analysis
Neeran Naidoo
The impact of telecommunications and information and communication technologies (ICT) on economies, countries and societies is speculative in nature. Much of the current analysis is pinned on case studies. There is little evidence from which to predict the outcome of the trend towards knowledge economies apart from the fact that we need to dovetail behind trends in advanced countries and economies.
Jay Naidoo, former minister of communication, spoke of “more highly paid jobs” or opportunities for software development and “information processing industries”. Lalla Ben Barka, deputy executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa, said: “Empowerment of people comes from access to knowledge societies.”
The global communication infrastructure allows for a globally dispersed workforce for occupations like airline ticketing, accounting, data processing, credit card handling, health care record processing, insurance claim processing, toll-free telephone services, and software development.
American Airlines, for instance, has its data entry employees in Barbados. About 3 000 jobs were created, the same number as those employed in the sugar cane industry. Some jobs were replaced by newer technology like optical character recognition, which made the need for data capture redundant..
IBM has a worldwide 24-hour software development programme with 30 programmers in China, India, Belarus and Latvia. The programmers are linked to the IBM team in Seattle. This cuts both the development cost and the time factor.
Developing countries, however, can be in the unfavourable position of competing with one another for the same employment opportunities. Competition can encourage countries to offer worse conditions like keeping labour costs low to attract investment. This also encourages low wages and low skilled jobs with little prospect for improvement.
India, for instance, exported $1,5-billion worth of software in 1997 but skilled software engineers earn 20% of their counterparts in the United States. There are also no restrictions on investing in countries that violate human rights.
The developing world’s share of foreign direct investment (FDI) is still concentrated on low-wage and low-skilled jobs. Developing countries have to create a highly skilled labour force or else they become dispensers of cheap labour only.
The growth of the African telecommunications infrastructure can facilitate service-sector employment opportunities. While “leapfrogging” stages of development, the work environment is also transformed to include features of the leading economies a shift from manufacturing to a service economy. However, this does not imply that the manufacturing sector disappears. 24% of gross national product in the US comes from values added by manufacturing firms and another 25% of GNP from direct manufacturing.
There is growth in both low-end unskilled occupations like cleaners and gardeners and high-end occupations like those in the professional, creative, management and technical sectors. The fastest growing categories of work are temporary labour and part-time work with an increase in self-employment and tele-work. In Britain these types of jobs rose from 17% in 1965 to 40% in 1991 and from 15% to 33% in Japan over the same period. This has resulted in flexible labour policies and an escalation in the “feminisation” of the workforce, which means more opportunities for women, but under worse conditions. There is also growing insecurity in jobs and income as workers become autonomous without social and institutional protection.
However, it is becoming more difficult to predict with accuracy the impact of ICTs as jobs are created, lost and workers are displaced. Technology can reduce employment needs in the short term but also creates work in the long term, while countries without the technology are unable to provide much employment at all.
Global corporations put pressure on local policies to be more flexible on labour issues. France, Germany and Britain, for instance, have weakened their dismissal laws. There are 27-million workers in 845 export processing zones globally who are not allowed to organise in unions. This is what African labour has to compete with to be globally competitive.
Ironically, developing countries themselves outsourced $585-billion worth of production in 1994 to take advantage of cheap labour in other developing countries.
The information and communication network has the potential to erode trade union activity as labour becomes increasingly global and work becomes fragmented, weakening labour organisations. There is no clear distinction between physical and mental labour as was evident in the Fordist model of industrialisation. Under these conditions, unions have to reinvent their roles and make the conceptual shift from industrial to informational economies.
The traditional working week no longer exists. Corporations change as they outsource some of their work and traditional class differences also become increasingly blurred but it is uncertain to what extent this work structure results in a polarisation of society.
Neeran Naidoo is an assistant to the Speaker of the National Assembly