The Perils of Automation

By Judy Gregory

The following is excerpted from a speech delivered by Judy Gregory of Working Women at the October 1981 Women at Work Expo sponsored by WomenSpace.

Automation of the office is one of the fastest growing trends in America. More than 10 million people work at video-display terminals (VDTs) in the United States today, terminals which barely existed a decade ago. Businessmen extol the virtues of the "Computer Age," since automation provides tremendous increases in productivity. Office automation has improved jobs for some people, and has the potential to improve office jobs overall. New technology could and should make our jobs easier, less tedious, and more enjoyable. It has the potential to upgrade our jobs, our pay and our skills. The increased productivity brought about by the addition of new equipment can and should be reflected with more rest breaks, more pay, and/or shorter work weeks or a combination of all three.

But the truth is that office automation doesn't benefit managers and secretaries equally. For women in the office, office automation raises new workplace pressures and concerns about the future of our jobs. For the vast majority of women office workers, ofice automation as it is being implemented today poses serious problems, including the deskilling and devaluing of our work, the potential for job loss on a large scale in the future, and increased risks to office workers' health associated with increased stress and strain from working with VDTs in repetitive jobs under high pressure. Further, with the increase in automation, the things clerical workers like most about their jobs are threatened with elimination: variety of tasks and the opportunity to learn new job skills; social contact with other workers; an overview of the office function; an opportunity to exercise judgment; and recognition for our work.

The Rebirth of Routine

Automation is made up of two basic features, the introduction of technology-more advanced machines such as VDTs and reorganization of work, or rationalization, which can be for better or worse. When jobs are rationalized, or "deskilled," each job is broken down into its smallest possible components. Decision-making is taken out so that cach person can work faster, doing a standardized fragment of the larger task. When this happens, clerical jobs become routine and repetitive.

Most women office workers will find themselves in jobs which are closely supervised and increasingly

"specialized," meaning that they do ever smaller fractions of the larger task. Each job thus requires less training, and offers less potential for advancement. For example, in a large Cincinnati corporate headquarters, the jobs of a group of secretaries were broken down into five subtasks when wordprocessing equipment was brought in. One secretary typed all day, one entered data all day, one took it out, and so on. Now, each woman must complete a tour of duty

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in each subtask before she can be considered for advancement. In other words, she has to be promoted four times just to get back to where she started!

Looked at closely, we see that the much vaunted "Office of the Future" is little more than a recreation of the Factory of the Past. "Electronic mail" and the "paperless office" sound like science fiction, but rationalization is as old as the steam engine.

Lower Pay the Computer Way

Management consultants point with pride to portable computer terminals, which will allow women with small children to work out of their homes, supposedly creating freer lifestyles. However, portable terminals are more likely to mean piecework for "homebound" clericals, rather than a freer lifestyle. With piecework, employees get paid only for the amount they produce, and are not in a position to de-

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mand higher pay or employee benefits.

Automation is also contributing to lowering pay for clericals. In taking skills out of our jobs, wage ceilings stay as low as possible. As a programmer for AT&T put it, "The work must be very carefully designed in the programming department so that the great bulk of it can be done by minimum wage clerks with virtually no training". Employers also reduce labor costs by increasing our workload and speed without increasing our pay. In 1979, fulltime VDT operators averaged only $7 a week more than conventional typists in spite of the fact that typing speed and output increase 50 percent to 150 percent when word processing equipment is used.

The Computer Takeover

Ultimately many managers hope to replace as many clericals as possible. Here's how one bank manager put it in a seminar on automation:

The way I look at it, you've got your choice. You can have your two "Suzie tellers" over here, with their vacation days, their sick children, their annual demands for cost-ofliving raises and desires for promotions, or you can have your two automatic teller machines, which can work all night, never get sick or need a vacation, and which only need to be upgraded every five years. It's your choice.

Clerical work is still the fastest-growing occupation in the U.S. in the 1980's. But in ten to fifteen years, we could see a drastic reduction in the workforce. This raises a long-term social concern for us: where will new jobs come from if employment in the service industries slows down at the same time manufacturing jobs are declining?

Automation and "Women's Work"

Another negative result of automation is the perpetuation of sex segregation in the office workforce. The very first operational computer, the ENIAC, used to perform calculations for the atom bomb in 1944 and 1945, was successfully programmed by women. One hundred young women, with basic college training in math, were hired to do what was ironically considered "clerical work" and thus "women's work". Almost immediately, however, computer programming occupations were defined as technical and professional, and became overwhelmingly male. Today, 96 percent of keypunch operators are women, while only 19 percent of computer specialists are women. There are an estimated 250,000 openings for computer programmers; this is an excellent opportunity to upgrade women and minority workers into these new jobs.

A sociological study of five large employers in 1977 found that when computerization was introduced, the proportion of low-level clerical jobs remained the same, and that clericals were rarely upgraded to fill new skilled jobs. The study found that automated clerical jobs were more mechanical and narrow, and that "the main avenues for clerical workers are either horizontal or downward,” but not up.

Health Hazards

Evidence is also mounting that the new equipment being used and the way work is being structured in the automated office pose serious hazards to the health of clerical workers, especially in the areas of occupational stress and VDTs. Recent studies show that. women clerical workers already experience higher levels of stress on the job than men or women in most other occupations. Secretaries rank secondhighest as victims of stress-related diseases, including coronary heart disease (CHD), according to a 1977 study by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) of the Department of H.E.W.

Recent findings of the Framingham Heart Study

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