Word: workers
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...reaction to a simple football match seems exaggerated or inappropriate, consider Pittsburgh for a moment. Primarily a blue-collar worker's town, most of the people who live here, from lawyers to contractors to mill workers to coal miners, are in some way involved in the steel industry. Consider also, that the recent slump in the steel market, aggravated in part by the recession and by competitive foreign steel markets such as Japan's and West Germany's, has forced many plants to close down, leaving many thousands of steel workers unemployed. The layoff of the steelworkers has serious repercussions...
...This is a worker-based, nationwide movement undermining Soviet authority," Michael L. Nact, associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy School, said yesterday. Because U.S. leverage in the area is extremely limited, the possibility of a Soviet takeover in Poland is "quite high," Nact added...
...present, that is what is happening, and it can continue as long as corporations do not make the shift to robots faster than the natural rate of worker attrition, which now runs as high as 15% in the metalworking plants that are ripe for robotization. (One reason why Japan has been able to shift so extensively to robots is that Japanese corporations have a tradition of caring for their employees for life.) But as the robots take over more and more jobs-and they can do the more pleasant and interesting tasks as well as the dull and dirty ones...
...rumblings. Says Russ Cook, U.A.W. district committeeman at GM's Buick plant in Flint: "If we don't get smarter and start combatting the machines, we will be cannibalizing ourselves and competing against one another for jobs." Adds Larry Jones, a Chrysler metal-shop worker: "They say they are only going to put robots on boring jobs. But in an auto plant, all the jobs are boring jobs...
Aside from the specific problem of lost jobs, Shaiken warns of more intangible difficulties. "The use of robots has social costs that are not being addressed by anyone in the U.S. today," he says. "By designing a production process that minimizes human participation, you freeze out the worker's control and you freeze out his initiative. We often overlook the impact of robots on the jobs that remain. Today, if a worker assembling components has a daily quota of 100 units to fill, he can, for example, work flat out and assemble 60 in the first half...