The Ax

12

When I was a boy, I was for a while a science fiction fan. A lot of us were, until Sputnik. I was twelve when Sputnik flew. All the science fiction magazines I'd read before then, and the movies and TV shows I saw, assumed that outer space belonged by natural right to Americans. Explorers and settlers and daredevils of space were all Americans, in story after story. And then, out of nowhere, the Russians launched Sputnik, the first space vehicle. The Russians!

We all stopped reading science fiction, then, and turned away from science fiction movies and TV shows. I don't know about anybody else, but, as I remember it, I turned my interest after that to the western. In the western, there was never any doubt who would win.

But before Sputnik turned my whole generation away from science fiction, we had read a lot of stories that talked about something called "automation." Automation was going to take the place of unintelligent labor, though I don't think it was ever phrased quite like that. But simple assembly line stuff is what they meant, the kind of dull deadening repetitive labor that everybody agreed was bad for the human brain and paralyzing to the human spirit. All that work would be taken over by machines.

This automated future was always presented as a good thing, a boon to mankind, but I remember, even as a child, wondering what was supposed to happen to the people who didn't work at the dull stupefying jobs any more. They'd have to work somewhere, wouldn't they? Or how would they eat? If the machines took all their jobs, what would they do to support themselves?

I remember the first time I saw news footage of a robot assembly line in a Japanese auto factory, a machine that looked like the X-ray machine in the dentist's office, jerking around all by itself, this way and that, welding automobile pieces together. This was automation. It was fast, and although it looked clumsy the announcer said it was much more precise and efficient than any human being.

So automation did arrive, and it did have a hard effect on the workers. In the fifties and sixties, blue-collar workers were laid off in their thousands, all because of automation. But most of those workers were unionized, and most of the unions had grown strong over the previous thirty years, and so there were great long strikes, in the steel mills, and in the mines, and in the auto factories, and at the end of it all the pain of the transition was somewhat eased.

Well, that was long ago, and the toll that automation was going to take on the American worker has long since been absorbed. These days, the factory workers are only hit sporadically, when a company moves to Asia or somewhere, looking for cheaper labor and easier environment laws. These days, it's the child of automation that has risen among us, and the child of automation hits higher in the work force.

The child of automation is the computer, and the computer is taking the place of the white-collar worker, the manager, the supervisor, just as surely as those assembly line robots took the place of the lunch-bucket crowd. Middle management, that's what's being winnowed now. And none of us are unionized.

In any large company, there are three levels of staff. At the top are the bosses, the executives, the representatives of the stockholders, who count the numbers and issue the orders and make the decisions. At the bottom are the workers on the line, the people who actually make whatever is being made. And between the two, until now, has been middle management.

It is middle management's job to interpret the bosses for the workers and the workers for the bosses. The middle manager passes information: downward, he passes the orders and requirements, while upward he passes the record of accomplishment, of what has actually happened. To the suppliers he passes the information of what raw material is needed, and to the distributors he passes the information of what finished product is available. He's the conduit, and until now he has been an absolutely necessary part of the process.

Once you bring in the computer, you no longer need middle management. Of course, you still need a few people at that level, to serve the computer, to run specific tasks, but you no longer need the hundreds and thousands of managers that were still needed only yesterday.

People like me.

As the computer takes our jobs, most people don't even seem to realize why it's happening. Why was I fired, they want to know, when the company's in the black and doing better than ever? And the answer is, we were fired because the computer made us unnecessary and made mergers possible and our absence makes the company even stronger, and the dividends even larger, the return on investment even more generous.

They still need some of us. This is a transition we're in now, where middle management will shrink like a slug when you pour salt on it, but middle management won't completely disappear. There will just be fewer jobs, that's all, far fewer jobs.

But my job, the one Upton "Ralph" Fallon is holding for me, that one still exists. A human being or two is still needed to run the production line, to be above the working stiffs but capable of communication with them, so the bosses won't have to deal directly with people who play country music on their car radios.

Fallon is my competition, all right. And the six resumes I've pulled out of the stack are my competition. But this is a sea change taking place in our civilization right now, and all of middle management is my competition. A million hungry faces will be at the window soon, peering in. Well educated, middle-aged, middle class.

I have to be firmly in place, before the flood becomes overwhelming. So I have to be strong, and I have to be determined, and I have to be quick. Thursday, I have to drive into New York State and find Everett Boyd Dynes.