I once participated in an attempt to organize a glass factory in Meadville, PA. The plant was not really in a town, so it was not too accessible. Workers told me that the company (PPG Industries) made an effort to hire workers from various of the small towns near the plant (plus al ot of workers live in the countryside and not in a town) with the purpose of making it hard for the workers to get together. After work, they get in their cars and pickups and head for home. In my own hoetown, there was also a PPG glass factory, but everyone lived in the town or very close by. People went to bars and clubs and the same few churches, so socializing beyond the workplace was not hard. this helped to create a greater sense of solidarity.
On the issue of worker access to computers, I'd recommend reading works by Harley Shaiken. In plants with numerical controlled machines, I would be surprised if the workers get to do more than push buttons and watch what happens. Of course, the new technology offers a lot of good possibilities, but capitalism cannot allow these to be realized. I just re-read Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capital" in preparation for a talk I have to give this weekend. It sure holds up well after nearly 25 years. There is a lot in it about computers and workers.
Michael Yates
Charles Brown wrote:
> 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
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> Cornell Univ. schaffer at tam.cornell.edu | les at designspring.com