WATCHING TV in America recently, I listened with incredulity as a factory worker described how he worked hard to get his quota of pressings finished so he could take the rest of the day off to read books and play cards. He was on a picket line, on strike, and along with his colleagues, proud to be doing battle against his company. This interview was followed by a company spokesman explaining that the plant was so inefficient compared with those of competing companies because it had continually resisted change.

Apparently the competition used the latest technology and fewer people, working a full shift, and was now five times more productive and a lot cheaper. The outcome looked inevitable: a major plant closure was on the cards.

All this brought memories of my student days in the early 1970s flooding back. At that time, Britain was strike-ridden; I can still recall the rubbish stacked in the streets and the daily power cuts.

How can successful companies and countries be plunged into such destructive turmoil? What is it that so disconnects the workforce from reality and the all-too-predictable consequences of industrial action? It can only be years of smokestack stability giving the illusion that nothing has to change.

In the 1970s we witnessed the wholesale self-destruction of entire industrial sectors facing global competition and relatively slow technological change. In the late-1990s, self-destruction is even more certain and much faster.

Research, development, design and production expertise can now be outsourced around the globe at low cost; the result is that the world has an over-production capacity for white, brown and automotive products. It is a no-win contest for those who oppose change.

In a sane world, we would see employers and employees agreeing on transformation programmes whereby new industries and skills would be created in concert with the downsizing of the old. Only a few industries seem to do this, and it is possible only when they are both money- and people-rich. Here, the computer industry seems to hold all the cards with the widely adopted practice of share ownership. People with a stake in a business do not, in general, go head to head with management in some metaphoric fight to the death.

Probably the only chance for the old smokestack and box-assembly businesses is another influx of automation to displace even more people. With fewer staff doing more skilled work looking after the machines, and the work currently beyond machines, we would see more direct ownership and participation. But what of those people displaced? Will we ever see full employment?

In Silicon Valley anyone who wants a job can get one, and there is still unemployment of 2.5 per cent. Most new jobs are in the service sector looking after those predominantly employed in hi-tech industries. People in this sector do not clean their cars, paint the house or do the garden. They are too busy exercising and extending their expertise. Like the US, Britain does not have enough technologists, and there are thousands of vacancies.

Perhaps it is time we started concentrating our energies on computer education and training.

Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is:
http://cochrane.org.uk