IT and society: IT and employment.

Introduction

Most of this book has concentrated on the technology of information processing and its business applications. This final chapter covers its impact on society in general.

• We look at its impact on work and employment. Here, IT is changing the content of jobs. Old skills and practices are disappearing, and new ones emerging. New machines and new products are developed at an ever­ increasing rate, creating new markets and jobs, while companies and industries that stick with old technology decline, shedding jobs.

• Turning to education and training, we see that com­puter-based training is steadily encroaching on tra­ditional methods.

• We look also at the impact of IT on commerce, including retailing and banking. 'Intelligent' cash cards are making their appearance, and supermarket point-of-sale termi­nals that analyse our purchases, update the store's records, and even dispense cash from our bank accounts are now part of the everyday shopping scene.

• We consider too its impact on the home. Here, the microchip is used in more and more appliances. We read of the 'intelligent home', in which the central heating system, the burglar alarm, the cooker, the video, and other systems are all linked into and controlled by a computer.

• Further examples of the way IT impacts society at large can be seen in the growing use of computers in all aspects of public administration and national defence.

The Gulf War graphically illustrated the devastating effect of computers applied to battle control systems and guided bombs. We consider at the end of this chapter the impact of IT on personal privacy and national security.

IT and employment

The IT revolution is just the latest in a long line of technological revolutions: the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, and so on. All these technological advances have had two main effects upon employment:

• They have altered the pattern of employment, as old skills and jobs become obsolete and new ones emerge. During this transition period, inevitable social disloca­tions arise.

• They have resulted in increased productivity, so that more is produced for the same amount of labour. This has led to increased wealth, to the ability of society to support jobs that are not concerned with the direct production of food and other material products, and also to increased leisure. The increased leisure may express itself as shorter working hours, or actual unem­ployment. (In earlier times this unemployment mani­fested itself in the rise of the 'leisured classes'. Only in recent times has it resulted in 'working class' unemployment.)

The technological advances that have occurred in the last couple of centuries (i.e. since the start of the industrial revolution) differ from earlier advances in two important respects:

• They have happened very rapidly, so that the social dislocations have been more acute. Large numbers of people can be thrown out of work in the space of only a few years. And people with jobs need significant amounts of retraining several times in their working lives.

• They involved a heavy investment in manufacturing plant. This has led, in the initial phase of the advance, to a significant increase in employment.

The current technological advance is based upon the wide­ spread adoption of the microchip in manufacturing plant and in manufactured products. The various elements of computer-integrated manufacturing technology are appearing- robots, automatic materials handling, CAD/CAM, and so on (see Chapter 10). The investment in this technology should result in a significant increase in both output and employment in the industrialized world in the short term as new kinds of machines and new kinds of factories are developed and constructed. The long-term effects may be static or declining employment.

One of the features of technological advance is the changing employment patterns and the need for new skills. This is manifesting itself at present by the concern being expressed by many industries in many parts of the developed world at the shortage of suitably trained and skilled labour.

IT and employment patterns

As I've said, one of the effects of technological advance is increased productivity and greater wealth. This reduces the labour required for the production of food and for other basic economic tasks, and increases the ability of society to sustain other types of jobs. So, over the centuries, we have seen a steady movement of labour away from agriculture, mining, and other 'primary' industries, through 'secondary'

(i.e. manufacturing) industries, and into the 'tertiary' (ser­vice industry) sector of the economy.

• A few centuries ago most of the labour force worked in primary sector, on the land. Today, the figure is one or two percent.

• A few decades ago, most of the labour force was employed in manufacturing.

• Today, most of the labour force works in service industries.

This steady movement in the pattern of employment is likely to continue, and even accelerate with the introduction of computer-integrated manufacturing. It may be that in two decades from now manufacturing employment will fall to the kinds of levels that we associate with farming, with perhaps 95% of jobs being in the service sector. Many people in the service sector are 'information' workers, using IT equipment such as computers to process their work.

One of the features that characterized the industrial revolution was the concentration of manufacturing in factor­ies with expensive large-scale plant and production lines. So there was a mass movement of people away from the countryside into the towns and cities where the factories were concentrated. Although the industrial revolution raised living standards enormously, this mass migration to urban areas lowered the quality of many aspects of people's lives. In contrast to this, the information technology revolu­tion is characterized by the miniaturization of computer components and the development of communications net­ works. As a result, the need for information workers to travel to work in large city offices is reduced. Many jobs can be done in remote locations, linked electronically to the central site. So many companies are moving their offices away from congested centres of population, and a number of individuals now carry out a significant part of their work on personal computers at home, able to communicate with their organization's central computer via the telephone network. This reverses some of the negative influences of the industrial revolution, leading to improvements in the quality of life.