‘impractical’. What is ‘impossible’ or ‘impractical’ in halving the length of the working day by using an invention that makes one person able to do the work previously done by two? Only one thing stops management acceding to these demands and trade union leaders fighting seriously for them – they clash with the desire of employers to use the new technology to increase profits.

Look for instance at the dispute at Times Newspapers that began in November 1978 over the conditions for the introduction of new technology.

Management suspended publication and gave notices to almost the entire workforce because they would not accept a drastic cut in the workforce and surrender the powers of their chapels (shop organisations) to take industrial action.

Yet, Times management made £2.1m profits in the first ten months of 1978, and the Thompson organisation, who own the Times, £126m profit. If the new technology were introduced without loss of a single job. Times Newspapers and Thompson would continue to make hefty profits.

The only ‘impractical’ thing about using the new technology to cut the amount of work done by each Times employee rather than using it to cut the size of the workforce was that the former approach would stop profits increasing.

The fight against the new technology destroying jobs and dehumanising work is a fight against the capitalist organisation of society. It is a fight for a different order of society, in which production is not guided by profit, but by the needs of those who work.

The transition from capitalism to this new society can only be achieved in one way – by a struggle of workers to take control of industry and to create a structure for running society as a whole that will follow their dictates.

When workers demand that the new technology serves their interests, not the interests of profit, they are beginning that struggle for control.

Limited successes in that struggle for control are possible, without waiting for the rest of society to be transformed. Every time that the employers or the press complain of ‘overmanning’ what they are really complaining of is that the workers of a particular industry have succeeded in using some new piece of technology to cut the amount of work each worker does.

That is why, instead of being half-ashamed of so-called overmanning, the workers in the industry concerned should be proud of it – it means they have made technology serve their interests, not those of profit. Only by getting more ‘overmanning’ can workers ensure that technology means an easier life and not a longer dole queue.

’Overmanning’ means that workers’ control over the production process has made some inroads against the old managerial control. But this is a state of affairs that cannot last indefinitely, unless the battle to wrest control from the employing class is spread to the whole of society.

Workers in a certain industry can force a cut in the working week by industrial action. Workers can prevent a blurring of demarcation lines, can prevent any extension of shift work, can stop the ‘selling’ of jobs.

But each such limited victory will be subject to continual efforts by the employers to roll it back, which can only be countered by extending the area of struggle, by moving from a defensive struggle within present day society, to an offensive struggle aimed at changing society in its entirety. Workers who begin by taking for granted much of existing society have to learn, through the struggle itself, that revolutionary change is necessary if they are to hang on to their initial gains.

The argument can be put in a slightly different way. You cannot fight consistently for control over new machinery unless you challenge the whole way in which all machinery is owned and controlled in capitalist society. The struggle over the issues raised by the new technology has a dynamic which brings in much wider political considerations.
 

Methods of struggle

PRECISELY BECAUSE the questions raised by the struggle for control of the new technology are so fundamental, they cannot be dealt with just by using traditional trade union, tactics.

The strike is an excellent weapon for achieving many aims. It can often force wage increases. Certain powerful groups of workers can even use it to completely tear apart government policy, as the miners showed in 1972 and 1974. It can make nonsense of anti-working class laws, as the dockers and the engineers showed in the same years.

But the strike has its limitations. It leaves the employer in control of the factory or office, and the workers outside. That is why the strike is often not a particularly good weapon for fighting redundancies or factor closures – it can play into the employer’s hands by achieving what he wants – getting workers out of the way so that he has a free hand to move machinery and raw materials.

The same problem often arises in struggles over the new technology. The employer often welcomes the closure of his factory or office for a few weeks, so that he can use contractors to install new machinery and begin to train unskilled and often non-unionised to run it. This has happened several times in the US.

There is only one way to counter any such manoeuvre – it is to stop production and to stay inside the factory or office, to occupy it. The occupation is the only effective answer to any attempt by an employer to lock out or sack workers who refuse to operate the new technology on his terms.

But the occupation is no good by itself, any more than the strike is. While you are in occupation of one of his factories or offices, the employer will be trying to cover his losses by getting work done elsewhere. In both the US and France, newspaper publishers have shifted production wholesale to unorganised plants in order to break union resistance.

This can only be countered by using the occupied plant as a base to launch flying pickets. Pickets need to be sent from the occupation to stop other firms taking over work normally done by those in struggle. Delegations have to be sent to ensure blacking of the firm’s products by other trade unionists. Efforts have to be made to get commitments to sympathy action from other factories and offices – especially if any effort is made to evict the occupation or to arrest flying pickets.

No doubt many of those involved in the struggle over the new technology will not at first like the suggestion for militant forms of struggle. It has to be explained patiently to them, through regular meetings and regular leaflets, that a desperate situation demands desperate measures.

It is no good the union negotiators believing they have everything in hand and keeping the majority of people on the factory or office floor completely in the dark.

Here again, the course of the struggle itself will challenge many of the ideas that previously have held people back from action. When they find that High Court writs are used to try to break the occupation, and police to disrupt picket lines, many workers will begin to see for the first time that it is not only the individual employer who demands that technological advance increases profits at the expense of jobs and working conditions, but the whole apparatus of present day society.
 

Wider demands

THE DEMANDS we have suggested so far relate to the particular workers in a particular factory or office. But in the course of the struggle over new technology much wider issues are raised. Just as the tactics involved in the struggle have to stretch out beyond the individual factory or office, so too do the demands raised.

A national shorter working week

So far, we have stressed the necessity for acceptance by management of a shorter working week before new technology is allowed in. But this demand will not always be accepted by the workers in particular workplaces. Often the new technology will not be a threat to jobs in that workplace, since increased work will be taken on there with the new techniques, at the expense of other factories or offices, where sackings will take place.

A national struggle for an hour off the working day, without loss of pay, in each industry is the only answer to this problem. Union negotiators must no longer be allowed to drop this demand first as they have, year after year, in the past.

Work or full pay, regardless of the individual firm’s ‘ability to afford it’

The shorter working week will not in itself create jobs for all those who find themselves threatened by the new technology. In some occupations the new technology is going to mean one person doing the work previously done by three. In such cases the demand must be that the new technology is used to pay the workforce the full wage, even if their work is not ‘necessary’.

Individual firms will often claim they cannot ‘afford’ this demand. They will say that if they keep ‘non-productive’ workers on the payroll, they will be forced out of business by their rivals.

Yet we know that throughout industry as a whole the new technology is creating the possibility of the creation of more wealth than ever before. Why should any worker have to suffer, just because of the accident of where he or she works?

It is capitalist control over industry that causes new technology to wreak havoc with workers’ lives. It is because the economy is organised on the basis of individual firms competing with each other, to the benefit of the directors, shareholders (if they are private firms) and those who lend money to them (if they are state firms), that the workers are made to suffer from inventions that should make us all better off.

The only logical thing for those who work to do is to kick out those who run things along such absurd and inhuman lines.

In the case of private industry, that means the demand for:

Nationalisation of industry

Without compensation to the old owners, with the workers in the industry having the right to supervise the management of the newly nationalised concern so as to make sure that there is no run down in the work force or speed-up of the work.

In already nationalised industries, it means the demand for:

An end of control of nationalised industries by those who subject them to the same absurd drive for profits as private firms; and a workers’ veto over any run down in the workforce or any increase in the speed of work.

But this new form of nationalisation in the interests of the workers is not possible unless the government is forced to stop treating nationalised industries as capitalist firms.

That means:

Forcing the government to guarantee the jobs, wages and working conditions of all workers affected by the new technology.

The experience of the last few years shows that such guarantees are not going to be forthcoming from governments. Labour or Tory, without immense struggles – and even then these governments will retreat from any guarantees the moment big business puts pressure on them and the workers’ pressure subsides a little.

The struggle for such guarantees can only be assured of permanent success when workers control the introduction of new technology as part of their overall control over society.

And that requires the complete destruction of the power of the existing employer class.

It requires the abolition of the state of affairs in which immense power lies in the hands of judges and police chiefs and army generals whom no-one elects but who are the friends and relatives of those who own industry.

It requires the replacement of governments which are tied by a thousand threads to big business and the banks by a government directly accountable to those whose labour creates the wealth.

In short, only a complete socialist transformation of society can provide final protection against the effects of the new technology. The fight to control the microprocessor is part and parcel of the fight for that transformation.


Last updated on 7 March 2010