The Perils of Automation (continued from page 4)

show that women clerical workers with children and blue-collar husbands are almost twice as likely to develop CHD as men. The study also found that women who work as clericals, regardless of marital status or family size, suffer nearly twice the rate of heart disease of all other working women. The study found that clericals who developed CHD were more likely 1) to have an unsupportive boss, 2) to suppress feelings of anger, and 3) to experience few job changes. We can see that the automated office exaggerates the very factors that lead to stress. The com puter becomes the ultimate unsupportive boss, lowering pay through deskilling work and thus increasing economic stress, and systematically eliminating decision-making. The office of the future is becoming a stress factory for clerical women.

NIOSH released a report in February 1981 in which they found higher levels of job stress among VDT operators at Blue Shield's offices in San Francisco than they had ever found in any occupational group studied, including air traffic controllers. The NIOSH study also compared three groups—VDT clericals, "conventional clericals" doing the same work' but with regular typewriters, pencil and paper, and professionals using VDTs, mostly newspaper writers and editors. The research team found the highest stress among the VDT clericals, the "conventional clericals" in the middle, and the lowest stress among the professionals using VDTs. The differences, they believe, are due to the conditions of the professionals' jobs: they have more control on the job, more avenues for job satisfaction and pleasure from their work, they can decide how to meet a deadline, and they get credit for what they do. The clericals' jobs are completely rigid.

Thus, it's not the technology, it's the way managers use the technology that creates new levels of job stress and health risks and threatens our job satisfaction.

Automated Discipline

In addition to lowering labor costs, management seeks to increase control over the workforce. The underlying principles of automation are succinctly stated by a consultant for Computer Decisions magazine: "The move to electronics finally gives managers a way to enforce discipline and standardization in the office". A "bonus” of office automation is that business can monitor and measure the clerical function. And, as a representative from Arthur D. Little, the country's top automation consulting firm, put it, "Let's face it. When you get down to the bottom line, you've got 850 clerical workers running around your corporation who you just can't control. You'll never have enough

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managers to control them. This technology is the only way you can control those people".

Solutions

A great many clerical workers file their objections to automation-by quitting. The extremely high turnover rate is a problem the industry would rather not broadcast. A researcher for one of the leading firms told Working Women:

Word processing was an initial disaster and still has 100 percent turnover because an oversimplistic view of secretarial jobs was the basis for reorganizing plans that totally screwed up the jobs, changing secretarial work from a socially integrated environment into a production line where the class distinctions were more obvious and the opportunities for interaction far more limited.

Response by management to the resistance to.. automation is varied, and therein lies the debate. In some companies, management is trying to implement automation in a decentralized fashion, preserving the job structure and enhancing existing jobs.

Fortunately, office automation is still a development in process. There is still an opportunity to shape office automation so that it satisfies management's désire for higher productivity and takes into account the well-being and job satisfaction of the twenty million office workers who will be affected.

Job content, variety of tasks, ability to exercise judgment, recognition for work performed, opportunity to advance, a living wage, social contact with other workers, a natural work pace-these are high on the list of needs of women office workers that must be built into the future of office work.

Alienation of blue collar assembly line workers is legendary in this country. No society that places any value on the quality of life of its working people could knowingly create conditions of work that lead to such alienation. Yet that is what we risk doing to the nation's twenty million office workers unless current problems of automation are challenged, and soon. Computer industry analysts predict that within two years this will be a "frozen" technology, and that "within the next five years it will be too late❞ to undo adverse effects.

But just as the office continues to change, so do the attitudes and concerns of women office workers. In the 1970's we began to organize for equal pay and equal opportunities. In the 1980's we will also organize to influence automation-while the technology is still in flux-to insure the health, wellbeing, and employment of women office workers.

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