Record numbers of jobs in the telecommunications industry have been lost over the past twenty years. The 1970s breakup of 'Ma Bell' - American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) into the Regional Bell Operating Companies heralded the beginning of a neo-liberal tidal wave throughout the industry, initially felt in the UK with the privatisation of British Telecom, the removal of the former state monopoly, and the licensing of new carriers commencing with Mercury, itself large owned by the privatised Cable and Wireless.
BT alone has shed about 100,000 jobs (43%) over the last five years, creating not only a 'leaner, fitter company', but a demoralised and embittered workforce. BT's competitors are in a similar position - unit costs (ie jobs) are being cut by most operators in order to maintain or improve market share and profits in what has has become one of the most liberalised free market sectors in the world. Both Mercury and Nynex (UK) have been 'rightsizing' (aka 'downsizing') recently with workers being made redundant.
Ironically, the telecommunications sector is still expanding rapidly with large numbers of new national carriers as well as (mainly US owned) cable television companies entering the fray. However, despite the rapidly increasing volumes of speech and data traffic being carried by well over one hundred new companies, the total employment levels are rapidly diminishing.
The explanation lies in the nature of the technology itself. Capital has rapidly replaced labour over the past period with huge volumes of capital being invested in new switching and transmission technologies. This feature has been a significant factor since the industry's earliest days, but the rate of technological innovation and application has increased beyond belief. It would seem that the industry is currently on the threshold of yet another wave of technological change - largely because of convergence between the computing and telecommunications industries.
Convergence theory has been around for a long time and workers in the industry have become accustomed to both industries gradually becoming interdependent and closer together in the application of similar technology. However, recent switching developments with ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) may unlock that final barrier between the two disciplines; ATM will be used by Internet providers to improve switching between sites (and speed up the use of speech over the Internet). Similarly with the Telcos (telecommunications companies), who may adapt ATM technology for the next generation of switching exchanges.
Bandwidth availability has also rapidly expanded, partly through the laying of new high capacity optical fibre cables. Previous cable technology usually relied upon pairs of twisted copper wires for local delivery of telecommunications services. Bandwidth was narrow - fine for speech but slow for the transmission of large volumes of data. Recent compression techniques in computing and modem design have increased 'normal' modem speed from 2.4kilobits/second to 28.8kbit/s over a three year period. However, digital compression techniques in the network, will increase that several fold. Various Telcos, including BT, are presently trialling ADSL (Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Loop) which currently allows the host (telephone exchange) to download at 2 - 6 megabits/second, and the user to upload at 64kbit/s. Thus, one plain old pair of copper wires, can, with new configurations, provide broadband services - television, radio, fax, data, alarms as well as speech.
But that transmission speed can be rapidly increased over shorter distances, especially with more sophisticated compression techniques. It is therefore not too difficult to reconfigure the telecommunications network so that the bandwidth of optical fibre can be delivered locally, then linked to a local fibre for business premises, or to a copper pair using ADSL compression for households.
An additional feature of convergence is broadcasting. Recent articles in the press have carried reports that new digital compression techniques in broadcasting can already expand one satellite channel's bandwidth to carry not one but ten channels. Koos Becker of NetHold told a Financial Times conference that compression will lead to perhaps 4 500 satellite channels by the year 2,000. As though that prospect were not sufficiently dismal, Abe Peled of News Datacom (a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation) was quoted as saying that digital broadcasting will become the most cost effective way to deliver electronic books, newspapers, music and software to users. Mr Peled added that "A digital newspaper delivered simultaneously [by digital satellite] to thousands of users is close to a thousand times faster, and over a thousand times less expensive than via a typical Internet connection".
Clearly, broadcasting will be a key component of the developing digital 'information superhighway'. Although it presently lacks two way interactive features, future satellite uses for personal communications should not be ruled out; Iridium, set up by Motorola, intends to provide global mobile telephony based on 66 satellites, each 2 000km above the Earth. At a standard fee of $3 per minute for a call to anywhere in the world, it is unquestionably attractive to business users.
All of these developments will cause huge problems for the regulatory bodies; indeed, the free market, freebooting aspects are so dominant that it is increasingly unlikely that regulators or even governments will be able to keep up with new developments. During the current round in the World Trade talks, the United States even offered to remove all restrictions on telephony, cable TV and broadcasting - provided other countries did the same (thus opening their home markets to predatory US corporations). While that may simply be positioning by the US government (somewhat at odds with Republican Pat Buchanan's protectionism), it nevertheless is a recognition that telecommunications, computing and broadcasting are irretrievably intertwined in what may be the first global free market.
Facing up to the future will be a major task for technological workers and their unions. There can be no easy answers, but several years of redundancies leave their marks - big corporations have become 'redundancy junkies', unable to see any solution beyond the next fix of 'business process re-engineering' or 'rightsizing'.
In an effort to come to grips with these huge issues the Communication Workers Union and BECTU, the broadcasting and entertainment union, have been analysing recent developments and hope to jointly draw the lessons together. While the issues will cause severe problems for communications and media unions, it should also be recognised that communications is now a central factor in all industries. It is therefore the intention of CWU and BECTU to initiate a much wider debate, not only within our own unions, but throughout the trade union movement. At this stage, workers and trade unions need to seriously consider the rapidly changing nature of technology and how that impacts upon jobs. Only then can we begin to piece together a credible programme which can counter the ravages of the recent period.
What happens to us today will affect you tomorrow.
'We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we will all hang separately' (Benjamin Franklin).
Donald MacDonald
Vice President
Communication Workers Union (UK)
3rd March, 1996
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