When the electronic revolution was first reaching business and industry in the 1970s, I was a new employee at International Paper Co. My boss at that time was a major proponent of electronic gadgetry. He got excited about new office equipment and was always putting promotional materials on my desk. In that regard, he was preaching to the choir.
A decade before the first buildings went up in Silicon Valley, Calif., my boss was exploring the merits of memory typewriters with IBM in Mobile, Ala. He was the first in Mobile, and probably the world, to finally try them, proving what the IBM sales guys must have been hoping about sucker birthrates.
Memory typewriters, with a little LCDish strip screen, had enough memory for about two sentences. Not much, but better than the Selectrics and sling-key Royals of the time. Soon every manager's secretary in the research department had a memory typewriter, even the receptionist who doubled as a switchboard jockey and handled overflow typing at the same time.
My boss also was among the first with the latest office dictation technologies, putting new machines that used vinyl dictation belts on everybody's desk. These things actually cut a groove into the belts (like vinyl records). He devised an elaborate coordination structure for these belts that was to become one of the first typing pools around (again, maybe in the world).
A couple of years later, these beloved machines would be replaced with magnetic cassette units, which are still used today. The bright blue belts disappeared from interoffice mail, and the typing pool evolved into a clerical support center that handled correspondence and mailing, general typing/forms, travel arrangements, vacations/benefits, central filing, etc., and probably most important (when the receptionist was swamped) wrote up while-you-were-out telephone pink-slip messages.
Fast Forward
In the two decades that followed, the electronic revolution became the digital revolution, sweeping through business in a way my boss would not have imagined. It changed things in ways he probably never would have approved.
Not only did his typing pools and clerical support center disappear, along with centralized dictation, the digital world stripped away administrative support for professional employees almost altogether. Today, only a few professional people-some CEOs, presidents, and other company muckity mucks (ok, most)-don't handle everything administratively for themselves.
PC and corporate networks, wireless PDA's, cell phones, etc., have eliminated the need for almost any kind of middleperson support. Today, what control freak doesn't type/print/mail his or her own correspondence, make his own travel arrangements, keep his own digital filing, manage his own professional messaging (telephone and email), create his own PowerPoint presentations, etc., etc. It's easier (and faster) than involving a third person.
Compared with a quarter century ago, most offices today operate with 25%-50% fewer employees overall-doing basically the same things if not a lot more. Considering the great reductions in professional employees in the past few years, especially in the paper industry, that has likely risen to 75% in some offices.
Even the multipurpose receptionist is gone from most offices today, replaced by digital systems with devious, dead-ending menu loops. I've been to pulp and paper mills recently that have no receptionist or living person at all -just a phone and a mill directory on the wall-seemingly making them vulnerable to vagrants and people who slept in a Holiday Inn Express the night before.
Lost in Translation
Maybe we misunderstood what lofty biz-philosophers have preached these past few decades. But weren't there supposed to have been some benefits from the digital revolution? By erasing hundreds of thousand of jobs in the business ranks (just in the U.S. alone)—from secretaries to receptionists/switchboard operators to department librarians and filing clerks—shouldn't there have been some corresponding measurable gains in business profitability that trickled down in the form of lower product costs and prices, better salaries, more secure jobs, shorter work weeks?
Shouldn't the increased efficiency of process automation, advanced information technology, higher productivity per employee unit of production, etc., have translated into something more real to hang a hat on? Shouldn't companies be doing as least as well as they were a half-century ago, if not much better, considering what the digital revolution has wrought?
On an adjusted dollar basis, today's energy and raw materials costs are no higher than they were in the '50s and '60s, probably lower. Similarly, capital investments are significantly below what they were in the '70s and '80s, particularly in the paper industry. Salaries of professionals in general are probably below those of a quarter century ago, following recent layoffs and restructuring.
The professional salary structure in the U.S. began collapsing around 2000-2001 and will likely take a decade or more to recover, if ever. The decent salaries of some professional positions just a couple of years ago are definitely a thing of the past. Compensatory gains that some professionals made as the digital revolution developed, including engineers and various scientists, are currently more or less down the drain. Ironically, this sector contributed the most toward efficiency/productivity belt tightening in recent years and were the ones who literally steered the digital revolution to where it is today.
Where have the supposed gains of the electronic/digital revolution gone? Considering the current state of the U.S. pulp and paper industry as somewhat typical of at least a few others in this country during the past several years, maybe it's time to unplug some of our PCs and brush the dust off of a few old memory typewriters.
