THE THIRD WAVE
When Western Electric shifted from producing electromechanical switching equipment for the phone company to making electronic switching gear, the work force at its advanced manufacturing facility in northern Illinois was transformed. Before the changeover, production workers outnumbered white-collar and technical workers three to one. Today the ratio is one to one. This means that fully half of the 2,000 workers now handle information instead of things, and much of their work can be done at home. Dom Cuomo, director of engineering at the Northern Illinois facility, put it flatly: “If you include engineers, ten to twenty-five percent of what is done here could be done at home with existing technology.”
Cuomo’s manager of engineering, Gerald Mitchell, went even further. “All told,” he stated, “600 to 700 of the 2,000 could now—with existing technology—work at home. And in five years, we could go far beyond that.”
These informed “guesstimates” are remarkably similar to those made by Dar Howard, manufacturing manager of the Hewlett-Packard factory in Colorado Springs: “We have 1,000 in actual manufacturing.Technologically, maybe 250 of them could work at home. The logistics would be complicated, but the tooling and capital equipment would not prevent it. In white collar research and development, if you’re willing to invest in [computer] terminals, one half to three quarters could also work at home.” At Hewlett-Packard that would add up to an additional 350 to 520 workers.
All told, it means that fully 35 to 50 percent of the entire work force in this advanced manufacturing center could even now do most, if not all, their work at home, providing one chose to organize production that way. Third Wave manufacturing, Marx notwithstanding, does not require 100 percent of the work force to be concentrated in the workshop.
Nor are such estimates found in electronic industries alone or in giant enterprises. According to Peter Tattle, vice-president of Ortho Pharmaceutical (Canada) Ltd., the question is not “How many can be permitted to work at home?” but rather, “How many have to work in the office or factory?” Speaking of the 300 employed in his plant, Tattle says: “Fully 75 percent could work at home if we provided the necessary communications technology.” Clearly, what applies to electronics and Pharmaceuticals also applies to other advanced industries.
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