Technological Change and Unionization in the Service Sector

Costello, Cynthia B., Monthly Labor Review

Technological change and unionization in the service sector

The shift from an economy based on manufacturing to one based on services presents organized labor with major challenges. What the labor movement confronts is dwindling power in the manufacturing industries where it once exercised extensive control and relatively little presence in service industries, which are fast becoming the dominant industries in the American economy. In order to regain the position it once held in American society, the labor movement must assess the effects of technological change on service sector workers are develop new strategies for unionization.

How are new technologies transforming work in the service industries and what do these changes suggest for organizing service sector workers? In the clerical occupations, the evidence regarding the loss of jobs due to automation is contradictory. On the one hand, a well-publicized study conducted by Wassily Leontief and Faye Duchin predicted that clerical employment would decline …

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Publication information: Article title: Technological Change and Unionization in the Service Sector. Contributors: Costello, Cynthia B. - Author. Journal title: Monthly Labor Review. Volume: 110. Publication date: August 1987. Page number: 45+. © 1999 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. COPYRIGHT 1987 Gale Group.

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