Tony Brown

Centre for Popular Education

University of Technology, Sydney

Attention is turning to the workplace as a site for educational research, assessment, and certification as the changes to vocational and higher education initiated by national training reform has evolved.

Yet workplace reform and workplace learning are too often presented in a non-problematic way. The key tasks for educators are described as being the need to ensure workplace competencies are in line with industry needs, that workers' skills and technological know-how are kept up to date, and contribute to smooth and effective communication between managers and workers in order to make efficient competitive enterprises.

Much of the labour process and education literature interested in these issues in the 1980s and 1990s argued that older Taylorist or Fordist production methods had been superseded and replaced by newer flexible systems which recognise and develop workers' skills and lead to more rewarding work and career paths. New production methods would lead to more efficient enterprises featuring quality systems, the harnessing of worker and management knowledge to produce new synergies, improved productivity and in general mutual benefits for labour and management seeing off the old divide characteristic of Taylorism.

An alternative view sees changes in the workplace from a quite different perspective. The introduction of quality systems, teams, lean production, reengineering, just in time production and so on are explained as new attempts to intensify the work process, to increase productivity and the rate of profit while workers' wages rise either marginally or not at all and where for many job loss is the outcome. And central to the introduction of teams and lean production are new methods of acquiring and appropriating workers' knowledge.

Adult educators under the guise of human resource staff and/or trainers are pivotal to facilitating the attendant changes of restructuring. Their role is to assist workers in the transition from the old to the new by ensuring that the required new skills and attitudes are understood by the workforce. For some this role presents no dilemmas as they perceive their job to be one of facilitating their employers' changes in the name of improvement. For others it is more difficult as they see they are caught between the workers who lose their jobs as the enterprise is downsized and those who remain who are required to produce more with less. They are confronted by the question of whose interests these changes are made and have to resolve their personal dilemma of how to act in such a situation.

An area that has been little investigated is how workers have understood the dramatic changes that have occurred in the areas of work; industry and award restructuring; training reform and skill development; as well as wider issues of national economic policy. This paper describes research undertaken at a clothing factory which draws on the accounts of workers' experiences of change at their workplace over the period. Incorporating workers' accounts of their experience is important for two reasons. Firstly, it was in the interests of workers and trade union members that, at least in part, motivated trade unions to embark on their course of action of restructuring the workplace, awards and training. So asking workers to reflect on their experience and to assess what impact those changes have had on their working lives is a crucial means of assessing the benefit of those changes. Secondly, the literature on workplace change and training stands out for the absence of workers' voices in the various accounts of change. These accounts form part of a wider study into Australian trade unions' expectations and assessment of training reform under the Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s.

The first section looks briefly at the polarised debate about the new workplace and then compares modern claims about skill formation, worker autonomy and satisfaction with Taylor's ideas and related management practices this century. Against this context four groups of workers' experiences of teams, quality response units, award restructuring, joint union / management committees and the training associated with these changes are explored.

The literature on the impact of economic restructuring during the 1980s and 1990s in Australia includes, for example, analyses of the effects of restructuring on individual and neighbourhood income distribution (Harding 1994, Gregory & Hunter 1995, and Saunders 1994); industrial relations and work organisation (Bramble 1997, Ewer et al 1991, Hampson 1996, and Mathews 1989, 1990, 1994); and the impact on women's labour market participation (Hall & Fruin 1993, Edwards & Margery 1995, Pocock 1988 and Probert 1995). But the area that has been little investigated is how workers have understood the dramatic changes that have occurred in the areas of work, industry and award restructuring, training reform and skill development, and wider issues of national economic policy. There are exceptions to this lack of attention. In Australia, Foley (1994) has written about how production workers' in an open cut mine learn about the process of workplace change and enterprise bargaining, while overseas, Schied (1998), Greenbaum (1995) and Garson (1989) have incorporated workers views in areas ranging from a manufacturing plant, to the finance and computing industries and electronic based white collar work. Others have been concerned with the areas of informal and incidental learning parts of which focuses on informal and incidental learning in the workplace (Emery 1991, Foley 1995, Field 1990, Field & Ford 1995, and Marsick & Watkins 1991). However, in general workers voices are rarely found in the literature reviewing Australia's economic changes since 1983.

The study was conducted through three stages of interviews. In the first stage interviews were held with senior human resources and plant managers to get their explanation of what workplace changes were introduced and the reasons. In the second stage trade union officials were interviewed. These included national education officers and state based organisers. These interviews covered similar ground to that canvassed with management. In the third stage small groups of workers were interviewed using a semi structured format as the workers were asked to explain what changes had occurred at their workplace, why they thought this had occurred, what impact had it had on their working environment, satisfaction, quality and pay. In addition observations were made of the workplace and the organisation of the quality response teams.

In the workplace interviews two different types of small groups were interviewed. In the first instance union representatives who were members of the Implementation Committee at Clothing Co. were interviewed. The second group were three teams from the factory floor in different production areas. Training materials and restructured award documents provided valuable information documenting formalised changes and mutually agreed training programs to use with employees. Additional material was taken from recent reports into the clothing industry conducted by government departments and agencies, trade unions and academic texts.

The site was chosen because it is an industry where training reform was actively promoted in the 1990s by both management and unions. It is a highly unionised workplace, it has been extensively restructured and recently introduced a new quality improvement scheme. There is a joint union / management committee and management facilitated my access to the plant and provided space and paid time for their workers to be interviewed.

Clothes Co. employs about 200 people at its clothing plant on the NSW south coast and it is one of the two major workwear clothing companies in Australia. It was established in 1926 as a family company and remained that way until the early 1980s when it became a public company. Its present owners are an American / Dutch multinational company which employs almost three thousand people in four divisions - food, women's wear, clothing and cleaning products - across Australia. It produces and distributes a number of household brand name products.

The discourse around the changes at the site is one of something new happening, with continuous improvements in production, customer service and workplace relations based on team work and mutually beneficial knowledge production. But are these changes so new and are they leading to the sort of improvements that management literature, and much of the labour movement's information and press, in the 1980s and 1990s suggested? Have the promises of increased autonomy and job satisfaction, more meaningful work and career paths, workplace democracy, greater consultation, empowerment, the transition from deskilled to knowledge workers, come about?

Much of the discussion portrays the modern workplace as one which is being released from the constraints of traditional work practices and rigid organisational structures. Flexibility and individual discretion over work processes are key elements in the new managerial terminology, while academic discussion is couched in terms such as post-Fordist production, flexible specialisation, and both outline what type of work and jobs are likely to exist in the future

What have been characterised as Fordist or Taylorist work and production practices have increasingly been viewed as impediments to an enterprise's ability to respond to new, more volatile conditions. Greater responsiveness to market signals, more specialised production, quality rather than quantity, flexibility, innovation etc combined with greater micro electronic technologies it is explained liberate and create 'potential'. It is argued that to realise this potential also involves a restructuring of work organisation and greater access to education and training opportunities and autonomy of the workforce over decision making .

The debate has mostly taken place by positing two views of the introduction of new technology and new work arrangements. The 'sides' taken can be generalised as those who see these developments as being representative of, and offering greater potential for, radical transformation of the capitalist order; and those who believe that while there exist different features to earlier periods of production and accumulation the changes that have occurred represent fundamentally 'more of the same'. The critical question arising from the changes to the organisation of work is the extent to which the contemporary workplace is characterised by management practices which constitute a significant departure from conventional employment relations and which reflect a continuity with past practices.

Optimistic accounts of postindustrial society suggest that workers are becoming or will become the flexible multi-skilled workers of more democratic, technologically informed postindustrial workplaces. (Drucker, 1992; Senge, 1990 and Zuboff, 1988). Zuboff for instance contends that new technology has the ability to empower workers by providing them with information and arguing that complex technologies require better educated, more autonomous workers. She argues 'as work becomes more abstract, requiring flexibility and manipuability, workers experience new challenges and forms of mastery...thus fostering in the workplace relationships which are more intricate, collaborative, and bound by mutual responsibilities to colleagues' (Zuboff 1988 p. 6)

Some, such as Alvin Toffler, predict the replacement of bureaucratic, centralised workplaces by home-based work in what he terms the 'electronic cottage' (Toffler 1980), while others suggest we live in a transformed capitalism, a new age of 'flexible specialisation' in which new technologies support loose networks of autonomous producers and create a workplace populated by autonomous, skilled workers. (Piore & Sabel 1984)

Giving popular expression to these ideas Paul Keating argued that 'The information highway is already here. A revolution in work is occurring before our eyes. By early in the next century as many as a third of all jobs will be in the so-called knowledge based industries. Today without question, knowledge is the most valuable resource a nation can have. We are working as fast as we can to build the bridge by which Australians can get from the old to the new - into new work opportunities, new jobs, new technology. From school to work, from the social margins to the mainstream, from manufacturing to knowledge-based, from unemployment to employment...' (Keating, 1995)

By contrast alternative analyses emphasise the new technology's capitalist character and its tendency to extend and deepen the harsh consequences of capitalist relations of production. They point to the use of computerised technology and networks to extend employer control over workers, even over long distances, and to create automatic systems that can replace the judgements and discretion of expert employees.(Garson 1988)

The re-emergence of home work in the age of computers represents not the advent of decentred, autonomous work but the growth of contingent, insecure employment, the cheapening of production, and the intensification of work. (Boris 1994) It also reproduces and reinforces traditional patterns of gender subordination under capitalism, as women workers are obliged to take low-wage, insecure jobs that simultaneously perpetuate their status as the primary providers of (unpaid) child care and domestic labour. (Phizacklea & Wolkowitz 1995)

Both of these views point to a partial reality. But the real point may be that they miss something more important and that is that the new technology highlights the potential available to reorganise work and economic and social activity but what prevents the flowering of that potentiality are the existing social relations.

The most important lesson to be learned from the introduction of new technology and techniques, is what it tells us about the contradictions of modern capitalism. These technologies are being used in both positive and negative ways in contemporary workplaces which tends to create impulses for change which cannot be fully accommodated without jeopardising capital's ultimate control over production.

The real question is how to assess these various claims. Can we by looking at different workplaces come to some better conclusions about changes taking place in Australia over the past decade and more critically analyse the position of education and training in those changes?

The proponents of these changes imply that recent changes in work organisation and control, new managerial techniques, references to increased worker autonomy and satisfaction and the impact of new technologies are features of the last quarter of the 20th century. Yet any cursory study of the history of work organisation and control and their relationship to technological advance will quickly demonstrate that these issues have being contested throughout this century and indeed can be located in the very nature of the capital / labour conflict.

Appropriating and controlling workers' knowledge of production and the labour process is at the heart of Taylorism. In his Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, Frederick Taylor put forward three principles for separating factory work into small tasks that management could organise. The first was that 'the managers assume...the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workman and then classifying, tabulating, and reducing the knowledge to rules, laws and formulae.' In order to accomplish this feat of gathering knowledge from workers and bringing it under managerial control, Taylor laid out his second principle: 'All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying out department.' To make it all work, Taylor had a third principle, which Braverman describes as the 'use of this monopoly over knowledge to control each step of the labor process and its mode of execution.' (Taylor cited in Braverman p. 112, 113, 119 from F. W. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, New York, Harper, 1947)

The three principles are interconnected. The attempt to take skills away from workers by removing their control over the labour process is supplemented by the separation of conception (thought) from execution (action), which leaves workers with fewer defences against managerial control strategies. As been noted, Taylor's techniques were an attempt to separate the head from the hands.

Following Taylor in the 1920s an Australian, Bernard Muscio, was the first psychologist in the British Empire to call for the 'application of psychology to industry'. A field of industrial psychology - relating psychology to the goal of improving scientific management - was elaborated. In 1917 he wrote in the Australasian Manufacturer that 'where scientific management is carefully and thoroughly applied...the whole establishment works together like one huge machine, almost like a living organism.' (cited in Blackburn 1998. pp. 125, 126)

By the 1930s more new theories of organisation were promoted in response to the Great Depression, the resulting social, economic and political conflicts, and the failure of Taylorism to break worker group solidarity. In America human relations theories emerged. They emphasised industrial and social integration, democratisation of workplace relations, and communication. According to Craig Littler, Taylorism had attempted to:

A similar need to regain managerial authority in workplaces arose after the Second World War. The pro-democratic and anti-authoritarian rhetoric of the war effort did not fit in well with the authoritarian structure of war industries and this, combined with the return of soldiers aroused by democratic and egalitarian sentiments made the need for a new language of work organisation necessary. These techniques went by the names of individual ' job enrichment' or the constitution of 'semi-autonomous work groups'. Rasmus described the purpose of these techniques was to:

To modern ears Taylor's principles of turning work into a series of cut-and-dried rationalised operations sound harsh and even unworkable. Taylor's ideas - the aggressive effort by management to gain control over technical knowledge connected with work - pervade so much of production culture and industrial relations, that we no longer realise it's there. Yet the bulk of office tasks, particularly those in the back offices of banks, insurance companies, credit card processing facilities, and airlines still follow procedures that take the form of Taylor's operations. One example is that of the training methods used by the one of Australia's big four banks. There tellers, call centre operators and telemarketing staff don't have to think when dealing with customers as they are given script cards with opening sentences, dialogue and questions and responses all written out in advance.

Within the labour movement one of the rationales for training reform and industry and award restructuring in Australia was that it would do away with Taylorism. Taylor and Taylorism were demonised. To take just one example from a WA TLC bulletin explaining skill formation:

The document goes on to explain that this outdated system of production is being replaced by a new 'post-fordism' whose features include human centred manufacturing, flexible specialisation; diversified quality production; functional flexibility and the 'flexible firm'. All these new processes need a highly skilled and motivated workforce.

The document summarises this new environment in the following way.

W.A. TLC 1992, p. 5

Restructuring is cloaked in neutral language making it sound as if whatever happens is necessary and even inevitable. A whole new world of work opportunities appear to be opening up. The often repeated zippy sounding phrases also have the effect of putting workers on the defensive when they try to object. The dilemma for some in the labour movement of the reskilling strategies was that they could see better ways to organise the demoralising work that characterised many blue and white collar workers jobs yet were caught in a framework that could only imagine the present system of ownership. As a result they found themselves having to in the end accept the rationale of reorganising work to produce more efficient enterprises and more internationally competitive industries in the national interest.

The lean production system, pioneered in the NUUMI model in the American auto industry has spread to other industries including clothing and textiles. Perhaps the central feature is the creation of teams of workers. Paul Osterman found half of all US firms he surveyed used teams in 1994 (Osterman 1995, pp. 78-88). Others features of the system include Just in Time inventory control; technology designed to minimise indirect labour, increased use of outside contracting and systematic speed-up. Most descriptions contrast team production to the 'scientific management' principles of Taylor. In fact the tendency is in the other direction - to specify every move that a worker makes in much greater detail than before. In team concept plants workers and the teams have little control over basic job design. Management chooses the processes, basic production layout and technologies to be used. Speeding up the pace of work is an intended consequence of standardising services and software.

Reengineering involves a form of work rationalisation that Taylor could never have imagined. In Taylor's day there were few machines that could be counted on and those that were useful were more like individual tools rather than mechanised systems. Now manager have access to a far greater range of strategies to call upon. Reengineering and its components are part of a toolbox of techniques that give top management more control over which jobs can be standardised, which can be combined, and which can be integrated through office and technology.

Training reform mirrored this process through attempting to detail all learning, skills, knowledge and values in the form of skills, tasks, performance and assessment criteria and competencies. It shared with Taylorism the appeal of promising a fair and permanent solution to the industrial and class turmoil of the time. It would balance the need for greater output with the promise of higher wages and would be based on objective or scientific analyses of work and production.

Two economic issues impinge on this scientific analysis. The first deals with the restructuring of the labour market, where people compete for jobs and hope they have the right skills and experience. As companies and organisations are restructured and jobs dismantled more people are pushed into the highly competitive labour market for short-term, temporary or freelance jobs. This has the effect of keeping salaries and wages down.

The second issue concerns the restructuring of the labour process, or the way work is done. More jobs and pieces of jobs have been combined resulting in increased productivity while making work more intensive.

The short survey of different organisational theory and management practices highlight the need to tell stories of workplace change in context. And the context includes not just the technology and techniques but also the reasons for their introduction and use. The restructuring that has occurred in recent times in Australia did not take place over night nor did it come about by accident. Technology and work organisation is created by people, it is a social invention.

At Clothing Co. the organisation of work in the factory was typical of traditional mass production work processes. The work is typically divided into a series of very narrow tasks which are designed to be performed at high speed. The traditional approach to producing a shirt was to group all the sleeve machinists in one section, the cuff and collar machinists in another and so on. It is not uncommon for workers with years of experience to develop competence in sewing only one garment type.

The first changes were facilitated by the award restructuring process in 1989. The restructured award provided for a skill based career path where 162 classifications were compressed into a 5 level skill based classification structure. The amended award (1989) sets out what is expected of a worker at each of the five skill levels. The concluding point of each level acknowledges that the worker 'may commence training in additional skills required to advance to a higher skill level'. There is no evidence that this occurs at Clothing Co, indeed most workers interviewed were unaware that it was even an option and understood that training was only approved if a job vacancy existed and the management wanted someone to acquire the skills for that particular position. The large majority of workers are Skill Levels 2 and 3. There are only a handful of Level 4s and there are no positions at either level 1 or 5.

Enterprise Bargaining

The first Enterprise Bargaining Agreement (EBA), with its commitments made by management and the union, was critically important for the introduction of teams and the reorganisation that subsequently took place.

The first move to teams occurred in 1993 and were called quick response cells. In 1996 teams along the lines of the NUUMI model, were introduced as part of the company's first EBA which had been signed in November 1995. The agreement committed the parties to 'co-operate positively to increase the efficiency, productivity, and international competitiveness of the three plants...in a way which will enhance the career opportunities, quality of working life and job security of employees.' (EBA, p. 5) The company committed itself to, among other things, provide training for interested employees to enable them to participate in the consultative process; provide opportunities for learning and skill development for all employees; and to ensure that no employee would be required to do a task for which they are not appropriately trained.

The agreement further sets out a number of 'values shared by all employees' which include: a formal commitment to establish a workforce which has the flexibility to meet the changing needs of the business in the most efficient and productive way; aggressively pursuing improvement and accepting the associated risks; striving to continually improve our performance. (EBA p. 6, emphasis added)

The EBA sets out in a 2 page appendix a list of intended objectives, accountabilities, responsibilities and expectations in establishing work teams. These objectives impose additional responsibilities and accountabilities on the workers and are reinforced in a special training program for all employees.

According to the agreement the role of the team is to enhance productivity and efficiency; quality control and level of output; work organisation and change; participate in budget setting and recruitment practices; liaise with other teams to implement improvements; and review the operation and effectiveness of the team. The original management intention of including hiring and firing within the teams which was opposed by the workers and their union and not continued with because of the objections.

Eleven areas were identified for training, the majority of which were not focused on improving skills but rather focussed on 'values' training such as teams, quality control and management, customer service, conflict resolution, communication, and problem solving. This is an increasingly common phenomenon as the main emphasis in training has moved from qualifying workers for particular occupations (skills) to that of absorbing the values of the company (values).

The sessions on teams encourage staff to accept the changes with a mix of positives ('mistakes will be treated as learning opportunities', 'staff will 'own' their jobs') and potential means of enforcing compliance ('staff will take the necessary actions to continue improving themselves, their work and our organisation', and 'every member of the team shares equal responsibility for the finished product ') (Training session outline - emphasis in original)

When trained the work teams are expected to accept responsibility for: quality control and quality assurance; production planning of major product Stock Keeping Units (SKUs); performance measurement and management of both individual and team work; solving problems; resolving conflicts; corrective action for performance problems; occupational health and safety; and assuring customer leadtimes are met.

What would once have been seen as managerial responsibilities are downloaded to the team which has the affect of making team members impose discipline on their workmates. Under the terms of the agreement teams are expected to: ensure that production quality and service targets are met; ensure team members are appropriately trained; a safe and healthy work environment is maintained; manage overtime, absences and time keeping; review systems and procedures; plan work activities and allocate tasks within the team; and ensure machinery and equipment works efficiently and safely.

Like the NUUMI model, this system is not reliant on new technology, indeed there has been little additional technology introduced in the plant, but rather on the reorganisation of work, continuous improvement, identifying performance problems, developing corrective action.

A number of features are referred to by the women which illustrate the mixed response the new system receives. They have gone from sitting down all day at a single sewing machine doing the same specific task over and over and being closely monitored by a supervisor to standing up to work in a group. They now work in a team of 9; there has been a big reduction in the number of supervisors and the remaining ones are called co-ordinators; they are now authorised to call a mechanic for their machine if they think it necessary, and they can make a phone call without the permission of a supervisor. As a team they have an increased degree of autonomy over their work in that they can slow down or speed up, decide when to take breaks and decide if they need to stop to talk about their work. However because their pay is dependant on output the dynamic is such that the pressure is to increase their effort.

The plant's physical layout has been altered to allow for U shaped work units to replace the lines of machines. This layout allows the women to move easily from one machine to another. Each woman covers one and a half machines enabling them to move up and down the U according to the needs of the production at any given time.

But the women have a mixed response. They like being without the supervisor, their ability to call the mechanic (and stop the line) has come to symbolise the difference between teams and the 'old way of doing things'. This ability is extremely attractive as it symbolises their being accepted as adults rather than children. For the women it represents a new found autonomy and a level of respect that recognises a worker's ability to decide when it is necessary to stop production. Wendy explained that

But they also talk of the increased pressure and the increased stress. A number explain that despite the added pressure the move from an individual based bonus system to a team based bonus has resulted in reduced wages. They realise they collectively impose discipline on each member of the team but accept this. A resigned acceptance is a feature of the plant as employment prospects in the district are poor and they anticipate increased pressure at work, more changes imposing greater responsibility but feel they have no alternative because of the state of the local labour market. They don't feel any more secure in their employment or their future as a result of teams being introduced. "I've got no choice, if they take my bonus away they take my bonus away, I can't go anywhere... But you knew then (in the past) if you were out of work you could go to another clothing factory and get a job. You could walk out of one job and get another one in the afternoon. But not now." (Norma)

There is a shop floor scepticism about the teams even after the efforts put into training by management. Management had used the twin motivation of teams as a new better method of work with the threat that jobs could be lost if they were not adopted. 'In reality, for King Gee to stay competitive in the market today, teams must be put in place' (Training session outline). The women absorbed the message as it has been repeated throughout the industry and in society more generally for a decade or more. One of the implementation committee members summed up the women's view that 'They see that you have to be competitive and flexible to have a job in 5 years time. They see that.' (May) Yet the fear of job loss is still in the forefront of the workers' minds.

Management had told the workers that teams needed to be introduced to reduce the high level of stock lying unused in the factory to provide more flexibility in responding to production and customer needs. Now a work shirt is completely made in around a minute.

Another implementation committee member sees the reason for teams in terms of competition. 'To make (the company) more competitive. That's what it comes down to, what their main aim is to get the teams competing against one another. This is what I get from (the plant manager). He wants teams to see that other team is better than us, he expects the other team to get better at it, to say 'well they're doing x amount we've got to keep up with them.' (Juan)

But some workers not so convinced. 'At first the whole picture of teams and autonomy sounded great - and we were told our survival depended on it. So if our survival depended on it OK. But that's not how its turned out.' (Wendy) Wendy first started at Clothing Co. as a young woman in the early 1980s. She remembers that at that time there were over 300 women working in the plant. In the past 14 years one third of the workforce have left.

Among some workers there is a pragmatic acceptance that the changes associated with enterprise bargaining and teams represent a new opportunity to make the company, with which they identify, competitive, possibly prosperous, but at least able to keep employing staff. For many though the shift has resulted in an intensification of work, a pressure to ensure other workers in the team increase their effort to secure bonuses, and an expectation to give over their knowledge to continuously improve the production system for little reward other than the prospect of continuing employment.

In large part the team system rests on appropriating workers' knowledge. Lean production methods refines production by having supervisors and team leaders continually acquire workers' knowledge about the details of the production process. In this regard it is not very different to Taylorism . Taylor sought to harness workers first hand knowledge about the production process, but he believed that such knowledge could be acquired by engineers essentially all in one go. Lean production seeks to enlist workers themselves in 'continually improving' their jobs.

Far from being a new, radical breakthrough in management technique it is in essence a reworking of traditional Taylorist methods. Team work streamlines production by drawing on the knowledge of the workers to do the streamlining. In the words of Taylor, scientific management involved the 'deliberate gathering in of..all the great mass of traditional knowledge, which in the past had been in the heads of workmen.' Adler and Cole, supporters of the NUUMI model, reports that in the early 1990s participation in General Motor's suggestion scheme increased to over 90%. On average each worker made 5 suggestions to improve work each year and 80% were implemented reflecting both the quality of the suggestions and the ongoing need for management to acquire workers' knowledge. (Adler & Cole 1993)

James Womack and his colleagues in The Machine that changed the world: the story of lean production (1990) argued that increased reliance on less skilled and lower paid workers was one of the main selling points of the new system. They wrote of one advantage being that it:

The sad fact is that many workers see no other alternative but to assist their employers compete to bring wages and conditions down in order to compete against workers in other plants. One GM worker described what happened at his plant:

How did this come about? A combination of factors have led to this situation. An aggressive and confident employing class supported by their political representatives have driven moves to lengthen the working week, throw millions out of work and cut down living standards; secondly the partnership ideology and practice of so many union leaders has weakened workers ability to fightback; and finally the fear among workers caused by longer hours, fear of job loss awhile working multiple jobs together with a lack of confidence in their unions' ability to resist have proved to be a potent combination.

The pattern is to get unions to first agree to co-operate in modernisation then turn on the union demanding increased flexibility, a list of lean production style changes, contracting out, downsizing, increased workloads and new work schedules. In the developed world union leaders have embraced a new 'realism' of competitive business considerations. Co-operation with management is the means to that end, and partnership with national or regional capital is the road to employment stabilisation. If this strategy did lead to more secure employment, increased real wages, and improved living standards then it would be wise to adopt it. However, it has demonstrably failed as unemployment continues to increase, along with casualisation, lower real wages, lower living standards, increased income inequality and a pervasive uncertainty about the future.

Braverman's argument that management needs to control the labour process not only to control costs but also in order to control workers retains its relevance today. (Braverman 1974, p. 126) By removing knowledge from workers - and in essence therefore taking away their skills - management creates a workforce that can be paid less, and one that is less likely to rebel and therefore easier to control.

As we have seen more competitive labour markets, which hold wages down, and more streamlined labour processes, which press people to work harder and produce more quantifiable output, stand in stark contrast to the notion that increased competition is good for the worker in the workplace. Research into the contemporary workplace equips us to challenge prevailing conventions and assumptions in order to rethink the present and the future.

Countless developments today reflect Taylor's logic, and not only in the manufacturing industries. The imposition of strict curriculum documents on teachers from school through to college levels; the bureaucratisation and bottom line mania of public services in health and welfare through to utilities and garbage collection; the efficiency craze in public administration and the outsourcing of innumerable white collar jobs are other examples.

There is a discourse that encourages us to see these developments as both inevitable and desirable. We are told we can do nothing to stem the tide of globalisation, that job losses and industry closures are the price Australia must pay for improved productivity; and that in the future most Australian workers will have to live with a more or less permanent insecurity about their jobs.

But the most important lesson to be learned from the introduction of new technologies and techniques is what it tells us about capitalism. That they are capable of being used in both positive and negative ways is one of the contradictions of capital. The creative and destructive drive that is part of the constant restructuring of capitalism tends to create impulses for change which it then cannot fully accommodate without jeopardising its ultimate control over production.

What is inevitable is the drive to increase profit which is achieved at the expense of workers. As education and training has become central to, and a facilitator of, the drive for efficiency and increased production the question adult educators have to ask is what sort of future do we wish to contribute to?

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This section, through the use of two workplace studies in two industries - clothing and steel manufacturing - focuses on the informal and incidental learning of workers and gives a voice to those workers. A vital, and too often neglected, area of research is that pertaining to working people's experiences. These interviews aim to develop an understanding of how workers learn about economic issues. It also serves to expand the notion of adult learning beyond the narrow definition of formal course participation. An appreciation of the significant impact informal and incidental learning has on adults and their adaptation to the world can contribute to a broader conception of adult learning. Building upon this research could help contribute to developing a richer understanding of how and what workers learn about economic issues.

The two studies are written up in chapter xx and are set against a background where:

It argues that one of the pillars of Taylorism - the appropriation of workers' knowledge - underpins the changes in many workplaces which have introduced new workplace techniques. Rather than superseding Taylorism we can observe a new Taylorism at work.

From Schied et al

Industry Commission (Quality response)

lean production

reengineering

teams

finance

Taylor's techniques were an attempt to

(Taylor cited in Braverman p. 112, 113, 119 from

Principles of Scientific Management, 1911

Braverman & Reich

A further premise is that of Braverman and Piore and Sabel regarding capitalism's inherent drive to deskill labour and the optimistic view of the post-industrialists (Kerr, Gorz, Piore and Sabel, Mathews). A more local off shoot of that debate is the contention by Gregory and Hunter that virtually all job growth in Australia in the late 1980s / 1990s has been in low skill, `peripheral' occupations, thus seriously questioning the underpinning beliefs of the national training reform.

In America there is a very stark contradiction in expectations about the type of jobs in the immediate future. On the one hand Robert Reich in his The Work of Nations: a blueprint for the future (1991) attempts to provide a classification of work that reflects future employment patterns

OHT

Three broad groups of workers:

From these groups he draws a number of conclusions about types of employer; employment status; type of production; skills, attributes, mobility, productivity, education and training, competitive position (refer back to Maglen in AER)

As well as likely outcomes of future employment in terms of increases and decreases. He concludes that the future is dimmest for routine production workers, brightest for symbolic analysts while in person service workers will increasingly depend on the ability of symbolic analysts to derive international wealth in a globally competitive economy.

However a quite different picture is presented by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in their projections of the fastest growing occupations between 1994 and 2005. As you can see they bear no relation to Reich's categories

The 30 Occupations with the Greatest Projected Growth, 1994-2005

The restructured award provided for a skill based career path where 162 classifications were compressed into a 5 level skill based classification structure. The amended award (1989) sets out the what is expected of a worker at each of the five skill levels (see refs to skill levels on p 10 of Jensen / Price interview transcript; also training availability - moving through levels p9/10) The concluding point of each level acknowledges that the worker 'may commence training in additional skills required to advance to a higher skill level'.