'New Management Techniques' (NMTs) are sweeping every workplace both in Britain and internationally. Capitalism's drive to restructure itself and increase profits has resulted in the imposition of an increased workload on virtually every worker, cuts in jobs,and union busting. But what are the implications for women? MARION BRAIN reports. THERE ARE FOUR basic elements to NMTs - attacks on trade unions, restructuring of the workforce, changing working practices and an ideological offensive. Combined, these form an overall strategy for the bosses to revolutionise the production process.
The separate elements are not new. What is new is the way these elements are integrated by management into a coherent approach in which each part reinforces the others.
Attacking trade unions takes different forms ranging from outright de-recognition to measures designed to break the allegiance of workers to their union and make them identify with their employers.
These include measures like performance related pay, individual contracts, binding arbitration, reduction in trade union facility time and the abolition of the check off system where union dues are deducted at source.
What impact have these changes had on women and what will they mean for women if they continue to extend into other areas of work?
Bye bye equality
Over the past few years the vast majority of trade unions have been negotiating equal opportunities for women into their collective agreements. The destruction of collective bargaining and its replacement with individual contracts means the destruction of equal opportunities.
Even with the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act women do not receive equal pay and are still discriminated against.
Imagine the scope the bosses will have in a situation where thev have managed either to derecognise the union or where they have a compliant union and are able to impose performance related pay.
No longer will there be a rate for the grade of work or the job. Each individual will be pitted against the other.
Many women are already receiving less pay than men and in some places where there is equal pay and pay is determined by grade, surprise, surprise women are congregated at the bottom of the heap.
The NMTs, whilst attacking every member of the workforce impact more heavily on those already at the bottom.
An illustration of this is in British Telecom. A number of years ago a new grade of commercial officer was introduced as the highest non-management grade on the clerical side. It comes as no surprise that women are a tiny minority unlike in other grades.
With collective bargaining workers can try an address the problem. Without it then the 'blue eyed boy' or 'if your face fits' syndrome will rule.
Managers will be able to pick and choose who they want. Without unions that can collectively organise and fight we remain isolated and weak.
Another feature applied in a variety of work places is team working, often with elected team leaders. The teams are promoted by management as an alternative Early victims in the public sector: Barking Hospital strikers fight privatisation to trade unions.
Workers are encouraged to look to their team leaders rather than shop stewards or reps to solve problems. The aim is to make it appear that pay and conditions depend on individual effort and not collective action.
These techniques demand an intensification of work levels achieved by a reduction or abolition of job demarcation. They also attempt to define jobs in terms of tasks to be completed per week which effectively introduces compulsory overtime.
Speed up often operates through team working - teams have the responsibility for checking and reporting each other.
Part-time staff
The character of the workforce in Britain as elsewhere is changing, increasingly involving the use of part time workers, more often than not women, or short term and casual staff plus the stepped up use of sub-contracting - the development of core and periphery workforces.
There is a sustained attack on the public sector.
Especially in local government with the introduction of Compulsory Competitive Tendering. Management want the hard won pay terms and conditions to be bargained away 'all in the name of saving your job'.
In education, telecommunications, social services, health and publishing the use of agency staff and freelance workers with short term contracts is on the increase.
The workforce becomes divided with obvious implications for women, black people, lesbians and gay men - groups that have been traditionally discriminated The different aspects of the new techniques are held together by a number of key words which are constantly used, 'choice, flexibility and quality'.
Companies aim to be world class by introducing systems of total quality management'. Management tries to portray anyone who opposes the techniques as being inflexible and standing in the way of providing choice and quality for the customer or client.
Unscrupulous local authorities have no compunction about using the situation of working class people who use services as a lever to introduce new working practices.
Teachers and social workers are told that accepting new techniques is a necessary part of providing accessibility and quality for a wider range of people. Of course, without being given any more resources to do this. We know that it is women who are the main group working in this sector of the economy and we also know that women are the main users of these services.
We need to construct a public sector alliance that can defend the whole of the public sector and defend jobs and services and which can explain the implicaNot so much Jane Fonda as Henry Ford. French women employees of Canon are put through their paces before work tions of new management techniques. A useful book published by 'Labour Notes' in the United States entitled a Troublemakers Handbook - How To Fight Back Where You Work And Win' explains the effects very well.
The opening paragraph highlights the fact that during the 1980s corporate management propositioned the labour moveHICIL.
Their plans for labour-management co-operation took many forms - quality programmes, team concepts, statistical process control, sociotechnical systems.
There were also many promises: an end to the adversarial relationships between company and union; workers' control over the work process; better quality for consumers and dignity on the job.
Under the guise of humanising the workplace, it is dehumanised, and workers lose their collective and individual ability to have any control over their working lives.
In reality the goal all along is to weaken the union and give management, not the workers greater control. Their objective is to reorganise the work process itself in a style that can be called management by stress - they aim to eliminate all slack.
After the work has been reorganised it turns out that multi-skilling is really deskilling, because production workers do not learn a new craft, office workers do not learn a new profession; instead they simply add another boring job onto the ones, they already do.
Centres of coercion
Management uses the team's self study to appropriate and to break down their skills or transfer them to machines. The teams that were supposed to be models of shopfloor democracy turn out to be little centres of coercion where workers are indoctrinated into seeing the world through management's eyes. FEATURE Management's world is one where there is no human solidarity between sister and sister or brother and brother or between men and women.
Individuals are pitted against each other, team against team, plant against plant, plants owned by the same company or by other corporations are seen as the enemy.
Management's version of a humanised workplace turns out to be a world of ruthless competition. Working smarter really means working harder and faster and women are some of the greatest losers.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 51, October 30 1993, Page 14 cleared in the annual budget.
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