Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
4
Technology and Employment
A common starting point in the analysis of the relationship between energy and
employment, and indeed technology and employment generally, is the distinction
between capital-intensive and labour-intensive projects. In the former, the hardware
dominates, in the extreme in a completely automated plant; in the latter, workers
dominate, in the extreme performing traditional farming or other purely manual
tasks.
On this view, everything else is strung out between these extremes, and as a soci-
ety we are in the process of moving from manual to high tech, with capital con-
stantly replacing labour. The main driver for this process is said to be the increased
productivity obtained when machines replace (or at least augment) people. The
result is increased profi tability, on the assumption that the cost of investing in major
new expensive capital plant will be paid back by an increase in output, and the
reduction in the need to pay large numbers of workers. Industrial history has been
shaped by this process, which has often displaced unskilled labour in some sectors
but also replaced skilled labour in others, as craft work and small batch production
have been replaced by mass production in factories using unskilled labour. But, in
turn, mass production has then given way to automated process production, with a
few highly skilled staff (Elliott 1975 ).
In reality the process is more complex and uneven. While labour is replaced in
some sectors, it expands in others, e.g. in services and retail, until some of them are
also automated. The debate over the impacts of automation in the 1970s assumed
that this process would continue. Optimists looked to a future of leisure with reduced
work hours and a cornucopia of automated production while pessimists to a future
of mass unemployment and deskilling, driven by a triumphant capitalism, benefi t-
ing only an elite (Elliott and Elliott 1976 ).
In the event, capitalism has triumphed, but so far has arguably managed to spread
affl uence to some degree by accelerating growth in both production and consump-
tion, using advanced technology. We have seen the creation of mass consumerism
and global markets, often based on new advanced products, with new groups of
workers in newly developing countries taking over from the earlier unskilled work-
force and the rise of technically skilled workforce alongside a vast new service and
retail sector. With new patterns and types of work emerging (Rifkin 1995 ) and major
changes in the global economy, there have been growing concerns about the long
term.
Certainly whether this process can or should continue indefi nitely has long been
the subject of debate. With the exploitation of natural resources and the planet
deepening, it has been argued that there may be internal economic contradictions
in the process (O'Connor 1991 ). Karl Marx saw this in terms of the falling rate of
profi t as rival chunks of capital tried to expand, forcing capitalist to reduce wages.
The vast increase in productivity through technology has mostly avoided that out-
come for the moment: some of the benefi ts have spread. However, there is of course
a vast underclass of sweated labour, who barely enjoy any benefi ts, and the potential
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