I can't answer all of this now, though I could do some research.
The distributability of literature is not the biggest thing I am talking about, but I've been wanting to say it to someone. I used to handout papers at the Chrysler Jefferson Avenue Assembly plant. The workers parked outside the plant entrance or road buses. As they went in, there was a public street/sidewalk area they crossed where you could hand them literature. Now with the new Jefferson North Assembly, (2000 feet from the old plant) they drive in and park where you can't go. You could try to get them to roll down their car windows,but it's difficult.
An extreme example is the placement of the GM Saturn plant in a cow pasture in Tennessee, a neo- feudal manor, far from the madding crowd of workers.
My main point is that the whole locus of plantworkers'
lives, work and home, is scattered compared to before -
>From the city to the suburbs,from the North to the
South, and from the U.S. overseas.
This , I hypothesize, undermines collectivity. I believe Lenin noted the sense of their collective power that workers get from their "massing" at the point of production.
The reduction in the number of job classifications from the 1980's and the subsitution of "team concepts" and workers module teams was rationalized by technological development. This directly undermines the union, in that teams are workers supervising themselves.
I have no specific evidence now on keeping workers from computer/CAD systems. In fact there is a lot of emphasis on computer training in joint labor/management projects (yuk). Training and jobs are two different things, but I think there is rank and file usage of computers.
I will look for more evidence on this if you want.
Charles Brown
>>> Les Schaffer <godzilla at netmeg.net> 05/05 2:42 PM >>>
Charles> Now they
Charles> design the plants so that you can't stand at the gate and
Charles> hand out literature to the workers coming and going to
Charles> work, too.
I'd like to hear the specifics of this and similar developments. how exactly are the new plants designed to interfere with worker organizing and such?
also, are there deliberate attempts to keep workers seperate from computer systems?
and tangentially, do workers on the line have access to the CAD systems used by the engineers?
regards -- ____ Les Schaffer godzilla at netmeg.net ___| ------->> Engineering R&D <<-------- Theoretical & Applied Mechanics | Designspring, Inc. Westport, CT USA Center for Radiophysics & Space Research | http://www.designspring.com (soon) Cornell Univ. schaffer at tam.cornell.edu | les at designspring.com