[These quotes appeared in a special section on the Midwest Conference on Technology, Jobs and Community, in the Vol. 22, No. 10 issue of the People's Tribune newspaper]
"We are, indeed, entering into a new period in history -- one in which machines increasingly replace human beings in the process of making and moving goods and providing services. ... 'What if there were really no more jobs?' asked Newsweek [in an issue dedicated to technological unemployment]. The idea of a society not based on work is so utterly alien to any notion we have about how to organize large numbers of people into a social whole that we are faced with the prospect of having to rethink the very basis of the social contract."
-- from "The End of Work," by Jeremy Rifkin
With the end of work, what's happening to people? Where's the social force to rethink and reorganize society for the betterment of all?
KAREN REID, Gary, Indiana: You see a new class forming with young people especially. They are confused and they don't have any alternatives. They aren't being prepared for this new revolutionary technology. We have a group of young people in our city that have been graduating over the last six years that are unemployed -- no means of being employed, they're undereducated. These forces that work against them, they don't understand them. They're reacting to them in different ways. We have 6,000 high school graduates that are undereducated and lack the skills to even compete on the college level. A PC [personal computer] is an unfamiliar object to them. These people are part of that new class, the permanent underclass that develops. We haven't seen poverty as we're going to see it. If you're not preparing your child now, in the midst of all this turmoil -- especially when you're living on the bricks, which can be overwhelming -- and you've got to prepare this child for the coming century with skills where they'll be able to survive, that's another added burden. How do I do that? That involves organizing.
JIM DAVIS, Chicago, Illinois: Ten years, ago people thought that a job in the computer industry was a job for life. That's not true anymore. Our work can be done anyplace in the world. IBM has moved software work to Mexico, Texas instruments now does programming work in India. Sun Microsystems has hired computer designers for just a few hundred dollars a year in Russia. New technologies also cut the amount of people needed to design and program computers. People in high-tech fields are not immune to the technology revolution and engineers are being replaced just as auto workers are. We are joining everyone else being pushed out of the economy. It's a new class which has no choice but to fight to reorganize society to put this great technology to work for everyone.
JON RICE, Chicago, Illinois: We need to work with people who have a lot of morality and very little in the sense of materialism, and with people who have more. The point is, we have to control the morality of technology, its ethics. The technology is here, we certainly don't want to get rid of it. We want it to work for the good of all people. That is, hesitant to impact on anybody until it is certain to be positive for everybody. Definitely not the profit motive. I mean subverting the current morality that says that greed is holy, profits come first. If it [technology] gives off plenty, then it should give off in a more equitable way.
STEPHANIE SHANKS-MEILE, Portage, Indiana: As a sociologist I'm trying to inform people and create some social change. When I get to teaching people, they are frightened and angry. That's because I'm up against the media, government, all these promoters of tired ideas. Scientists are looking for genetic markers that are being linked to social behaviors. A biological explanation for the violence in our inner cities. It's the same old blaming the victim, dating back to Social Darwinism, or to Nazi Germany, that somehow it's a biological inferiority. They're walking backwards in time!
******************************************************************
This article originated in the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE (Online Edition), Vol.
22 No. 10 / March 6, 1995; P.O. Box 3524, Chicago, IL 60654, pt@noc.org
For free electronic subscription, email: pt.dist-request@noc.org
Feel free to reproduce; please include this message with reproductions of this article.