While large corporations that can advertise their sites all over may reap the largest benefits, small providers can benefit just as well. Imagine you are a provider with a very small niche of say 100,000 regular users. If you collect just 10 cents per month from them on average, you will take home $120,000 dollars/year. As you can see, if you can provide a more unique and specialized information service, you can charge more to a smaller audience and still do quite well. Less specialization implies a lower charge and a larger audience for success. While small specialists will not be able to afford the advertising resources of a large corporation, that may not be important. Larger specialty sites that have established followings are happy to link to smaller more specialized sites to increase their traffic. The smaller sites are thus “electronic symbionts” of the larger sites. This type of spontaneous hierarchy can go a long way and provide millions of niches for small providers. As this evolves, these niches as a whole may be necessary to the functioning of “corporate communities” who will ultimately depend upon good relations with thousands of these smaller communities for business.

As with corporate information management, the growth of these sites is in a positive feedback loop, the more sites there are, the larger the need for newer sites to help people negotiate all the sites available.

How many people are employed by web sites? Unfortunately I have no statistics on this. The range goes from one person for a few hours a week (cy.Rev fits this) to hundreds of people working in several shifts to keep a large commercial site functioning 24 hours a day. Given that there are millions of web sites and thousands of commercial sites and that the commercial sites are just starting to come up, this translates into a large number of jobs. In addition, there is the indirect labor employed by the Internet Service Providers to keep the basic infrastructure working. There are all kinds of graphic artists and writers who are contracted to produce specific content for a site and then move on to other contracts, advertising agencies, consultants galore, trainers, technical book writers and on and on. The point to remember is that we are just at the beginning of the Web as a commercial trend . It is bound to keep growing at a furious pace for at least the next 10 years (and probably a whole lot longer).

The Future for High-Tech Jobs

One conclusion seems inevitable. For people in the high-tech sector who constantly renew their skills, job opportunities will always be expanding. Job related anxieties will not be about finding work, it will be more with deciding what kind of circumstances to work in, as well as completing projects successfully.

The other interesting question becomes what happens to salaries in an economy in a permanent job shortage? Traditional economic views predict disastrous inflation leading to a meltdown. But we are experiencing one of the longest runs of low inflation in history, so that view is probably wrong. While sooner or later the speculative bubble will burst and many stocks will loose their value, I am dubious that this will be anything more than a bump on the road. I think the left needs to do more empirical and theoretical work to understand the new dynamics in the information led economy.

There are no studies (that I am aware of) that demonstrate this positive feedback loop between the information explosion and the need for more high-tech labor. On the other hand, the Bureau of Labor statistics provides some interesting supporting data. The top 5 occupations that are expected to grow the fastest in the period 1998-2008 are all high-tech computer-related jobs(6):

Employment change, 1998-2008

Note this table does not imply that these jobs are or will be the most numerous in this time frame. Low paid service jobs will still dominate numerically.

For people who can function in this environment because they have the necessary skills, this new economy is a fantastic promise. You can have the money to live and work anywhere you want comfortably, possibly even without a boss. For those without the background, this is just another opportunity that is beyond grasp.

Strategies for the Future

By a high-tech worker I mean someone who has information manipulation skills using computer technology. At its most basic this means knowing how to use one of the office suites such as Microsoft Office, WordPerfect or Lotus’ SmartSuite as well as being able to get around the internet with a browser. In general this also means having the ability to read and write, as well as reasonable computational ability. It should also be obvious that the more educated a worker is the higher the job earning potential.

There are two main barriers to entry into the high-tech job market. The first is education and the second is job entrances or who you know. Progressive strategies that address joblessness need to account for both of these factors.

Traditional left strategies that focus on getting a bigger piece of the pie as well as keeping the pie constructed the same way it was in 1950 have clearly failed and I see no indication this will ever be reversed. Even the UPS workers’ recent victory seems to me to be more of a missed opportunity. The union, instead of taking up the cause of part-time workers (as part-time workers) took a more traditional approach. By getting some of the part-time workers upgraded to full-time they won the strike. But part-time workers are expanding at a fast rate, and are being used by UPS’s competition. The upshot is that the union managed to avoid the issue of organizing part-time workers, giving management time to figure out how to defeat the union on this issue in the next struggle.

Others argue that we need to reduce the workweek so that more people can obtain full-time employment and so workers will enjoy a better life style. This also seems like a stop-gap. First it still does not address getting workers into higher paying and more stable high-tech jobs. Secondly, it is quite possible that given the pace of automation, capitalists will be able to continue to shrink the labor force even as the workweek shrinks resulting in no net gain for labor.

Dan Swinney’s “The High Road(7)” seems to be the strategy best positioned to be able to attack these barriers. Swinney divides the capitalist class into two camps, the high roaders and the low roaders. The high roaders are concerned with providing employment for people to generate new wealth and for a healthy environment. They can be tactical allies when it comes to providing capital to restructure failing enterprises by arranging for worker buyouts, retraining and even capital equipment purchases. The low roaders are driven by a "race-to-the -bottom" focus on short term gain to the exclusion of all else. They are the ones who shut down productive factories in one country to take advantage of starvation wages and totalitarian environments in another. They are the primary constituents of the new transnational class. Swinney’s strategy goes way beyond allying with sectors of capital; he involves unions and community groups as the core of the people that need to be organized and empowered to be able to stand independently of any ally. This is why I consider this approach so promising.

Swinney’s strategy is critical to stem the bleeding that is now going on in the name of globalization. It does not yet address the dynamics of the high-tech marketplace. I want to make a stab in that direction.

First an anecdote will hopefully clarify the kinds of opportunities that are now opening up as a result of a tight labor market. Entrepreneurial Edge Direct on March 16, 2000 (8) published an interesting article about a plumbing and heating company that needed more help but was hindered by the tight labor market. The owner got hooked up with an organization that taught “survival” language skills and was able to contract with them to provide survival English lessons for 5 newly hired Latino workers and survival Spanish classes for his 65 English-speaking workers. This became a major boon to his business. It seems doubtful that this would have come about in anything other than a tight job market. Employers are loath to cross racial and/or language lines unless they are desperate. But under these circumstances not only did normally left out Latinos get some jobs, a new service company grew too. Survival language skills are probably not going to do well in a loose labor market. This is an example of how a tight labor market not only provides entrances to new jobs to the traditionally left out. It also provides opportunities for labor service organizations that did not exist before either.

The basic model is to grow politically and economically independent and self-sustaining organizations built up around gaining access to the high-tech workplace. As in Swinney’s model, this means reinvigorating unions and giving them back to their membership. It also means building alliances with community organizations and other institutions that have a stake in the success of the oppressed. In addition it means struggling for democratic and civil rights and advocating economic and civil policies that are consistent with the needs of the overwhelming majority. It means struggling to be heard, which is increasingly difficult in a world dominated by huge transnational media monopolies.

This, in many ways, this model resembles the “Serve the People” approach of the Black Panthers. As you recall, the Panther strategy was derived from revolutionary third world strategies to build a self-sustaining independent base from which to operate. Impoverished and oppressed, the Afro-American community was marginalized even when employed, numbed by welfare and deadened by gangs and drugs. While the attempt to build that independent base failed, it failed because the State was fearful of its success. Cointelpro, other parallel actions by law enforcement and media hysteria all succeeded in destroying the Panthers. This shows how difficult it will be to establish such a base.

One of the reasons for this difficulty is that now the new Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC)(9) is asserting hegemony over national governments that in the first place were never oriented to helping the oppressed. This class is even more predatory that the earlier national bourgeoisie of the advanced nations and is completely focused on short term gain. Independent economic and political organizations not dominated by the TCC are considered threats; and national governments are charged with disposing of those threats.

Developing a revolutionary base among the oppressed is only one aspect of developing a revolutionary strategy. This paper is focused on this aspect because of its relations to the question of jobs. I am not attempting to claim that these ideas constitute a whole revolutionary strategy. The following points, however, need to be addressed in an overall strategy:

Reforms to bridge the digital divide are not enough. Gaining access to technology is clearly important for oppressed groups, but it is not sufficient to provide meaningful jobs or to provide an independent political and economic base to contend for power.Reforms to bridge the digital divide are not enough. Gaining access to technology is clearly important for oppressed groups, but it is not sufficient to provide meaningful jobs or to provide an independent political and economic base to contend for power.

Unions and community groups need to become high-tech learning centers and to go after alliances with venture capital to form high-tech incubators. These institutions are a critical need in the inner city. Poor and minorities without any experience have a much harder time breaking into good jobs. Nobody knows who is behind a web page or where they are located. It should be possible to start all kinds of businesses that serve the base communities and are profitable. These businesses can grow and become independent and also provide much needed on-the-job experiences for members of depressed communities. Again, if a progressive organization such as a union or community organization is behind this, there are ample opportunities to build a political base.

Unions that adopt these ideas could not only provide jobs for their members, they would be in good position to be an employment resource, a place that employers would go to find qualified staff. This would make it easy to negotiate for better salaries, working conditions and benefits since they would be holding scarce resources in a tight market as opposed to now when they are holding resources of diminishing value both economically and politically. This would also be a good way for unions to again become a major political force on the rise.

Unions and community groups also need to create partnerships with local colleges and universities (knowledge-based social capital). Educational institutions need to provide classes at an extreme discount or for free in exchange for a piece of the action from the profits that come from the incubator. While scholarships and loans can be important, this idea makes the educational institutions invested in the success of their students and the incubator and thus also invested in the economic success of the community. This can have important political ramifications to the community’s benefit since the educational institutions can drag in many other players who can become allies (even if the amount of commitment varies).

Progressive organizations with access to workers need to become conduits for needed educational services. By using the internet, many classes can be taken in circumstances where the environment can be set up to insure greater success, especially for single mothers or for people who have to care for injured or disabled family members. Education should be on a broad continuous basis. This is because not only because technology changing rapidly, but because more educated workers have more intellectual facilities to bring to bear in a job and that provides competitive advantage. Finally, continuous education means more opportunity for organizers to interact with the base, especially if the educational environment is under the auspices of a progressive organization.

Controlling access to high-tech workers also means unions and community organizations can have influence on the deployment and direction of high technology itself. Why should high-tech businesses only serve the interests of the TCC? Why shouldn’t these businesses be better for the environment? Why shouldn’t customer sensitive web businesses be concerned about the fact that a large base of customers wants more democracy and real news not just a backdrop for advertisements? Building up a strategic base will have profound consequences for the exercise of power in this new world. Not building this base will have equally severe consequences in the opposite direction.

Conclusion

The new economy is upon us. There is no going back. Rather than looking for progressive models from the past to guide us, we need to strike out in new directions. Through a “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” today, we need to determine a strategy and tactics to combat rapacious capitalism in its modern form, not as it was 100 years ago. Organizing the industrial proletariat to remain an industrial proletariat is a rear guard action. It is still important as long as there is an industrial proletariat, but helping the millions who are excluded or about to be expelled from the global economy obtain lives they can live in dignity and justice must be our priority. We can not do this just by saving industrial jobs, we need to transform people into modern high-tech workers using a progressive, high road agenda.

Notes

(1) http://www.nytimes.com/library/financial/sunday/022700biz-atlanta.html

(2) http://www.examiner.com/000209/0209visas.html

(3) Typically classification can occur before entry in a scenario similar to the following: A new engineering modification is to be created, before the modification design can start a change request id must be generated by the system. A record with the identifier and classifying information is created and placed in a system as a place holder so that other engineers can see what other changes are being requested even though the request is not yet complete.

(4) http://www.sciam.com/2000/0500issue/0500toig.html

(5) These architectures are defined primarily by their use of database technology with the first phase being the most primitive. Mainframe databases never really standardized though it seems safe that the combination of CICS and VSAM has ended up as the dominant trend. Client/Server is primarily defined by relational database technology and the Structured Query Language (SQL). Object oriented databases supporting XML seems to be the common trend in the most advanced of the web based technologies. XML adds a new dimension of “unstructured” or text based information to the mix in ways that can not be accomplished in a client/server environment (though Oracle and IBM are trying very hard to dominate this area with their older database technology).

While arguing that the new multi-tiered “pure” XML solutions are clearly the most efficient and will very soon come to dominate information management will appear contentious especially to the many software companies that depend on the older client/server architecture, it seems like a safe bet. Part of the reason for this is the incredible growth of XML that is being driven by the W3C which is an industry standards group that guides the development of the internet as a whole.

One of the distinguishing features of this new era in computing and all other eras is that in this era standards bodies are leading the technology sector forward while in previous eras, dominant corporations were. This is due to the fact that the web is the first technology that has created real head-to-head competition in the computer marketplace. Before the web, computer systems were islands to themselves and vendors could capture market share by getting a corporation to buy their hardware and/or software. This would keep many other vendors either out of the corporation or at least lower their footprint drastically. With the web, there is no way to isolate your technology so the expansion of the web depends upon the existence of industry standards that all vendors adhere to.

An aside is that Microsoft’s monopoly problems have to do with how it dominates the client side of the client/server technology. Even Microsoft has been forced to adhere to W3C standards as a condition of its existence in the new technology marketplace.

(6) http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/ooh.t01.htm

(7) This can be purchased from The Center for Labor and Community Research for $10. See http://www.clcr.org/lst_publications.cfm

(8) http://edge.lowe.org/main/direct/ELR_spanish.htm

(9) See Transnational Capital Faces Nationalist Challenge by Jerry Harris or Fissures in the Globalist Ruling Bloc? by Jerry Harris and Bill Robinson