The world’s biggest container ship has just docked in the UK. It will be unloaded in 36 hours. This repesents a huge technical advance - but at what social cost? The shipment and distribution of commodities (world trade) has grown something like 50 times in the post war period and container ships have become very bigger and faster. The unloading of these ships up until relatively recently was done by manual labour. With the advances of technology (containerisation in particular), dock work has changed from labour intensive to capital intensive. An example of this is the London docks. In the 1930s there were around 100,000 dockers who between them moved around 3 million tons of goods. The Port of London Authority now operates with less than 2000 dockers - but between them they move around 100 million tons of goods a year.

The underlying factor here is that this is exactly what the government and the neo-cons would like to see in the public sector. Effectively a shift from manual to capital intensive in white collar work processes. This is really what ‘e-government’ is all about. It is ‘efficient’ from the point of view of the employers in shedding huge amounts of labour. The social costs of all of this - unemployment, temporary and casual work, lack of job stability - are all passed on to the workforce themselves.

In a recent ‘leaked’ memo (I will try and find the reference) there is mention of thousands of jobs disappearing. It’s true - a machine really is after your job.