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OCR for page 311
Part IV
Policy Perspectives
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314 APPLICATION OF OFFICE SYSTEM TECHNOl OG Y
nonprofit organizations to explore four issues of concern: (1) how
organizations are going about implementation of new office sys-
tem technologies; (2) how women workers have been responding
to these implementation policies, under both favorable and unfa-
vorable circumstances; (3) what policies of "leading edge" organi-
zations hold promise for long-term productivity and job enhance-
ment; and (4) whether favorable adaptations by both workers and
managers will likely occur on their own, or rather be enhanced by
intervention.
The discussion concentrates on women clerical workers, since
clerical work is the area toward which most office system applica-
tions have been directed in the past decade. In this kind of work,
video display terminals (VDTs) are used most intensively, and for
the longest period per day. Women make up over 90 percent of
the clerical work force in the offices where the new technologies
are being implemented.
One conclusion from the larger study is that there is con-
siderable variation at this point in the policies and procedures
that employer organizations are using in implementing office sys-
tems technology. We do not share the view that the technology
somehow dictates one dominant implementation strategy, or that
women clerical workers are encountering one set of "OA (office
automation) impacts" wherever VDTs are being installed. In this
paper, the focus is on the quality of work life and equality aspects
of applying office systems technology to clerical work where female
employees predominate. We did not study the employment-level
impacts of office automation, nor the ejects on job security or
insecurity.
The 110 organizations that were visited on-site for the larger
study were not a representative sample of corporations, govern-
ment agencies, or nonprofits. They were chosen primarily on the
universities, hospitals, and civic groups. At these sites, we conducted open-
ended interviews with over 1,100 end users of VDTs, primarily at the
clerical, secretarial, and professional levels, and with over 650 managers
and executives. In addition, the project made visits to 15 large vendors
of office systems and support equipment; interviewed officials at 40 U.S.
labor unions concerned with VDT and OA issues; did a pilot survey and
had follow-up meetings with information-system directors in 55 business
and government organizations; and interviewed representatives of women's,
religious, minority, industry, and user groups concerned with the impact of
office technology. We also conducted interviews with 75 employees using
VDTs in organizations to which we did not make site visits.
OCR for page 313
Employer Policies to Enhance
the Application of Office System
Technology to Clerical Work
ALAN F. WESTIN
SCOPE AND FOCUS
In this paper, I draw on a recently completed study1 of office
automation (OA) experiences at 110 business, government, and
Financial support for the study was provided, in part, by IBM, Hewlett-
Packard, NCR, OCLI, Control Data Business Advisors, Haworth, Kelly
Services, and Northern Telecom. The research design, field work, and project
reports were the responsibility of the Educational Fund, and the sponsors are
not responsible for any of our judgments or positions. My senior colleagues
on the project were Michael A. Baker, Heather A. Schweder, and Sheila
Lehman. The first product of the study, 17`c Changing Workplace: A Guide
to Managing the Pcopic, Organizational, and Rcg?datory Aspects of Office Technology
(Westin et al., 1985), was published by Knowledge Industries, 701 West-
chester Avenue, White Plains, NY 10604, in April 1985. A second book, The
O§icc Automation Cor~troversy, will be published in 1987.
~ Between April 1982 and June 1984, the Educational Fund for Individual
Rights conducted a study of "The Workplace Impact of Using VDTs in
the Ounces The centerpiece of the research was a program of on-site
visits to 110 organizations implementing office system technology. About
60 percent of these were business firms, in the insurance, manufacturing,
financial services, media, transportation, retail, utility, distribution, energy,
and consumer-services industries. About 40 percent were federal, state,
and local government agencies and nonprofit organizations, such as private
313
OCR for page 314
314 APPLICATION OF OFFICE SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY
nonprofit organizations to explore four issues of concern: (1) how
organizations are going about implementation of new office sys-
tem technologies; (2) how women workers have been responding
to these implementation policies, under both favorable and unfa-
vorable circumstances; (3) what policies of "leading edger organi-
zations hold promise for long-term productivity and job enhance-
ment; and (4) whether favorable adaptations by both workers and
managers will likely occur on their own, or rather be enhanced by
intervention.
The discussion concentrates on women clerical workers, since
clerical work is the area toward which most office system applica-
tions have been directed in the past decade. In this kind of work,
video display terminals (VDTs) are used most intensively, and for
the longest period per day. Women male up over 90 percent of
the clerical work force in the offices where the new technologies
are being implemented.
One conclusion from the larger study is that there is con-
siderable variation at this point in the policies and procedures
that employer organizations are using in implementing office sys-
tems technology. We do not share the view that the technology
somehow dictates one dominant implementation strategy, or that
women clerical workers are encountering one set of "OA (office
automation) impacts" wherever VDTs are being installed. In this
paper, the focus is on the quality of work life and equality aspects
of applying office systems technology to clerical work where female
employees predominate. We clid not study the employment-level
impacts of office automation, nor the effects on job security or
· · .
Insecurity.
The 110 organizations that were visited on-site for the larger
study were not a representative sample of corporations, govern-
ment agencies, or nonprofits. They were chosen primarily on the
universities, hospitals, and civic groups. At these sites, we conducted open-
ended interviews with over 1,100 end users of VDTs, primarily at the
clerical, secretarial, and professional levels, and with over 650 managers
and executives. In addition, the project made visits to 15 large vendors
of office systems and support equipment; interviewed officials at 40 U.S.
labor unions concerned with VDT and OA issues; did a pilot survey and
had follow-up meetings with information-system directors in 55 business
and government organizations; and interviewed representatives of women's,
religious, minority, industry, and user groups concerned with the impact of
office technology. We also conducted interviews with 75 employees using
VDTs in organizations to which we did not make site visits.
OCR for page 315
ALAN F. WES TIN
315
basis of their reputations as "advanced" and "active" users of office
systems technology. Many were selected because of a reputation
for having "good human resources policies, though this was not a
prerequisite for selection. These reputations] characteristics were
drawn from nominations by vendors, articles in the computer and
business press, articles in the personnel and labor relations media,
and suggestions from interest groups, OA experts, and academi-
cians. About 10 percent of the sites were union-represented, about
evenly divided between private and government employers.
In the course of our site visits, we spoke with approximately
900 women that use VDTs at their jobs. About 15 percent of these
women were professional, technical, or managerial employees, and
about 85 percent were clerical workers.
Four main types of clerical work were examined: word process-
ing in both centralized and distributed settings; customer-service
work via terminal and telephone; intensive data-entry work; and
general secretarial functions. Most of the conversations were con-
ducted with individual employees, but about 20 percent took place
in small focus groups.
We used a topic checklist for these interviews, made up of
neutrally worded questions designed to minimize prompting or
forcing of issues.2 Our questions asked how long the employee
had been using a VDT; whether she had done this job previously
without a VDT; what kind of training for the machine she had
received; what personal involvement, if any, she had had in the
process of using office system technology at her job; how the VDT
was affecting "her job" and "her works; whether she had read or
heard anything about "VDT issues"; how management supervised
her performance; what problems, if any, she had encountered using
the VDT and whether she had raised these with management; how
2 We guaranteed employees complete anonymity for their comments, and
our interviews were done without supervisors or managers present. As a re-
sult, we believe these women clermals were open and candid in their discussion
of how they saw VDT uses affecting them, and their responses provided us
with valuable reports on the reactions and problems of clerical workers doing
intensive VDT work. However, since we did not conduct a representative-
sample survey, or use a standardized questionnaire, our interviews do not
provide the basis for making statistical statements about national trends,
particular industries, or specific occupational groups. Therefore, we feel
most comfortable reporting what we found for these 110 organizations, using
broad terminology. Our conclusions must therefore be viewed as exploratory
rather than representative.
OCR for page 316
316 APPLICATION OF OFFICE SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY
she saw her future at this organization or elsewhere being affected
by her VDT skill; and similar broad inquiries.
In addition, ~ draw in this paper on two other interview
sources. In the course of the larger study, we conducted in-depth
interviews averaging about 1.5 hours each with 12 white, black,
and Hispanic clerical workers in one large metropolitan area, and
these have been used for our analysis of women clerical worker
life situations, career aspirations, and orientations on "women's
issues. We also obtained the transcripts of 10 excellent in-depth
interviews with women clericals conducted in 1983 as part of a
larger University of Connecticut Labor History project (Asher,
1983~. Both sets of interviews probed personal history, education,
pre-VDT work experiences, career goals, social and family situ-
ations, treatment as women on the job, and other key elements
shaping the reaction of these women to the use of VDTs.
OFFICE AUTOMATION AND WOMEN'S
ISSUES—EVIDENCE FROM CASE STUDIES
The following are trends among organizations in our field
study that relate most directly to the impact of office systems
technology trends on women clerical workers (for the detailed data
and full-scale discussions of these trends, see our study report,
Westin et al., 1985~.
Varied Application Among the organizations visited, we did
not find the kind of unitary, deterministic application of office
systems technology that some social analysts or group spokesmen
have asserted to be taking place. Rather, we found significant
variations in the design and implementation of VDT clerical work
from industry to industry, among individual firms within indus-
tries, from division to division, among different local work units,
and even among specific types of jobs. In addition, there were
often significant variations in how supervisors and unit managers
were applying top management "OA policies to clerical work-
ers. Such diversities affected both the experiences and attitudes
of women clerical workers toward the institution of VDTs at their
workplaces.
Importance of Overall Human Resource Policy The overall hu-
man resources or personnel philosophy of managements at the
organizations we visited was the strongest single variable in how
the quality of work life aspects and the women's equality issues of
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ALAN F. WES TIN
317
OA were being perceived and addressed, both in general and as far
as clerical work was concerned. We found firms with nearly iden-
tical types of clerical operations, work force characteristics, lines
of business or government activity, and economic circumstances
whose policies toward the two issues of concern in this paper were
dramatically different and were perceived as such by women cleri-
cal workers we interviewed. (See the profiles of "Great Northern"
and "National Services" later in this paper for specific illustrations
of this contrast.)
Significant Differences Among Women Attitudes toward VDT
work among women clericals interviewed differed as a result of
important individual and group characteristics, such as education,
social class, race and ethnic status, age and life situation, economic
needs, attitude toward "women's issues," experiences with sex
discrimination, etc. (This will also be discussed in greater detail
later.)
Positive Perceptions of Office Automation Confirming the re-
sults of various national office worker surveys conducted in the
past 3 to 4 years, a large majority of the clerical women we inter-
viewed (in the 80 to 90 percent range) expressed positive comments
about having VDTs to use in their jobs. Specifically, they reported
important quantitative and qualitative improvements in their job
performance as a result of the new once systems, and they were
glad to have VDT skills which they believed would make them
more ~marketable" for jobs both within and outside the firms for
which they were working. Furthermore, even those women cleri-
cals who did not like the content of their jobs very much, or who
were upset at the manner in which the new technology was intro-
duced at their workplace, did not attribute the problems to The
machine" as such, but rather to the way that their management
was structuring jobs or work settings around the new technology.
Problems of Office Technology Implementation Despite their
initial positive attitude toward the technology, a majority of cler-
ical women we interviewed reported a combination of significant
VDT problems that they wanted their managements to address.
(This also parallels the findings of national surveys of VDT use
in offices.) Some of these were general problems growing out of
how well or poorly VDT technology was applied (ergonomics,
job design, computer-based monitoring), while other problems
these clericals reported are issues specific to women workers (such
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318 APPLICATION OF OFFICE SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY
as pregnancy concerns from VDT use, pay equity for "women's
work," etc.~.
Job Reorganization Women clericals in each of the job sec-
tors we examined—data entry, customer service, word processing,
and secretarial were experiencing a significant reshaping of the
content of their jobs compared with the way these jobs had been
structured in recent decades. However, contrary to some commen-
taries, we did not find this to be unidirectional in the organizations
we studied. Some clerical jobs were increasing in variety, scope,
and satisfaction and were perceived so by employees. For exam-
ple, new capacities to search data bases and to perform complete
on-line transactions for customers in banking, utilities, or news-
papers were making customer-service work more interesting for
these workers. Similarly, graphics capabilities in word processing
were enhancing effectiveness and satisfaction in many secretarial
operations. We found other clericals had moved into interesting
pare-professional jobs, in which they were managing information
collection and distribution for work teams in their organizations.
However, some clericals, such as claims adjusters in insurance firms
and back-office workers in financial institutions, were having the
skilled and interesting elements of their jobs taken over by soft-
ware, and these employees found themselves functioning largely as
data-entry workers inputting routine customer information. The
feelings of women we interviewed were significantly shaped by
whether managements were providing task variety and interesting
activities in the new VDT jobs, or whether they were providing re-
tra~ning and new job opportunities for clerical employees for whom
straight data-entry work would be an unsatisfactory job. In terms
of the physical comfort of women clericals using VDTs, especially
operators using terminals for data entry, customer service, and
word-processing jobs for more than 5 hours per day, over three-
fourths of the organizations we visited during 1982-1984 did not
have the majority of their clerical-worker stations in "minimally
corrects ergonomic conditions. We defined this as an adjustable
chair, an adjustable terminal or work surface, and a nonglare
work environment (however achieved, with antiglare screen, ad-
justed workstation illumination, etc.~. As a result, a majority of
women clericals we interviewed complained of recurring physical
discomforts attributable to such weak ergonomic conditions for
intensive VDT use.
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ALAN F. WES TIN
319
Women's Labor-Force Experience A strong minority of women
clerical employees—perhaps 25 to 35 percent expressed concern
about the fairness of the pay they were receiving for working with
VDTs in their jobs and about the discriminatory treatment they
felt they were getting in promotional and career path opportuni-
ties compared with men at their organizations. These attitudes
were stronger among women clericals we interviewed who were
under 30 years of age: they were more inclined to expect man-
agement to provide such opportunities and were more ready to
make an issue of this at their workplaces than older women. How-
ever, "women's consciousness" was also present among some older
women, especially those who had been employed a long time at
their organizations and knew firsthand how men had been system-
atically preferred over women in key job opportunities.
Role of Popular Opinion and Activism Feelings about Fair
treatment" of women in the high-technology office were being
stunulated among women we interviewed by the growing critical
discussion of these issues by women's activist and mainstream
women's groups, the mass media, unions, and major religious bod-
ies. Though worried about the availability of jobs and about voic-
ing complaints in a time of job insecurity, especially at nonunion
sites where there Is no protection against arbitrary dismissal, a
strong minority (about a fourth) of women clericals we inter-
viewed were convinced that only if they spoke up at the workplace
would women's concerns about pay equity and fair promotional
treatment be addressed by management.
Variations at the Job- Type Level The executives and managers
we interviewed described attracting and keeping good employees
for customer BeT=ce and secretarial work, using VDTs as a major
organizational need. In contrast, many managers believed that
data-enl;ry work would be greatly reduced in the next few years
by a combination of optical scanning and direct customer input,
or else would be exported to cheap labor service bureaus abroad.
Therefore, ensuring job satisfaction for dat~entry work seemed to
be less important to these managements than for customer service
and secretarial work. Although we visited some sites (about 10
percent) in which having a high-turnover, low-paid, and accepting
work force for customer service and secretarial activities was the
staffing approach taken by top management, this was not the
policy we found being consciously pursued by 90 percent of these
organizations. At most corporate and nonprofit organizations we
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320 APPLICATION OF OFFICE SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY
visited, considerable attention was being paid to how to balance
management interests in cost control and head-count reduction
with organizational needs for a highly motivated and effective
customer service and secretarial work force.
Managerial Responses to Women's Issues In about three-
quarters of the organizations we visited, managements had not, by
early 1984, developed direct and responsive strategies for dealing
with the women's concerns and interests we cited. In some of
these organizations, staff groups had recommended new policies
to improve job quality for women clericals, reduce discriminatory
effects, or take positive actions to enhance women's opportuni-
ties, but these staff groups had not yet been able to persuade
top management to implement the policies. In only a fourth of
the organizations had top management set clear affirmative action
goals for VDT clerical work and had line managers actually begun
putting such policies into effect.
Phases in Offlce Automation Implementation In the first era
of OA implementation in the United States, which we would date
from 1978 to 1983, vendors stressed productivity and reduction of
labor costs and offered few ergonomically designed terminals and
workstations. This was partly because they saw no user willingness
to pay for such features. At the same time, purchasers of VDTs
that we studied saw themselves as struggling to make OA appli-
cations work and to achieve the promised productivity benefits;
little serious attention was given by most of these managements to
ergonomics, employee communication on health and safety issues,
or employee involvement. The overall social climate supported
such a focus. Despite the presence of occasional stories raising
issues of possible adverse health or other harmful effects of "office
automations on employee interests, overall media treatment in the
first era was highly positive.
However, 1983-1985 was the transition into a second era of
office system utilization in the United States. This was marked
by trends such as vendors responding to criticism and greater user
consciousness by providing ergonomically sound products and ma-
jor user-education campaigns; increased internal attention at most
sites we visited in 1984 to sound VDT policies and practices; major
media attention to VDT concerns; a very active regulatory and leg-
islative debate over VDT interventions throughout the country, in
at least 25 states; growing interest by academics and public inter-
est groups in office automation trends and impacts; and a growing
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ALAN F. YES TIN
321
concentration on special issues facing women clerical workers doing
intensive VDT jobs. Follow-up calls we made in 1985-1986 to sites
visited early In the project showed increased attention being paid
by these managements to issues of ergonomics, training, employee
communication, and other aspects of using VDTs, compared with
1982-1984.
GOOD MANAGEMENT POLICIES AFFECTING
CLERICAL WORKERS: THE GRAPHIC
A REPRESENTATIVE EXAMPLE
Among the 110 organizations we visited, there were sites at
which objective work conditions for VDT use and management
policies toward women's equality issues were both quite positive.
To illustrate, we selected a medium-sized organization, with sev-
eral thousand employees, largely because some analysts assume
that good VDT policies In the interest of the users are only de-
veloped by very large employers, with large staffs and substantial
budgets for innovative policy experimentation. While measures
of Aged user" need to be defined and applied by researchers,
adopt at this point the subjective perceptions of women clericals
as the primary basis for terming management policies as "good"
for "women's interests.
The Graphic is a nonunion newspaper located in a subur-
ban area. It is technologically advanced, profitable, and highly
regarded for both journalistic and business excellence. Adoption
of office systems technology has not led to reduced employment
in this firm over the past decade, but rather major expansion of
business services (such as selling advertising inserts) that have
been accomplished through greater productivity and effectiveness
by the same-sized work force. The Graphic is well regarded locally
for its employment of women ~d minorities, and its turnover rate
is very low, compared to other newspapers regionally.
We interviewed about 50 managers, editors, reporters, and
administrative and clerical employees at The Graphic. Twenty-one
of these were women clericab doing VDT-based customer-service
work in the classified advertising and circulation departments,
selected by us at random from the operators on duty the days
we visited the site. The six customer-service operators whose
office automation experiences we will describe are representative of
female clericals working at The Graphic who use a combined VDT
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332 APPLICATION OF OFFICE SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY
if she had any complaint procedure. She quit in anger and disgust,
as did many of the women working in this small shop after their
first 6 months. The management saw such a heavy turnover as
quite all right, since they had a steady supply of trained VDT
operators willing to take "probationary pay, and the firm did
not need operators knowledgeable about the business to do the
data-entry work involved. Sheila decided to leave VDT work and
is now employed in the food service business.
~ Marian worked for 10 years as a customer-service represen-
tative for a city government transportation agency in the North-
east. She used the telephone and manual files to handle calls
reporting problems on the bus system, in an all-female depart-
ment. When the agency put in a terminal system, a set of daily
production quotas was set by the new male operations manager
who took over direction of her unit. Training was weak, and most
of the women in the unit had trouble meeting the quotas. Many of
the women developed headaches, stomach pains, and muscle pains.
Marian developed serious chest pains, and was told by her doctor
that it would be "dangerous for a 55-year-old woman to continue
working at a job that was creating such symptoms. When Marian
discussed the chest pains with the operations manager, and her
feeling that this was caused by the high quotas, he said that "the
women will have to keep up or get out. When she tried to appeal
his position to higher management, she was told that decisions
concerning work quotas were up to unit managers, and maybe "it
was time for her to retire. Marian left the agency and now works
for a retail store. She feels that she is "a victim of the computer
age, but especially because she and her colleagues were women.
"I don't think they would get away with that if it was a new
garbage truck that was developed, or if the terminal was brought
into the accounting department, which is mostly men.
.
Claire, 57 years old, is chief clerk in the cash loan surrender
department of a large insurance operation run by a national reli-
gious organization. After graduating from high school, she entered
the Army Air Corps for 2 years (serving in a motor pool in World
War IT), worked in manufacturing, and later in an office job. She
joined the religious organization as a clerk in 1960 and has been
there for 20 years. She uses a VDT occasionally for calculating
loans and cash-surrender payments, but does not work intensively
on the terminal the way other clerks do. Claire is also the pres-
ident of the local union of the Office and Professional Workers
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ALAN F. WES TIN
333
that represents about 300 employees at this company, a post she
has held since the early days of the local union, in 1962. Claire
sees blatant sex discrimination as the long-time, regular policy
of the organization. Men have all the executive and department
manager posts; women stay in the clerical ranks. The best EDP
job sectors systems positions—are held by males. Women work
alongside men and "are being paid less. When new jobs open
up that have higher salaries and status, they are supposed to be
open to bidding by all, but a man always gets them. The union
has filed sex discrimination complaints with the state comm~s-
sion on human rights, but has lost its cases. Also, this company
has been shifting the higher levels of VDT work into jobs that it
now classifies as "supervisory work," which takes them out of the
union bargaining unit. These jobs also are overwhelmingly filled
by males. The union has filed charges contesting this with the
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and has raised the issue
in contract bargaining talks, but has lost there as well. Claire sees
this religious body as really conducting a commercial operation a
very big one but running it under the cover of the religious or-
der, and getting away with discriminatory practices "that it ought
to be ashamed of." Claire feels that it runs as a "men's club,"
and that legal and union actions will be the only way to force
change. Some women have been admitted to underwriting and
professional jobs, but these have not been promotions for talented
clerical women.
It would be easy to multiply these vignettes many times over.
What they have in common is that exploitive or discriminatory
practices that were followed in pre-VDT work settings are now
being applied in the context of VDT-based clerical work.
THE CENTRAL ROLE OF MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY:
"GREAT NORTHERN" AND "NATIONAL SERVICES
Policy choices of user managements are key to whether women
clericals—or any other VDT users—experience good or bad work
and are fairly or unfairly treated at the workplace. To illustrate
this concretely, we present anonymous profiles of two large cor-
porations we visited. We will call these "Great Northern and
"National Services" and make only those alterations of fact nec-
essary to prevent recognition of their identities (the profiles are
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334 APPLICATION OF OFFICE SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY
adapted from Westin et al., 1985~. Both of these are well-known
national firms with successful products and services and currently
profitable operations. Neither firm has had any significant sex
or race discrimination findings against them by EEO agencies
or courts over the past decade. Each is also well regarded in
management circles and in general public reputation for its past
employee-relations policies.
Between 1982 and 1984, managements enjoyed almost total
autonomy in applying office system technology, because there was
no state or federal legislation in place and virtually no EEO agency
attention to special issues of office technology impact. Less than
10 percent of clerical workers were represented by unions, and
even in union-represented workplaces, neither collective bargaining
contracts nor grievance systems exercised significant influences
over management use of VDTs.
In the Great Northern example we found evidence of sex
stereotyping. Sex roles at Great Northern follow strict lines.
About 95 percent of the nonexempt workers using VDTs to do
customer-service work are women, primarily white. Supervisors of
these women are mostly female. At the sales level, the jobs are 95
percent male. At the local-offices level, at which this company's
work is primarily done, managers are virtually all male, except for
the post of "Personnel Specialist,n which has been made into a
female-typed position and is mostly occupied by women.
When we interviewed women VDT operators, the absence of
career paths into sales and management was often brought up.
At Great Northern, about a third of the VDT operators have
community college or even 4-year college degrees, and many of
them would like to move up into sales and management ranks.
There is no path for them to do that now, and their morale is low.
In addition, when we met with women supervisors at Great
Northern offices in five states, there was much banter about the
"token woman" personnel specialist at their locations, and about
the absence of promotional opportunities for these women super-
visors into sales or middIe-management ranks. "We were the ones
that put the new computer system in, worked out its bugs, trained
the operators on the CRTs, and made the transition into the auto-
mated system succeed. But none of us are consiclered good enough
to go into management. That's the 'boy's preserve.' ~
Women supervisors revere bitter in their comments on Great
Northern's male management. They fee} that headquarters people
OCR for page 335
ALAN F. WES TIN
335
Tap dance around questions" raised by women and that "staff
doesn't have much credibility. Nothing is done about the com-
pla~nt that women are not being allowed into field jobs that are
a prerequisite for moving into management posts, nor are women
well represented in Great Northern's Management Development
Program.
As a result of these policies, women we interviewed see com-
munications between employees and management as poor, and
management's basic posture as highly defensive, mostly concerned
with averting unionization. There is an roped door" type com-
plaint program at the company, but, as one woman put it, "The
doors may be open, but their ears are closed. In some local of-
fices, women told us that the atmosphere was annoying—"women
are called 'honey' and 'sweetie' or 'girls,' and the men are very
condescending."
Some members of the personnel staff at Great Northern's
national headquarters are aware of this situation. In fact, concern
over sex stereotyping and lack of affirmative action promotional
opportunities for women ciericals and supervisors surfaced in one
recent employee survey In which two-thirds of women said they
weren't satisfied with their chances for advancement. However,
when this firm underwent a recent reorganization and a reduction
in staff, its sales and management ranks became loaded with men
who had seniority, and top management doesn't want to "rock
the boat. The alternatives it is considering include having more
part-time employees (and getting some men for that work), and
accepting a much higher turnover rate among its now dissatisfied
female customer-service work force than this company would have
accepted in earlier times.
Very few of the upwardly striving women clericals or supervi-
sors that we talked to felt anything would change soon at Great
Northern. They like the company, they like the new VDT work,
but they fee} like second-class citizens in terms of fair treatment
as women.
In contrast to Great Northern, when National Services decided
to create a large customer-service center for ordering parts and
supplies for its manufactured products In an all-VDT system, it
set out to improve the work environment. Traditionally, those
jobs had been women's work, done by telephone, and there was no
shortage of female job-seekers in the exurban community in which
the call center would be located.
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336 APPLICATION OF OFFICE SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY
In setting grade levels for this work, however, and in its adver-
tising, recruiting, and mterview~ng processes, the location manager
and personnel stab of National Services decided that it wanted a
mixed work force- men and women, black and white, and older
as well as younger workers. Its experience told it that morale is
higher and employee satisfaction greater in such a diverse work-
ing group, and this firm has an anticipative approach to equal
employment opportunity (EEO) and affirmative action consider-
ations. The location-staffing objective was aided by two other
factors: the weak job market when they opened this facility and
the strong national reputation of this firm as a good employer.
These factors provided them with a large applicant pool of men as
well as women, and people of varied backgrounds. In addition, the
company was able to offer transfers to this location for a varied
group of its own employees who were being affected by a major
reorganization this firm had also undergone. The result was about
as evenly balanced a customer-service work force at the VDTs as
any political party convention manager or EEO visionary could
imagine, by sex, race, and age.
Since the pay levels at National Services are above average
for customer-service work in the area, since there is a generous
benefits policy, and since the firm has a history of providing strong
job security, it was not surprising that individual VDT operators
we interviewed considered working at this site an "outstanding
job." They particularly liked the mixture of people they worked
with. "l used to operate a VDT at an all-women's job," one young
woman in her twenties commented, "and it was a sorority house
all day. Here, there are men of various ages, and things are just
more interesting.
Of 10 women we specifically asked about their career plans
at this company, 6 were working to go into supervision or pros
gramming and felt they had good prospects of succeeding in these
ambitions. One was entering a sales training course offered by the
company. The other three said they expected to keep on working
at their customer-service jobs for the near future. This firm has
an annual career-planning exercise at which each employee and
manager discuss the employee's skills, performance, and aspira-
tions and develop a blueprint for advancement for those employees
seeking it.
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337
TWO COMPANIES, TWO PATHWAYS
These two companies illustrate two different pathways to of-
fice technology implementation. At Great Northern, because of
its reorganization and consolidation, VDT customer-service work
will probably remain almost all female, unsatisfying for the ca-
reer concerns of many of these women employees, and likely to
make Great Northern's employees less accepting of management
progress on other VDT issues (ergonomics, work quotas, stress
effects, etc.~. The attitude of top management and especially its
information system experts has been highly deterministic; they
feel that using the technology "requires that certain work force
patterns be adopted to achieve maximum efficiency. They assume
that repeople problems created by a need to rush in their new
VDT system will disappear as employees "get used to the work."
As of 1984, the concerns of some personnel staff at Great Northern
had not led to any basic change in top management's blueprint or
its attention to women's issues.
At National Services, top management, its technical special-
ists, and its personnel staffs have a philosophy that office systems
technology should be used in ways that further the firm's basic em-
ployee relations and "people policy, rather than undercut these.
Management set out to create a certain kind of VDT work force
at its new center, and they achieved it. They report that produc-
tivity, the employee climate, and overall facility effectiveness have
been excellent; and our interviews confirmed high employee sat-
isfaction, especially among women. National Services follows the
same policies as to equality and opportunity for all its employees:
clericals, professionals, and managers. It has uniform policies in
all its installations, in central cities as well as suburbs and rural
areas, and it has facilities in all types of communities. Its am
proach is also carried through in bad as well as good economic
times, rather than being an approach that is tailored to exploit
economic pressures.
RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS
The larger study on which this paper is based draws on data
generated in an exploratory field study. We identified issues
relating to office technology and women clerical workers which
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338 APPLICATION OF OFFICE SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY
should be fully explored and studied through structured and rep-
resentative social research. However, there are many conceptual
and methodological difficulties associated with trying to measure
"technology impact," especially on the interests of women workers.
First, the treatment of women at the workplace and their op-
portunities to achieve good jobs, equal pay, and fair participation
with men is shaped by very large social forces and not just of-
fice technology applications. These forces include the following:
overall econorn~c conditions, national and local labor markets,
changing requirements for particular occupations or skills, and in-
dustry employment and staffing trends. They also reflect patterns
of sex discrimination in American society and institutions that
have been built up over long periods of time and that are not eas-
ily dismantled. Although some of these discriminatory attitudes
and practices at the workplace are in the process of being changed
in our time by new social values, women's rights pressures, and
EEO law enforcement, they remain significant factors affecting
most working women, especially in long-time sex-segregated areas
such as clerical and secretarial jobs.
Second, quality of work life and equality issues for women
clericals are powerfully affected by the general levels of employ-
ment available in our society. This wall be shaped significantly
by the overall strength of the U.S. economy and competitiveness
of American companies in a global economy marked by high-tech
tools and low-wage work forces; by the levels of government em-
ployment available in the next decade (and the fiscal strengths of
the economy that undergirds this); by social policies in education
and retraining of workers, job sharing, and work week length; and
by the distribution of the rewards of achievement among various
claimants in the social system.
Finally, in terms of social impact, the introduction of new
office technology can have one of several alternative effects on
the equality and quality of work-life interests of women clerical
workers:
OA could produce important positive changes in the ob-
jective condition of women clerical workers, along dimensions such
as pay, job quality, working conditions, career opportunities, etc.
~ OA could have no appreciable effects one way or the other
on the equality and equity interests of women, proving to be a weak
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ALAN F. WES TIN
339
or even negligible factor when measured against larger economic,
social, or legal forces unfolding in contemporary offices.
. OA could reinforce existing negative aspects of the status
quo, perpetuating patterns of differential treatment of women cler-
ical workers in aspects such as pay, promotion, and participation.
OA would therefore operate to retard or weaken social efforts to
close the equality gaps between women and men office workers.
. Finally, OA could actively increase discriminatory treat-
ment of women clerical workers, by enlarging the differential treat-
ment of women in office work under what were perceived by man-
agements as imperatives for effective technological utilization and
economic efficiency.
Researchers therefore need to frame studies that set baselines
of pre-OA conditions; measure changes in objective conditions
and perceived worker satisfaction in OA settings and compared
to non-OA work; factor in the presence of changing economic
conditions, social values, and legal standards; and produce as solid
an empirical description as can be assembled for all scenarios.
THE FUTURE OF GOOD USER POLICIES
Events are moving rapidly in the evolution of user policies to-
ward the ~people" and equality of work life aspects of installing
and expanding office system technology. Both the positive and
negative incentives we noted earlier are increasing the motivation
of managements to address these VDT issues. In addition, mod-
els for management have been suggested by negotiated provisions
on VDT work in collective bargaining contracts, such as those
at Boston University, Equitable Life Assurance, and others. Fol-
lowing the pattern in other areas of technology-society relations,
such as privacy and databank issues in the 1964-1980 period, a
set of value judgments, organizational policy frameworks, oper-
ating standards, and implementation procedures have begun to
emerge as Organizational software" for dealing with VDT appli-
cations; and the successful experiences of pioneering~organizations
are beginning to be made available for adoption by mainstream
managements. There has been a surge of "how to do its educa-
tional materials and seminars for user managements, developed by
industry and government user associations, vendor organizations,
university and consulting groups, and many others.
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340 APPLICATION OF OFFICE SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY
If we were to rank the breadth of adoption of good user policies
involving VDTs among the 110 organizations we studied, our
estimate as of mid-1986 would run something like this:
The most widely developing management responses are
directed at ergonomics better terminals, more user-friendly soft-
ware, adjustable workstations, and proper work environments.
This is the "nuts and bolts" aspect of better VDT policies, and
while it involves significant costs, it ~ essentially noncontroversial.
Ergonomics can be "solid within organizations on a combination
of productivity gain, health claim avoidance, and decent treatment
of employees arguments.
Better employee communication on health and safety is-
sues is next in rank. Because the great weight of scientific evi-
dence supports the position that VDTs cannot be shown to cause
disease, managements are increasingly communicating with em-
ployees on this issue, preparing briefing booklets and stories in
employee newspapers that report scientific findings and explain
their conclusions. The "don't make waves" concept of not talking
to employees about VDT health issues has given way in most orga-
nizations we visited to direct communications, including practical
guides for exercises to relieve muscu1Q-skeletal tensions, resting
the eyes from intensive VDT work, dealing with job stress, and
so on. Reducing potential worker compensation claims, absences
and high turnover provide important employer incentives here.
Next in order of emerging policies would be matters of job
design and performance evaluation. Providing variety in tasks, al-
Towing employees some discretion in work pacing, setting fair work
standards, giving employees access to- work records, and similar
matters are being considered, as more powerful office system ap-
plications are applied to claims processing, customer-service work,
and secretarial-adm~nistrative functions. The key here is usually
whether the personnel or human resources function is brought into
the application planning, as opposed to having this done exclu-
sively by a DP or OA function. Increasingly, personnel depart-
ments were being brought into VDT planning in the organizations
we visited.
Employee involvement seems to be the next most wide-
spread policy we saw being adopted. Clerical work has not been
an frequent an occupational sector for equality circle" or other
employee participation programs as factory work has been in the
.
.
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ALAN F. WES TIN
341
past 6 to 8 years. This was changing at the sites we visited. In
1984-1986, use of employee involvement mechanisms for clerical
groups was clearly growing and almost half of the organizations
we visited were making some use of formal employee involvement
programs in office automation.
~ As far as unique women's issues in clerical VDT operations
are concerned—such as pay equity, internal career opportunities,
and sex-segregated work grouping innovative management poli-
cies in this area were not developing as fast ~ 1984-1986 as the
other aspects of VDT-based work. Only 25 percent of the sites we
visited were addressing women's issues directly. This is probably
due to a combination of factors: the deeply institutionalized na-
ture of organizational policies in these areas; the absence of clear
or relatively cheap "fixes" for these problems; the absence of reg-
ulatory pressures on these issues from the Reagan administration,
federal or state EEO agencies, or the courts; and labor-market
conditions that currently provide employers with ample supplies
of willing women clerical workers.
As of 1986, then, new policies addressing the quality of work
life aspects of VDT use were developing widely among the organi-
zations we studied, following the most common to least common
patterns we have just estimated. Our observation of user publica-
tions and educational efforts suggests that this trend is also taking
place among most substantial users of VDTs, especially in the
clerical sectors which have generated the greatest publicity and
controversy. These data are reported in Westin (1987~.
However, it is not clearly established whether these employer
initiatives are coming primarily from users' own learning as to
sound employee-relations policies for using office systems technol-
ogy effectively, or whether employers are acting primarily to head
off threats of regulatory action and to defuse attacks by unions
and activist groups. Our own judgment is that the office automa-
tion controversy has not caused the development of good policies
among leading-edge organizations, such as the company we called
Functional Services. However, the controversy has accelerated the
process of mainstream-user consideration of quality of work life as-
pects of office automation and has also strengthened the position
inside mainstream organizations of those staff and management
groups that believe such policies should be pursued.
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342 APPLICATION OF OFFICE SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY
Since policy initiatives ace under way in the user community,
regulatory action may not be necessary. However, at this time,
attitudes toward the need for regulation depend more on the ana-
lyst's philosophy about the scope and timing of social regulation
than on any objective or empirical measures of VDT usage condi-
tions. The key questions in deciding about regulatory proposals
will be (1) whether the need for regulation can be preempted by
widespread usage of effective, substantive measures in the user
community and (2) whether regulatory advocates can produce ev-
idence of harm to employee health or well-being that convinces
policy makers that the substantial costs employers would have to
bear would be worthwhile.
We have shown that there are good policies present among
some user organizations we studied, addressing both the quality
of work life and women's equality issues of concern to millions of
women clericals in business, government, and nonprofit organiza-
tions. These policies work well, are not prohibitively expensive,
contribute to strong employee job satisfaction and women's equal-
ity interests, and support the productivity goals of organizations
in a time of challenge and competition. How widely and well these
approaches will be adopted in the next few years is therefore an
issue of enormous importance, not only to women clericals but to
all employees and employers in the United States and to American
society as a whole.
REFERENCES
Asher, R.
1983 Unpublished transcripts of interviews for the Project on Connecti-
cut Workers and Technological Change. Storts: University of
Connecticut.
Westin, A.F.
1987 VDT Update Report: Uacr Policies and Practices in Applying Office
System Technology. New York: The Educational Fund for Individual
Rights.
Westin, A.F., H. Schweder, M. Baker, and S. Lehman
1985 The Changing Workplace: A Guide to Managing the People, Organiza-
tional, and Regulatory Aspects of Office Technology. Westchester, N.Y.:
Knowledge Industries.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
clerical workers
