Orders of the Day — Unemployment

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 24 July 1978.

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Photo of Mr Doug Hoyle Mr Doug Hoyle , Nelson and Colne 12:00, 24 July 1978

My hon. Friend the Member for Chorley (Mr. Rodgers) is right. Capitalism can never come up with the answers to this problem. The problem will be intensified by the technological revolution involving the silicon chip and micro-processing. This is a second industrial revolution. We face a revolution in information technology. It will create immense problems. Yet so far in the debate no one has turned his attention to the problem that will face us, or to a possible solution. The solution cannot be achieved by this country alone. It will be arrived at only in co-operation with other industrialised nations.

We are in the era of the automated factory and the automated office. It has been possible for a long time for the large-scale mass production of cars to be carried out in an automated factory. However, the silicon chip now makes it possible to apply automation to small batch production. In Japan small factories which previously employed 700 people are now being controlled by only 10. But as this new era approaches the Opposition seek to debate unemployment for party-political purposes. That is no way to look at the future.

The president of the Telecommunication Engineering and Manufacturing Association said in March, that the change by the Post Office from electromechanical switchgear to system X would reduce the labour force in the manufacturing industry by 60 per cent. That will have dire effects for Merseyside.

Comparatively recently a system was developed by IBM known as the robot system, which is used for mechanical assembly. Computer Weekly said in February this year that it would throw out of work one in five of the people who work on the assembly of pumps, valves, compressors, radios, televisions, hi-fi, office equipment and telephone equipment in the United Kingdom.

It has been said many times that this new era will lead to the creation of white-collar jobs, but this advanced technology goes into the offices and the service industries as well as into the factories. With the development of optical fibre cables we are now, as my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Employment —the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mr. Golding)—with his expertise will know far better than I, moving into the era of electronic mail. The Post Office's viewdata system could be developed in this way. One hon. Member was speaking about the shortage of postmen. He will not need to worry in the future, because this new system will put postmen out of work. The letter will be a thing of the past. In future, messages will be flashed up on to a screen, and that will eat into the 800,000 jobs of secretaries and clerks in offices.

Micro-processing systems will therefore have a dramatic and drastic effect on both white-collar and manual jobs. It is already happening in banking with the introduction of the electronic banking system. In the supermarket the girl taps up the bill on a register which at the same time operates the stock control system, so that stocks are automatically adjusted.

These are the sort of developments that we face, and to talk in that context in terms of short-term measures is to talk of the obsolete. Such an approach is as dead as the dinosaur. In the debate so far we have been scratching at the soil with a penknife, when to solve the problem we need a team of excavators.

The question we must answer is how to begin to solve the problems that arise in this new world. The trouble lies throughout the developed world, and if we are not careful there will be added to the unemployment in the developed world more starving millions in the developing world. Those unfortunate people will be completely forgotten.

These developments represent a paradise for the large multinational companies. They will not suffer; they will benefit, because they will substantially reduce their labour forces unless action is taken to prevent them, and that action must be taken throughout the world.