In opening his remarks to the conference, David St. John of the US labour movement organization, the AFL-CIO, noted that the event had no precedent in America, despite Vice President Al Gore's initiatives and the establishment of the US Government's Private Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure (NII).
A Note of Caution
St. John sounded a note of caution about the superhighway vision articulated by the US administration. Despite much public-spirited activity, the construction of the superhighway in the US was primarily market-driven and profit motivated. As in the UK, he said, corporate management was clearly in charge as broadcasting, cable television, telephone services, publishing, and the computer industry converged.
Congress and the Clinton administration have been arguing for the past two years over the degree and form of telecommunications deregulation necessary to encourage orderly convergence. Accordingly, progress has been uneven, said St. John, but there have already been a number of huge cross-industry deals indicating that convergence will clearly happen. It is already having the effect of shifting the focus of competition in information-related industries firmly in the direction of the provision of services to the household market.
The degree of interactivity of these services has been the subject of much debate, said St. John. It was unclear whether services would be delivered to the home through a low level interactive television screen, or using a home computer with a high level of interactivity.
Two separate visions of the development of the superhighway prevailed in US, St. John said. On the one hand was Al Gore's vision of every child in small-town America with computer access to the Library of Congress in Washington. On the other hand, Wall Street saw the huge profits to be garnered from video-on-demand, home-shopping, and on-line video games. Given that corporate CEOs constituted a clear majority on the 37-member Presidential Advisory Committee on the NII, and that the Labour movement had only two representatives, St. John concluded that it was obvious which way things were heading.
Concerns of the AFL-CIO
The American labour movement was beginning to look at some of the issues arising from the construction of the information superhighway. The AFL-CIO Executive Council has set up a committee chaired by Morton Bahr, President of the Communication Workers of America, to look into the effects of the information superhighway on industry, working lives, and society at large. This committee has yet to recommend specific policy to the AFL-CIO but, said St. John, he could give some indication of how policy was developing.
The AFL-CIO believed that the NII had much to offer workers, not solely in terms of economics but in the provision of educational opportunities and the delivery of information of all kinds. Since access to information is increasingly a determinant of standard of living, it is important for the government to ensure affordable access to the information infrastructure for everybody, or the existing gap between rich and poor may be aggravated by the opening-up of a further gap between information haves and have-nots.
The NII must not become the preserve of a privileged few, said St. John. St. John noted that the AFL-CIO chairman has suggested that the US government ensures that every American home is equipped with a personal computer. However it is done, he said, we have to look at building a mass market for information services - services which mean more than a steady diet of violence and music videos. The AFL-CIO wanted government to ensure that there was a distinct and competitive market place for services, a diversity of programming, freedom to communicate over the NII, and attention paid to democratic values and a healthy civic sector.
A Lesson From History
St. John made the point that government involvement in this area is not new: public laws and policies have always guided the development of the US telephone system, and today the original goal of universal service has been largely achieved, largely because government policies many years ago encouraged it.
However, said St. John, in the current political and economic climate in the US, the AFL-CIO constantly has to remind people of this, and of the fact that government initiatives have benefited millions of individual Americans, as well as a great number of industries who profited from the development of new markets. Unfortunately, St. John said, it was proving almost impossible to convince the private sector that the government should have even the smallest involvement in the NII.
Some More Concerns
St. John continued to outline some of the concerns of the labour movement with regard to the information superhighway. He commented on the disparity in the education system. Private schools now required their students to have laptop computers while public or state-funded schools were finding it difficult to keep their libraries open. This was the context in which society would have to deal with the question of how to wire-up schools and libraries to enable American schoolchildren to prepare for the future. He said that this issue generated much discussion but only market incentives were being considered as an option.
Other issues concerning the labour movement included intellectual rights for those who create products transmitted on the information superhighway, particularly for union members in the entertainment industry; the ability of workers to access training and lifelong learning, thereby enabling them to upgrade their skills, keep abreast of technological advances, and maintain their incomes; and the protection of workers' privacy from employer monitoring.
St. John finished as he began, with a note of caution. He commented that, despite the talk of new jobs, some industries would lose jobs as the superhighway is constructed. Over 125,000 jobs had vanished from telecommunications businesses in the US alone over the last decade. The quality of new jobs was also uncertain, said St. John, noting an apparent increase of high-tech data entry or transaction processing sweatshops staffed mainly by women whose every key stroke is monitored. Justifying low pay, the owners of such businesses claim they face competition from other English-speaking countries with lower rates of pay. On the information superhighway, concluded St. John, there are pitfalls as well as possibilities.