De facto, however, mini-jobs and hourly payment continue to
deskill even those that are recognized as teachers and who are entitled to longstanding fringe benefits allocated by the collective agreement.
Concerns included "It
deskills junior (medical staff) and nurses--the long-term effects will only be apparent in the next 10 to 30 years" (Trainee C) and "Medical staff on general wards
deskill (due to MET) and feel no responsibility for sick patients" (Trainee D).
One size fits all" thinking will constrain and
deskill outstanding, creative teachers.
Its tendency to
deskill the worker and to diminish the mental and intellectual acuity he or she would bring to the job was rationalized by Frederick Taylor and, in reference to the white-collar employee, by William Leffingwell, Taylor's disciple.
I also enjoyed Shalla's article on passenger agents at Air Canada, and how (in this instance) automated technology has been successfully used to
deskill jobs and control workers.
Information technology has clearly been developed and used during these years to
deskill, discipline, and displace human labour in a global speed-up of unprecedented proportion.
The second part of the book covers the onset of the Depression, 1930-35, and shows how a process that had appeared relatively benign and even beneficial to workers amid the prosperity of the late twenties suddenly turned ugly, with employers increasingly resorting to the harsher forms of Taylorist practice - such as the Bedaux pay system - to extract more effort from workers (often for less pay) while they simultaneously worked to eliminate or
deskill jobs through mechanization.
Applying earlier standards of accepting a small number of errors to computers would not only
deskill secretarial staff but would also waste the computer's potential.
The direct managerial capacities individual businesses have over labour to intensify,
deskill and casualise work are not necessarily opposed to the capacities employer associations have to mediate the political interests of employers.
This segregation, combined with the assumption that women employees are women first, and workers second, provides managers with what they perceive as a rational basis for using information technology to
deskill and reduce the influence of clerical workers' jobs.
Changes such as those implicit in Japanese-style "lean production" or the type of organization sometimes referred to as flexible specialization are seen as reversing the traditional tendency to
deskill and disenfranchise the worker within production.
