'This Call May Be Recorded'

...The author has come to these conclusions after spending the last decade visiting worksites in various industries where computers have taken hold: "machine shops and auto assembly lines...

...Although few would guess that members of a profession requiring years of training would be subject to the same trends as unskilled CSRs, Head detects similar patterns creeping into the realm of physicians...

...He does not interpret this inequality as resulting from higher wages flowing to those whose skills are in greater demand...

...Besides makingjobs more personally degrading, IT combines with declining unionization, low-wage competition from depressed regions at home and abroad, deregulation, and other sources of weakened worker bargaining power to stifle efforts to increase compensation, regardless of advances in productivity...

...More ambitiously, Head also presents a harsher picture of growing wage inequality in the U. S. than most economists would...

...According to this almost utopie view, IT has improved productivity, fostered teamwork, increased the demand for employees with more sophisticated skills, and allowed them to do their jobs under less stringent supervision than in the past...

...software startups, call centers, hospitals, outpatient clinics...

...In The New Ruthless Economy, however, Simon Head declares that no matter how often it is repeated by politicians, the business press and much of the economics profession, the idealization of the IT revolution's impact on labor is a grave distortion...

...The '90s fads in "re-engineering" and "enterprise resource planning" (ERP) amounted to the imposition of Frederick Winslow Taylor's techniques of "scientific management" on the service industries...

...This is exploitation in the classic manner of the 19th and early 20th centuries," Head writes, "but there is a basic difference between contemporary practices and those of a century ago...

...He paid particular attention to service employment, where 80 per cent of Americans now earn their living...

...Still, there is no gainsaying the grimness of the digital assembly lines Headportrays...

...The authority of bosses lingers in determining broad strategic aims for their firms...

...The situation will not improve, as Head says, until workers either achieve greater organizational strength within firms, or are assured more security from the outside...

...Some parts of Head's argument are more convincing than others...

...By ""control" I do not mean dictating what decisions businesses should make, but simply putting in place a set of rules to protect their employees and their customers...

...As a result they tend to be transient and powerless before management and its automated methods of discipline...

...whether a patient with advanced cancer should or should not receive a course of chemotherapy...

...The tragedy of today's economy is not that management uses digital power to oppress workers, but that it has almost no incentive not to do so...

...Head argues that IT has caused "work methods born in machine shops and on assembly lines [to] cross over and colonize the offices, call centers, hospitals, and conference rooms of the nonmanufacturing economy...

...Reviewed by Joel Rogers Professor of law, political science, and sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison A myth has grown up about the effects of information technology (IT) on work in today's economy...

...Rather, he contends that it reflects a broad "skill debilitation" across the workforce, and a consequential shredding of bargaining power...

...In call centers Head locates the most startling examples of what he terms "digital assembly lines...

...The insurance companies doctors answer to in the provision of "managed care" strictly limit their discretion, for example, virtually proletarianizing the medical profession and stripping it of its traditional roles...

...But they are now so richly informed by reports and suggestions from workers streaming to their in boxes that "management" is simply another job...

...and whether a patient with chronic illness such as congestive heart failure should be treated in a hospital, a clinic, or at home...

...Its customary connotations of willfulness and coercion have been left behind...

...This popular vision of a new IT-driven corporate egalitarianism augurs a paradise of digitally enhanced professional fulfillment...

...Head is right to be concernedby those applications, and right to regret that the more constructive uses of this tool are not the most pervasive ones...

...He is certainly correct in saying that IT is used to support newly oppressive management practices...

...But the real story here is the enormous power of management over workers' lives, not information technology...

...Since the previous layers of management and monitoring have been peeled away, hierarchies have yielded to flat personnel structures, shimmering with equality and flexibility...

...Finally, he finds that the impact of IT on productivity is ambiguous at best, and that the quality of services associated with it is almost always poor...

...Second, advanced communications technology has permitted companies to construct monopolies where previously they had been unmanageable...

...More important, his contention that IT is substantially to blame for wage stagnation and inequality, specifically through its effects on workplaces, seems vastly overdrawn...

...As a society we have surrendered the notion of controlling the market and its masters...

...WHAT The New Ruthless Economy makes clear is that the application of information technology in the workplace is not benign...

...Health care institutions and call centers—the home of those "customer service representatives" (CSRs) for whom we spend a great deal time on hold—are the scenes of his most disturbing findings...

...American capitalism is now widely deficient in such rules...

...The corporate dogs are out, but politically we're still on hold...

...The real effects of IT, says Head, a former correspondent for the Financial Times and the New Statesman who is currently the Director of the Project on Technology and the Workplace at the Century Foundation, are the erosion of workers' skills, the tightening of managers' control, and stagnant wages for the majority of the American workforce...

...Ford and Taylor were mostly interested in controlling the bodily movements of workers tied to machine shops and assembly lines...

...His book is a welcome caution against all the claptrap we have heard about "empowered" workplaces...

...But today's scientific managers are also trying to control the minds of their white-collar employees...

...Virtually unskilled CSRs have little job tenure and near zero unionization...

...Head notes that such structures, facilitated by IT, extend to "every conceivable aspect of medical practice: whether a certain drug should or should not be prescribed...

...how long a stay in hospital should last...

...semiconductor plants and design bureaus...

...And eletronically savvy, substantially self-directed workers sort themselves into groups equipped to solve whatever problems they might face...

...Re-engineering and ERP do this by imposing upon these processes the standardization, measurement and control of the old industrial assembly line...

...whether a surgical procedure should or should not be performed...

...These extend to their nearly constant monitoring for fidelity to pre-programmed scripts for dealing with customer questions and complaints, and limitless pressure to reduce the length of calls...

...Taylor, who along with Henry Ford pioneered the methods of mass production, sought to control workers' movements and increase their efficiency through the routinization of tasks and close observation of their performance: "Relying on computers and their attendant software, re-engineering and ERP automate, simplify, join together, and speed up business processes...

...Two other consequences of IT are more significant factors in the depression of wages...

...IT's effects on the skills of America's workers are a mixed bag, and we do not have enough information yet to arrive at his broad, ominous judgment...

...IT is a powerful tool for management control and worker subordination...

...Computer software also automates thankless tasks out of existence and otherwise complements the talents of its users, who therefore operate with sharper focus...

...First, IT permits more competitive markets in places where workers and unions could formerly extract positional rents...

...Instead, we allow them to control our expectations of shared benefit for our cooperation...

...Despite their heavy reliance on advanced digital technologies, the two practices therefore remain profound 'old economy' phenomena...

...The political will to enable workers to walk away from degrading jobs by imposing a higher social wage, though, is at the moment lacking...

...But he seems overly convinced of a consistent, or even necessarily overwhelming, skill debilitation trend...