The educational requirements for this new kind of office work are subject to confusion, some of it deliberate, between the needs of the work itself and other considerations. Thus the authors of a recent study of electronic data-processing in New York write:
We have already noted the general tendency of employers to specify a highschool diploma as a prerequisite to employment for keypunch operators. It is also true, however, that many successful\*\* operators are hired without the diploma, particularly in a period when the labor market is tight. Our interviews convinced us that a high-school diploma is viewed as something other than a certification of academic or intellectual proficiency.
Some firms, admittedly, relish their ability to state that “all our employees are high-school graduates," as an indication of status or prestige. The great majority, however, view the diploma as a certification of responsibility, motivation, and reliability. . . . "Sure, we can find out quickly if a girl can really punch cards. But will she come in every Monday? Will she stay after 5 o'clock when we're pushed for overtime? Will she drift to another job after three weeks?" These are the kinds of questions that were repeatedly raised by employers.32
Earlier in the computer era, various managements not yet oriented in the field and perhaps somewhat deceived by their own glowing estimates of the mass “upgrading of the labor force" that would take place, hired the “wrong kind of labor." This was particularly true in banking, where the snobbish tradition of “superior" employees had not yet been overcome by managers. Thus in one study of bank computerization it was decided that personnel managers were “recruiting girls of too high an intellectual calibre for the new simple machine jobs." 33 Experience soon showed, in the words of another
study of technological change in banking, that “it would be misleading to assume that a massive upgrading will take place, for a large proportion of jobs created up to this point are relatively low rated. Encoders are a case in point: Encoding is a low-grade job which is easily and quickly learned, requiring only the ability to operate a 10-key keyboard.' At one bank, Due to the simplicity of operator training for single pocket proof encoders, the job, as related to our job evaluation scale, has been downgraded three grades and reduced from an average base of \$68 to \$53 per week.'\* An EDP clerk is only a slightly higher grade position than that of encoder. . . .' At the large branch bank referred to above, approximately 70 percent of the jobs created were low rated, while at the small branch bank they comprised around 50 percent of the new jobs."35 And it is in the nature of the organization of work around the computer system that, like factory work, it does not have the advancement ladder characteristic of the bank and office of several generations ago. This was recognized early in the computer era by the American Management Association, which, in a special report designed to help employers set up data-processing operations, said: "To be honest—we don't want people to take data-processing jobs as stepping stones to other jobs. We want permanent employees capable of doing good work and satisfied to stay and do it. To promise rapid advancement is to falsify the facts. The only rapid advancement for the bulk of nonsupervisory data-processing staff is out of data-processing!"36
So far as the traditional grades of office labor are concerned, the computerization of office accounting procedures further weakens the position of those skilled in the system as a whole, particularly bookkeepers. The decline of the bookkeeper, which had begun, as we have seen, with the rise of the office manager, was helped along by the rise of the bookkeeping or posting machine, which converted a certain amount of skilled ledger work into a mechanical operation. The decline was continued, especially in banking, by the development of electronic bookkeeping machines, which complete the conversion of bookkeepers into machine operators and at the same time reduce the demand for them sharply. Thus one multi-branch bank reported that within eighteen months after installing electronic bookkeeping machines, the bookkeeping staff of 600 had been reduced to 150, and the data-processing staff had grown to 122. This is in line with the experience of most banks, which achieve a reduction in overall labor requirements of 40 to 50 percent for the same volume of work, and in the process cut down the bookkeeping people sharply and replace them with machine operators.37
Not only bookkeepers, but even the lower grades of management, feel the effects in a similar way. The computer presents management with an enormous temptation to save management time as well as labor time by “mechanizing" many choices and decisions. It is probably for this reason that Howard C. Carlson, a psychologist employed by General Motors, has said: “The computer may be to middle management what the assembly line is to the hourly worker."38
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\* This vice-president gives us a clear illustration of the fetishism which puts the blame for the situation on the “machines" rather than on the social relations within which they are employed. He knew when he made this remark that it was not the "machines" but he himself who chained the workers to their desks, for in his next breath he pointed out that a count of production was kept for the workers in that machine room.
\*\* This term in itself is quite remarkable, and can only be understood if taken to mean key punch operators who turn out to be “successful" hiring strokes for the personnel manager.
\* These pay figures refer to 1963. Elsewhere, the job of coder is characterized thus by a data-processing executive: "The only gal who will stick with this work has to have a husband with two broken legs and five hungry kids. No one else could stand it."34