The high tech workforce, especially in the weapons industry, has historically been a conservative bloc, consistent with maintaining their livelihood through inflated military spending. With the enormous job losses in that industry (an expected 1.2 million jobs in the 1992-1996 period, according to the Federal Office of Technology Assessment), there is a real danger of those workers drifting towards a fascist solution to the economic crisis. One example of this danger are the efforts of the Coalition for Visa Reform, founded last January. "Its goal is to reform the H1 visa program (and any other visa) so that technical professionals will not lose their jobs or see their pay reduced because of the cheap foreign labor being brought to this country."[2] The legitimate issue of pay equity for non-citizen workers is instead raised in the context of a nativist solution. CFVR focuses the problem on foreign workers taking jobs, instead of challenging a system that cannot provide productive the world's engineers. As more high tech work is exported to cheaper labor markets, and mobile lower-paid workers are brought in as temporary workers, "Buy American Labor" could become a popular rallying cry among unemployed engineers.

The communications sector, which overlaps with high tech work, has also been hit hard over the past three years. At the same time the "information super highway" is touted as a jobs savior, some 44,000 jobs were cut last year among the companies who have laid claim to building the "infobahn." According to the Communications Workers of America, the phone companies in particular have been eliminating union positions through automation (particularly among phone installers and operators), and transferring capital to non- union sectors of the industry, through acquisitions of related concerns (e.g., cable companies).

The privatization of information has resulted in the decimation of the public library system and the closing of library schools. The reality of trends in public librarianship belies government and corporate assertions of concern for equitable access to information.

Layoffs and other labor cutbacks especially affect workers over 40. As technical workers get older, their salaries rise, their skills age (Sun Microsystems expects 20 percent of its engineers skills to become obsolete each year [3]), and their willingness to sacrifice family and community for work ebbs. So these workers tend to bear the brunt of "restructuring", "downsizing", etc.

The job market for recent college graduates is also drying up. CFVR concluded, "[t] here are at least 50% more people entering the software programming labor market than new jobs being created. This amounts to an over supply of 22,000 workers or about 4.3% of the overall labor force."[4] These figures have been challenged, but the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recently found unemployment among electronic engineers to be the highest in more than a quarter century, and some 200,000 engineers were removed from U.S. employment rolls between 1991 and 1993.[5] IEEE also describes the jobs crisis as an international phenomenon. In addition, youth considering engineering or other high tech careers face the problem of getting into college in the first place, with state colleges raising tuition and closing down programs. [6]

The Digital Convergence

As electronics permeates production, the product of production assumes a digital format, a form that can be easily stored and transported electronically. "Digital format" means the symbolic representation of information as 1s and 0s, which can be converted into electrical or light pulses, and transmitted over wires and fiber optic cable; or through air and space as electromagnetic waves. Electronics-based machinery at either end of the transport system encodes and decodes the symbolic traffic, and renders it into material use values. There are numerous enormous cost savings achieved by the digitalization of products: savings in storage space required, in transmission time and cost, and in the application of computers to completely automate the processing and routing of the digital rendering. [7] Just as railroads and trucks were needed to carry the product of production in the industrial era, digital carriers are required to haul the product of electronic production in the electro

Every stage of technical development demands both transportation and a communication system that corresponds to that level of the productive forces. The Industrial Revolution was also a transportation and communications revolution, that is, one could not have happened without the other, as capital demanded better and faster means of coordinating production and circulating commodities and capital; and the manufacture of new communication and transportation systems, especially railroads, spurred industrial production to more and more sophisticated levels. [8]

The ubiquitous debate over the so-called National Information Infrastructure" (NII), also known as the "information super highway", must be examined in this context. As modern production increasingly shifts to a digital basis, as a natural consequence of electronics spreading through production, modern production demands a commensurate means of transportation and communication. Or to put it another way, to paraphrase Marx, the old means of communication and transport handed down from the industrial period have become unbearable trammels on Modern [i.e., electronics- based] Industry.

This process is most intensely affecting the information industries -- especially communications, entertainment (music, film, television and the hybrid "multimedia"), publishing, education, scientific research, financial services, and advertising. But the shift to "information-based" or "knowledge- intensive" production affects traditional manufacturing as well. Just-in-time production requires sophisticated information networks to work. Modern robotics-based production requires not so much assembly workers as computer operators to monitor the workflow. Designs and orders enter into the machinery through digital ports: "‘retooling' with the new "flexible manufacturing systems", simply means changing the software that guides the machines. The assembly line (hardware) remains unchanged. The robots, hardly pausing, begin exercising different actions in obeyance of the newly-loaded programs."[9] The production and circulation of goods is increasingly an information processing function.

The terminal phase in capitalism is being driven by the expulsion of labor from commodity production. Objectively, this manifests itself as rising global unemployment, and for those able to find a market for their labor power, falling wages. The increasing use of information technology in the context of intense global economic competition is rapidly eroding wages. In 1979, 12 percent of the full time workforce earned less than the "poverty wage", so-called because it is the amount necessary to support a family of four above the official poverty level ($13,000 in 1992 dollars). By 1992, 18 percent of the full time workforce was earning less than the poverty wage, an increase of 50 percent. Thus, of those workers able to find full time employment, one in five is not earning enough to support a family. [10] More >>