From the "Electronic Cottage" to the "Silicon Sweatshop":

Social Implications of Telemediated Work in Canada

Graham D. Longford

Assistant Professor

Department of Political Studies

Trent University

and

Barbara A. Crow

Associate Professor

Communication Studies

York University

The work and workplaces of Canadians have undergone profound change over the last few decades, from the relative decline of jobs in manufacturing and primary industries and subsequent rise in service sector employment, to the increasing use of contingent (part-time, temporary, and contract) workers and the entry of millions of women into the paid labour force. While such changes originate from a complex blend of global and domestic economic and social forces, the emergence of new information and communications technologies (ICTs) has also played an important part. In this essay we survey and evaluate the extent and effects of telemediated work in Canada, that is, work that depends upon or is carried out through the use of ICTs. Numerous and often conflicting studies on work and technology have appeared in the last decade, some controversial. Works by Rifkin, Noble, and Menzies, for example, invoke near apocalyptic scenarios of the "end of work" and the formation of a mass cybertariat. Technology gurus like Don Tapscott, on the other hand, argue that work involving the production or use of ICTs constitutes the fastest growing source of employment in the new economy (Tapscott 1996, 188). Our task is rendered more difficult by the relative lack of empirical data in the area. Compared with recent studies of the impacts of organizational change, there is a lack of adequate study and analysis of the impact of telemediated work on such things as the availability of employment, skills and income, job security, and working conditions for many workers in the "knowledge-based economy". In an age when ICTs have been elevated to the status universal panacea, the need for better research and understanding is compelling.

Business and government leaders endorse the rapid proliferation and diffusion of new ICTs throughout the economy and workplace as key to Canada's future economic growth, prosperity and competitiveness, and have portrayed them as enabling technologies capable of breaking down barriers to economic opportunity based on gender, race, disability and geography (Boston Consulting Group (Canada) 2000; Information Highway Advisory Council 1997; National Broadband Task Force 2001). In our view, however, evidence for such widespread positive effects of ICTs is inconclusive at best. In fact, there is mounting evidence that the impact of ICTs on the nature, quantity, and quality of work in Canada is one of polarization, by reproducing and intensifying rather than overcoming historically recalcitrant barriers to economic opportunity and self-sufficiency. Without denying the benefits new ICTs have brought to many, their effects have been highly uneven. For some, albeit a minority, the effect of ICTs on the nature of work and employment in the new economy has had many positive aspects; swelling their bank accounts, providing new opportunities for autonomy and creative collaboration with distant colleagues, and helping accommodate family commitments, such as childcare or eldercare. At the other end of the spectrum lie hundreds of thousands of relatively unskilled, poorly paid teleservice agents working in conditions best described as "silicon sweatshops," where they are crowded into call centres, seated at workstations that will inevitably injure them, and subject to continuous electronic monitoring. Somewhere in the middle lies a substantial majority of Canadians who share a simultaneous fascination with new technologies like cell phones, pagers, and the Internet1, and an abiding suspicion that new technology poses a threat to their jobs and intrudes on their privacy and leisure time (Reid 1996, 127-144). Finally, even those who have succeeded in prospering in the new economy have paid a price, in the form of increased hours of work, increased stress, and a blurring of the distinction between work and home-life.

In this paper, we follow the contours of the contemporary landscape of work in Canada, with particular attention paid to how its has been restructured and reshaped in recent years by the growing use of computer and telecommunications equipment, and with a view to identifying emerging trends and issues with which employers, workers, policy makers, and Canadian citizens in general will soon have to contend. With so much ink and air-time in the popular media devoted to celebrating the benefits of these technologies, we have elected to focus on a number of more troublesome impacts, in order to offer the kind of critical counternarrative necessary to stimulate continued reflection on the changes being wrought by technology on such an important part of all our lives. Among these emerging trends and issues are: increased polarization of the workforce between highly-skilled, well paid knowledge workers and a large pool of semi- and unskilled workers occupying poorly paid and increasingly precarious part-time, temporary and contract positions; rising numbers of home-based teleworkers for whom coverage by employment standards and occupational health and safety legislation is uncertain; the persistence of a gendered and racialized division of labour in the new economy; geographic "clustering" of economic and employment opportunities in already economically privileged urban regions; declining working conditions and employment standards for all workers in the knowledge-based economy in terms of employment standards, job security, and stress; and the use of technology to electronically monitor the activities, performance, whereabouts and, increasingly, private thoughts of growing numbers of workers. Current public policy, with its focus on promoting further technological innovation and closing the "digital divide," has yet to acknowledge, let alone address, many of the issues raised below. Given the tendency on the part of business and government to celebrate the advantages of ICTs as universal, the task of raising and politicizing these issues is central to ensuring that the benefits of the technologies are equitably distributed.

ICTs in the Canadian Workplace

Before examining the effects of ICTs on work and employment, let us first get an appreciation for the extent to which they have been incorporated into and are a part of the daily life of working Canadians. Two recent Statistics Canada surveys provide useful snapshots of the diffusion of ICTs in the paid workplace in Canada. In its 2001 Electronic Commerce and Technology Use survey it reports that while e-commerce itself constitutes only a small part of economic activity, the use of ICTs such as the Internet, e-mail, electronic data interchange (EDI), and wireless communications at work is significant. In 2000, 63% of businesses used the Internet, 60% used e-mail, 51% used wireless communications, 26% had Web sites, and 12% used an intranet (Peterson 2001, 11-16). Public sector organizations report even higher use: 99% use the Internet and e-mail; 73% had Web sites; and 52% used an intranet (Peterson 2001, 13, 16-17).

Another method used by Statistics Canada to measure the phenomenon has been to measure the prevalence of computer use by individual workers. As of 2000, computer use in private and public sector workplaces stood at 81% and 100%, respectively (Peterson 2001, 11). At the level of the individual worker, 6 out of 10 employed Canadians use computers in their work, 80% of these on a daily basis (Marshall 2001, 5-11). The latter figure represents roughly 6.5 million workers. These figures also represent a striking increase over the number using computers only a decade ago - a mere 3 in 102 (Marshall 2001, 5) .

Not surprisingly, however, computer use at work varies across industrial sectors, occupational groups, and other demographic categories, including gender and education level. Public sector workers, firstly, were significantly more likely to work with computers (77%) than private sector counterparts (56%). Within the private sector, meanwhile, professional, scientific and technical services firms report 95% computer use, while only 66% of firms in the accommodation and food services industry use them (Peterson 2001, 12). Incidence of use also varies according to occupation, education, income, and gender. Professionals and managers had among the highest rates of computer use, at 86% and 78% respectively. In sales and service occupations, meanwhile, the figure stood at 39%. Of workers with high school education or less, only 41% report using computers, as compared to 85% of those with university degrees. Computer use also correlates with income level; with a mere 36% of those with incomes under $20,000 reporting computer use at work, while 80% of those with incomes in excess of $60,000 use them (Marshall 2001, 6-7). Finally, women were more likely to use computers at work than men, by a margin of 60% to 54%. Much of this gap can be accounted for by the prevalence of women in clerical positions, however, who recorded 84% computer use. Based on these figures, it is fair to say that computers and computer use have rapidly, albeit unevenly, become prevalent in the Canadian workplace.

Aside from computers, the proliferation of other new ICTs such as cell phones, pagers, and various other wireless devices has been significant. Cellular phone subscriptions in Canada rocketed from less than 100,000 to 9.9 million between 1987 and 2001 (Statistics Canada "Cellular Telephone," 1998; Statistics Canada "Telecommunications Statistics," 2001). A substantial portion of these are used for business purposes. The growing importance of ICTs to the economy overall is also reflected in the magnitude of investment that has been poured into ICTs over the last decade. Private sector capital investment in ICTs grew by approximately 20% per year in Canada throughout much of the 1990s, reaching $13.6 billion (CAN) by 1997 (Ertl 2001, 46; Rubin 2001), and overall firm expenditures on ICTs as a percentage of sales increased as well (Peterson 2001, 4). Public sector spending increases on ICTs have also risen dramatically in recent years. Federal government annual ICT expenditures, for example, increased from $3 billion to $5 billion between 1993 and 2000 (Longford 2001, 6).

With an appreciation for the rapid diffusion of new ICTs throughout the Canadian economy and paid workplace in recent decades, let us now turn to the question of what effects they have had on work, workers, and Canadian society as a whole.

Impacts of ICTs on Work I: Demand, Security, Skills

The End of Work?

Debates about the impact of technology on employment levels have a long history in Canada stretching back to the early days of automation, and take place against the backdrop of decades of chronically high unemployment, massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the early 1990s and the increasing ease with work can be transferred across national boundaries. The extent to which the introduction of new ICTs has affected overall levels of employment remains somewhat unclear, not least because of the difficulties in measuring any such effect in isolation from other factors. Competitive pressures, organizational changes, and human resource strategies - especially downsizing, delayering, outsourcing, and an increased reliance on part-time and temporary employment - have had a major impact on employment in the last two decades. By and large, in fact, Canadian firms report having introduced significantly more organizational innovations than new technologies (Leckie et al. 2001, 12). There has without a doubt, however, occurred a significant shakeout in industries such as manufacturing and occupations like clerical work as a result of the introduction of new technologies over the last few decades. Thanks to robotics and computer-controlled just-in-time delivery, automotive manufacturers are able to produce cars at a much greater rate than even ten years ago, despite employing significantly fewer workers (McNally 2000, 268-270). Successive waves of automation have enabled Canada Post to handle a 45% increase in mail volume since 1982, despite a 32% drop in full-time employment (Bickerton and Louli 1995, 220). Overall employment in clerical positions in Canada decreased by 250,000 positions during the 1990s as a result of new technologies which increased productivity and enabled managers to assume responsibility for clerical functions like word-processing themselves (Betcherman and McMullen 1998, 10). Similarly, airline ticket agents have suffered deskilling and job loss over the past decade, and find those jobs remaining threatened by self-serve check-in kiosks currently being rolled out across the country (Shalla 1997, 76-96). Finally, in the mid-1990s, Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) replaced 5,000 frontline staff with several thousand electronic self-serve kiosks, resulting in an annual personnel cost-savings of $200 million (Longford 2001, 12-13).

New ICTs have also facilitated the transfer of work out of Canada and into other countries. Between 1989 and 1992, 338,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared from Canada (Reid 1996). The loss of these jobs coincided with the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, which enabled employers to relocate operations south of the border. Many of Canada's high tech corporate darlings of the 1990s, such as Nortel and JDS Uniphase, created more positions outside Canada than inside (Reid 1996, 292). Such transfers of work and the control and coordination of work in production facilities thousands of kilometres distant from head offices was also rendered possible by the introduction of new ICTs, including the fax machine, EDI, cellular phones, and corporate intranets.

Still, for all the doomsday talk of the "end of work," it warrants pointing out that the employment rate in Canada has declined only marginally over the last couple of decades and hovers just over the 62% mark (Statistics Canada "Labour Force Survey," 2001),3 this despite the economy having to absorb the mass entry of women and millions of new immigrants into the labour force. Meanwhile, for all the hype about the knowledge-based economy, demand for many workers in occupations such as truck driving, cleaning, personal services, home care, and retail sales persists (Burke and Shields 2000, 103). Therefore, the fears of doomsayers appear at least somewhat exaggerated (Walters 2001, 78-83).

On the other hand, in spite of considerable state and corporate hyperbole regarding the positive correlation between ICTs and economic and employment growth4, sober analysis has demonstrated nothing more positive than the conclusion that, while no "job killer," information technology has produced no employment bonanza either (Conference Board of Canada, 1996). The average annual rate of employment growth ran at 2% through the 1990s, the very same period during which, as we have seen, Canadian firms invested very heavily in ICTs. In fact, the experience of the information technology sector in Canada itself mirrors this phenomenon of near jobless growth in the wider economy. Between 1990 and 1997, the ICT sector's contribution to GDP in Canada grew at an annual rate of 6%, eventually reaching 6.1% of total output. Meanwhile, employment growth in the sector lagged at 2.8%. In some sectors, such as telecommunications services and computer manufacturing, downsizing and restructuring led to net losses in employment (Denton and Pereboom 2000, 4-10). All tolled, the sector added perhaps 100,000 jobs to the economy of the 1990s, rising from 3.1% to 3.5% of all jobs in Canada (Ertl 2001, 18). While investment in the production and use of digital technologies clearly has the potential both to create as well as destroy jobs, there is little evidence supporting the claim that ICTs create as many, if not more, jobs as they destroy.5 What is clear is that new ICTs eliminate certain kinds of work and displace workers, mostly of a low to intermediate nature in skill level, and thus create problems of adjustment in the near term at least (Butcherman and McMullen 1998, 12). In past periods of technological change, such workers have been soaked up by emerging new sectors, such as the burgeoning public sector of the postwar period. The only work increasingly available to such workers today is that of a low-paying, part-time, and precarious nature, most likely in the service sector, with few benefits and little opportunity for acquiring new skills.6 Indeed, of the roughly 1 million workers laid off between 1993 and 1997, roughly half were rehired elsewhere at lower rates of pay, while only 20% benefited from increased pay rates after finding new work (Statistics Canada "After the Lay Off," 2001). Thus, without significantly impacting on the overall quantity of work, new ICTs have nonetheless played a role in restructuring work and production, bifurcating the labour market into so-called "good jobs" and "bad jobs" marked by stable employment, secure job tenure and sustaining rates of compensation on the one hand, and insecurity, vulnerability, and low pay on the other. Let us examine this relationship between new ICTs and job quality more closely.

Just-in-time work

One of the most significant changes in the way Canadians work witnessed over the last decade or two has been in the area of work arrangements, particularly the rise of "non-standard" employment such as part-time, temporary, and contract work, and own-account self-employment. As many as half of all Canadian workers, depending on one's definition of nonstandard work, now find themselves working under such arrangements (Lowe 1999, 5). 1.5 million, or 13%, of employed Canadians are in temporary jobs (jobs with a specified end date), a 60% increase since 1989 (Canadian Policy Research Networks). Many of the firms taking advantage of new work arrangements are closely connected with either the use or production of new ICTs.7 Numerous studies reveal a significant correlation between ICTs and the flexibilization of the workforce in terms of employment arrangements, such as increased use of part-time, temporary, out-sourced, or contract workers (Benner and Dean 2000, 361-375; Betherman and McMullen 1997, 1; Lowe et al. 1999, 43; Vosko 2000). Today, computerized systems offer employers an increasingly fine-grained view of workers activities, productivity, and workload in real time. Such information can be used to optimize staffing levels according to demand and workload, to the point where employers can rely on "just-in-time" workers. At call centres, for example, phone systems compile data on such factors as average time on hold, number of calls in queue, average call length, and number of hang-ups. As one call centre software developer puts it: "Its whole purpose is to optimize the relationship between the number of people that they have on the phones versus the number of calls coming into their centre so that they can have just the right amount of people."(Gully 2000) The call centre industry in Canada employs half a million people, roughly 60% of these on a part-time basis (Human Resources Development Canada). Such technology is not confined to call centres by any means. Increasingly, it is being used to "optimize" work and staffing levels throughout all sectors of the private and public sector.

High tech firms in the ICT sector itself, meanwhile, use such flexible staffing arrangements at an increasing rate, on the grounds that rapid technological change and pressure to reduce time-to-market for new products necessitates doing so. Firms in so-called high-tech "cluster" regions like Ottawa, or Silicon Valley and Seattle in the U.S., have made liberal use of innovations like outsourcing, contract employment, and the use of temporary workers (Benner and Dean 2000, 361-366; Chun 2001, 127-154). Such regions serve as laboratories for incubating new employment practices and offer a window onto the future landscape of work and employment in the new economy, where even the most skilled workers may find plenty of work in non-standard employment arrangements, but fewer jobs in the traditional sense. Silicon Valley in California has been singled out as the national capital of non-standard work in the U.S., where as much as 40% of the region's workforce works under non-standard employment contracts (Benner and Dean, 363-364). In Canada's software and computer services industry, meanwhile, fully 65,000 of 190,000 workers were reported to be self-employed in 1998, or almost 35%. (Industry Canada 2000, 3, 8). This figure does not include those working part-time or as agency temps. A survey of the multi-billion dollar temporary staffing services industry in Canada revealed the existence of 50 temp agencies devoted to supplying the information technology sector alone as of 1995, before the boom years and skill shortages of the late 1990s. A recent HRDC survey of Ottawa's high tech labour market noted that "a growing number of programmers work on a temporary basis to customize software and solve short-term problems for firms." (Human Resources Development Canada 2000) In addition, Canada's high tech sector is dependent upon a steady supply of skilled foreign workers coming on temporary work visas (Rao, 2001). A project begun in 1997 to fast track the processing of such visas for IT software development workers helped bring 3,000 individuals into Canada by early 2000 (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2000).

While such flexible work arrangements are clearly desired by many workers, an increasingly significant proportion find themselves in such arrangements involuntarily, indicating a considerable amount of underemployment (Jackson et al. 2000, 63). Furthermore, surveys consistently report that non-permanent, contingent workers are paid lower wages and salaries and enjoy little protection under labour laws and few if any benefits (United States General Accounting Office 2000, 18-30; Jackson et al. 2000, 58-73; Vosko 2000, 200-229). Thus, even in the heart of the new economy, the bonanza of high paying jobs alleged to accompanying the transition to a knowledge-based economy is part illusion.8 As this population of contingent workers continues to grow, calls to close the gap in wages, security, employment standards and working conditions between the permanent and "flexible" workforces may grow louder. The struggle to improve working conditions and extend protection for such workers will be a difficult, however, as employers and governments alike have worked to limit and roll back rather than extend protection to such workers.9

Ironically, the rising contingency of work among predominantly male professional and high tech workers has finally put the issue of contingent work onto the public radar screen, despite the historic prevalence of precarious forms of employment among female and low-income, low-skilled workers (Vosko 2000, 5-6). As more highly-skilled and professional groups find themselves among the ranks of the temporary workforce, there are signs of renewed interest in union-organizing to defend and protect their interests. Witness the re-emergence of occupational unionism among temporary workers in Silicon Valley and Seattle under the banners of organizations like WashTech, FACEIntel, and Alliance@IBM. (Washington Alliance of Technology Workers; IBM Employees' Alliance; Fraser, 150-152). While this remains a largely American phenomenon, it may only be a matter of time before it emerges in Canada as well. What implications this might have for the broader labour movement, and for improvements in working conditions for contingent workers in general remains to be seen. The contingent workforce is itself deeply polarized on the basis of income, gender and race. Whether the bonds of solidarity will reach across occupational, racial and gender hierarchies to benefit all contingent workers is not clear.10

Skills in the New Economy: Knowledge Workers or Cybertariat?

By some measures, workers in today's economy are more skilled and better educated than previous generations. Over half of Canada's workers possess a university or college degree, up from one fifth twenty-five years ago. Jobs themselves have also been said to be more complex on the whole. The rising skill intensity of some forms of work and the increasingly qualified nature of the workforce have been portrayed as symptomatic of the growing importance of ICTs; hence mounting pressure to expose school children to computers as early as possible through programs such as the federal government's SchoolNet, and the mass production of diploma-weilding "IT" graduates from private and public business colleges.11 Evidence on the effect of ICTs on workplace skills is mixed, however. Betcherman and McMullen have found evidence of a modest up-skilling effect (Mc Mullen). According to their research, over half of job-types created as a result of introducing new computer technologies were of a professional nature, whereas only 11% required intermediate levels of skill. Of the positions eliminated as a result of new computer-based technology, 60% came from the lower skilled job-types, and only 7% from the professional category. As well, workers in occupations with the most intensive use of computers - such as managers, administrators and clerical workers - also report increases in the skill requirements, problem-solving, and autonomy involved in their jobs (Betcherman and McMullen 1998, 14).

On the other hand, a recent Statistics Canada survey reveals that uses of computers at work vary considerably, and that not all involve a high degree of skill. The most common task reportedly performed on computers was word processing (83%), followed by data entry (72%), record keeping (69%), spreadsheets (63%), and Internet use (54%). Other tasks requiring specialized skills and training were performed less frequently, and only 16% engaged in any programming activities (Marshall 2001, 9). The evident increased use of computers in the workplace should not, therefore, automatically be equated with knowledge work. To what extent does it make sense to call a task like word processing a "skill", if already 83% of computer users report proficiency at it? (Barney 2000, 153-155) Of course many managers and other skilled workers use word processing and web surfing to support highly cognate tasks such as report writing, but the mere fact that computer equipment is used in a given workplace is not an automatic indication of the deployment of highly skilled labour.

The varying degrees of skill involved in using computers are also indicated by where and how users report getting their training. Most employees report acquiring the ability to use computers in a relatively informal manner, as a result of trial-and-error or learning from family and co-workers (Statistics Canada "Workplace and Employee Survey Compendium," 2001). By way of contrast, the kind of "critical skills" deemed necessary for core occupations in knowledge-based industries like the ICT sector itself are obtainable only through pursuit of an advanced engineering or computer science degree at a limited number of elite institutions, followed by three to ten years of experience in a relevant technology area (Denton 2000, 13). Clearly, then, the prevalence of computers at work is not a reliable indicator of the growth of knowledge-intensive work. As we look, therefore, to assess and secure Canada's place in the emerging knowledge-based economy, we must be careful not to make a fetish of computers and other information technologies, the presence of which can be just as indicative of relatively simplified forms of work such as data entry or telemarketing as it is of high value-added knowledge work.

What the Betcherman and McMullen study also fails to shed light on is where and in what kinds of occupations those holding low to intermediate skill jobs that were eliminated, including clerical workers not fortunate enough to hold onto their jobs in the 1990s, wound up. Highly skilled occupations in knowledge-based sectors carry with them high costs of entry, in the form of specialized university education and professional training, which places them beyond the reach of a large portion of the population. With few new avenues of comparable employment open to them, many end up accepting jobs increasingly likely to involve less skill, pay and security than previous positions. Indeed, for all the discussion of Canada's transition to a knowledge-based economy, a list of the top ten jobs for men and women contains few associated with so-called "knowledge work," according to the 1996 Census. The leading job types included truck driver, janitor, retail sales, secretary and cashier (Statistics Canada "1996 Census: Labour Force Activity,"1998, 3-6). In other words, the up-skilling effect observed by Betcherman and McMullen is also a polarizing one, as it increases the widening skills, pay, and job security gap between skilled and unskilled workers.

The bifurcation of the labour force on the basis of skill also shows up in income distribution, where a growing trend towards an "hour-glass" economy is evident in Canada. Polarization between rich and poor, and a general decline of middle and working class incomes is readily apparent (Jackson 2000, 113-138). While it is difficult to disentangle the distributional effects of ICTs from other factors, given what is known about its employment and labour market impacts, there can be little doubt that it plays some role in shaping distribution patterns in the Canadian political economy.12 The two-tier system increasingly characteristic of occupational structures and income distribution in the information economy is reproduced in the quality of working life as well. Elite knowledge workers experience high degrees of autonomy and flexibility in their work, take advantage of high demand and highly portable skills, and operate on the basis of relations of cooperation, creative collaboration and partnering with peers (Symons 1997, 195-215). The information-worker "underclass", meanwhile, engages in increasingly repetitive and stultifying tasks related to data entry, processing, and extraction, under working conditions in which hierarchy, subordination and electronic surveillance figure prominently (Bryant 1995, 505-521; Symons 1997, 195-215; Whitaker 1999, 115-118).

Impact of ICTs on Work II: A Gendered and Racialized Division of Labour

The intensifying occupational and distributional hierarchies characteristic of the new economy are cross-cut by distinct gender and racial cleavages as well. New ICTs have been seen as having the potential to overcome systemic barriers to economic and educational opportunity based on gender, race, and disability. New forms of teleworking, for example, have been held out as particularly advantageous to women, racial minorities, and the disabled. For women, telework offers the possibility of combining work with family commitments, and may provide an entry point into the workforce for less-skilled or new immigrant women. The virtual workplace, others have argued, reduces the chances that a worker might be penalized or discriminated against based on their race, since the visual clues to racial difference are eliminated. Finally, telemediated work has also been portrayed as offering the potential to more fully integrate the disabled into the workforce by enabling such accommodations as telecommuting.13 Unfortunately, aggregate trends in the place and status of women, racial minorities, and the disabled in the new information economy are not very encouraging.

Feminist analyses of digital technology have revealed the profoundly gendered nature of the division of labour within the new information economy. In addition to its contribution to the "feminization" of work in general, many new telemediated forms of non-standard employment, such as home-based call centre and clerical work, are doubly feminized in so far as women are disproportionately overrepresented in them (Menzies, 1997). The nature of computer use at work also varies by gender. Overall, while more women than men report using computers, (largely a reflection of the prevalence of women in clerical positions) men were more likely to perform a greater variety of tasks than women, particularly those associated with so-called knowledge work. Men were twice as likely to engage in programming tasks, and significantly more likely to use the Internet, produce graphics, or analyze data (Marshall, 8). We are also witnessing a certain "technological masculinism" within high tech employment itself (Sawchuck and Crow 1995). The effects of the gendered division of labour are manifested in the masculinization of scientific and computer technical expertise, and hardware and software development (Brunet and Prioux 1989, 77-84; Stromber and Arnold 1987; Ullman 1995, 131-144). In Canada, female employment in professional, technical, and managerial positions related to ICTs averages approximately 20% in the private and public sectors (Avon 1996, 13; Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 2000). Moreover, at the same time as the ICT sector has been experiencing impressive growth, there has been a world-wide decrease in the numbers of women in computer science (Wright 1997). Women tend to be concentrated in positions, such as call centre agents, which are relatively low-paying (under $30,000) (Buchanan and Koch-Schulte 2001, 9-14), while being underrepresented in the much more highly-paid and secure positions in occupations like computer services and software development, where salaries regularly exceed $100,000. Such gender-based occupational and distributional hierarchies in the new economy are to some extent the reflection of gendered conceptions of the skills used by various workers (Buchanan and Koch-Schulte 2001, 9-14; Eyerman 2000; Putman and Fenety 2000, Shalla 1997). "Communication" skills highly regarded in the service industry, for example, and particularly in call centre work, are viewed as a "feminine" skill, as something that comes "naturally" to women, and hence is not highly valued and is not translatable into higher wages. Paradoxically, "communication" skills are highly valued in the managerial classes in telemediated work, but not in call centre work. All of these figures suggest that the bifurcation of the labour force and polarization of incomes increasingly characteristic of the new economy will place a disproportionate share of the burden of poorly paid and insecure work upon the backs of women.

While there is little empirical research on the status of racialized peoples in terms of occupation and income in ICT-related forms of work, there is ample evidence pointing to the fact that they, too, tend to occupy the lower regions of occupational and income hierarchies in Canada. As Galabuzi argues, "adults in racialised groups are less likely than others to be employed in professional or managerial occupations. Instead, many are concentrated in lower-paying, clerical, service and manual jobs."14

Inequality and Social Cohesion in the New Economy

Increasingly, commentators from a variety of perspectives worry about the implications of such polarization and hierarchy for social cohesion. The mainstream consensus on dealing with the problem has focused on investments in "human capital" through education, training and skills development (Courchene 2000, 6-14). Workers will best protect themselves from skills-obsolescence in the new economy, and the attendant decline in the demand and remuneration for their services, by engaging in continuous skills up-grading and "lifelong learning". There are some grounds for this view. University graduates in Canada, for example, benefited from a 47% increase in employment during the 1990s, while non-graduates saw their total employment increase by a mere 2% (Statistics Canada "Workplace," 2001, 30). There is less consensus among governments, policy makers, business, and educators however, regarding how best to support education and training. While governments and employers have paid lip-service to their importance to society as a whole, the last decade has seen a contraction in opportunities for the most vulnerable workers and members of society in terms of education and training (Schmidt 2001). Government budget cuts and the deregulation of tuition fees in most provinces have led to shrinking budgets and rising costs to students and parents for education at all levels.15 Meanwhile, publicly-funded training infrastructure in Canada has been cut back and increasingly privatized (McBride, 167-171). Employer-sponsored training and skills development is significant, but is increasingly focused on those who already possess high levels of education and skill, thereby entrenching existing inequalities of access to the kinds of education and training that would enable the less skilled to create opportunity for themselves.16 Furthermore, the growth of non-standard work will lead to less employer-sponsored training, as part-time and temporary workers are much less likely to receive such training than those in traditional, full-time permanent positions (Employer Survey). Again, the patterns of gender and racial inequality in terms of employment in the new economy show up in terms of access to education and training opportunities, as well (Galabuzi 2001, 111). The general thrust of current trends is towards the privatization of education, training, and skills development, and the responsibilization of individuals for their own employment outcomes, by inculcating the rhetoric and values of life-long learning. Such a shifting of responsibility onto individuals, in our view, accompanied by the delegitimization of collective or government efforts to equalize training and educational opportunity, threatens to harden attitudes towards those deemed a "failure" in the new economy and to undermine societal cohesion as a result. As access to favourable employment opportunities and their associated social outcomes become increasingly dependent upon the possession of higher levels of skill and education, a commitment to equity requires a leveling of the playing field and a renewed dedication to creating universally accessible institutions for education and training.

Also cause for concern is a growing body of research suggesting that human-capital investment is only weakly correlated with favourable employment and economic outcomes. As a number of researchers have pointed out, the problem of accessing "good jobs" is more structural than the human-capital approach suggests. No matter how well-educated we become, "we can't all be web designers," (Stanford 2001, 31) for the simple reason that the economy does supply enough positions. There are, for example, 15 retail clerk positions in Canada for every job as a computer technician, and one quarter of all university and college graduates are employed in clerical, sales, and menial jobs, suggesting significant levels of underemployment (Stanford 2001, 31). Stronger correlations have been found between labour market outcomes and factors such as gender, public sector vs. private sector employment, and unionization (Burke and Shields 2000, 109-110, 120-122). In other words, the labour market polarization currently being witnessed in Canada will likely increase as long as the gendered division of labour persists, public service cutbacks continue, and trade union membership continues to decline.

Impact of ICTs on Work III: Locational Dynamics

The Eclipse of Geography and Distance? New Locational Dynamics of Work in Canada

In addition to their effects on the supply, quality, skill-intensity, and distributional patterns of work, new ICTs have been correlated with changes in the location of work, both within and between regions and countries. By detaching work from locale, a process dubbed "delocalization," ICTs have enabled the ready transfer of many kinds of work across regional and territorial boundaries, as well as the blurring of the boundary between the workplace and the home. The rise of networked computing, the Internet, and the growth of broadband infrastructure have encouraged the relocation of work along a number of vectors, reshaping the nature of work and employment in the process. In this section we examine the emergence and implications of four important shifts in the locational dynamics of work in Canada: the rising incidence of home-based telework; the growth of mobile telework; the increasing concentration of knowledge work in urban centres like Ottawa and Toronto and surrounding regional high tech "clusters"; and the insertion of Canada in the emerging international division of telemediated labour, which includes work in occupations such as computer services, data processing and virtual call centres. Popular views of these changes have been dominated by pastoral images of electronic cottaging offered up by Rheingold, among others, in which telecommuting professionals take advantage of ICTs to enjoy greater autonomy, contact with family, and freedom from the aggravation of daily commuting. (Rheingold 1994). While some do enjoy these advantages, the shifting locational dynamics of work raise concerns revolving around issues such as employment standards, work/home-life balance, traffic congestion, urban sprawl, and regional economic disparity. In several of these respects, what is perhaps most noteworthy is the failure of ICTs to produce a number of anticipated effects.

Home-based Telework: Telecommuting or Cyberserfdom?

New ICTs like computers, fax machines, and modems have played a role in the recent resurgence of home-based work in Canada. The number of home-based workers, including employees and the self-employed, rose markedly between 1971 and 1995, from 613,000 to 2.8 million, increasing from 8% to 17% of the workforce (Akyeampong and Nadwodny 2001, 12-13). The percentage of employed Canadians performing some or all work from home increased from 3% to 10% between 1971 and 2000, according to Statistics Canada. Ekos Research, however, reported in 2001 that 11% of employed Canadians work primarily from home, and that when periodic work at home (unpaid overtime, catching up on e-mail and paperwork, etc.) were included, the figure rose to 40%(Ekos Research Associates 2001). By 1997, meanwhile, nearly 2.5 million Canadians were self-employed, (twice as many as in the late 1970s), amounting to 16.2% of the total labour force. During the 1990s, self-employment accounted for over three out of four new jobs added to the economy (Lin, Yates and Picot 1999, 2). Such a dramatic rise was bound to impact on the incidence of home-work, given that 50% of the self-employed work at or from home. Upper estimates of the total number of such workers who could be classified as "teleworkers," that is, those whose home-based work is enabled by information and communications technologies, range from 1 million to 1.5 million (InnoVisions Canada/Canadian Telework Association ).

Since some of the largest annual increases in the numbers of self-employed homeworkers took place during the 1990s, a decade marked by significant corporate downsizing in white-collar as well as blue-collar occupations, many have argued that the rise in home-based self-employment reflects the existence of a large group of former employees unable to find traditional full-time work (Jackson et al 2000, 49-61; Tal 2001). Other studies have suggested that the rise of home-based self-employment has more to do with the increasing availability and use of new ICTs, like PCs, mobile phones, fax machines, and the Internet, which have enabled individuals to work from home while remaining in close contact with clients and colleagues (Akyeampong and Nadwodny, 2001). For employees working from home, such as virtual call centre workers, on whom little research has been done, anecdotal accounts suggest that compulsion to do so by employers is not uncommon.17 Whatever the reason for resorting to home-based work, ICTs play an undeniably important enabling role. Homeworkers, whether employed or self-employed, report significantly higher rates of computer use than counterparts working outside the home - roughly 83% versus 51% - and 77% feel that their work has been greatly or somewhat affected by computer or automated technology in the past five years, whereas only 54% of those working outside the home felt this way (Marshall 2001, 16).

As with other impacts of ICTs, the implications and effects of increased home-based work, often called "telecommuting," are ambiguous and difficult to make generalizations about. Commentators like Mitchell, Negroponte, and Rheingold, for example, invoke bucolic scenes of "electronic cottagers" plying their electronic crafts in the comfort of their homes, while Gurstein and Menzies warn of the danger of homes being turned into silicon sweatshops. In the new economy, however, workers in conditions approximating both of these stereotypes exist at once. In fact, home-based telework appears inherently polarizing in terms of the nature of the work involved and kinds of working conditions, security, and remuneration it entails. Of the kinds of work that might take place outside conventional workplaces, repetitive low-skill data entry and clerical work, on the one hand, and highly cognate "symbolic analysis" such as report writing, on the other, appear to be the most sustainable. Home-based telework in Canada features plenty of both. In 1991, for example, the largest occupational category for female home-based workers was clerical work, which accounted for over 110,000 positions, followed closely by service and sales positions at 98,000 and 34,000 respectively (Menzies, 1997, 113). Home-based clerical workers at the time earned a mean income of around $7,000, according to one of the few studies available (Menzies 1997, 113). At the other end of the spectrum, high-paying professional and semi-autonomous positions in managerial, social science and educational occupations are also well-represented among home-based workers. For example, fully 25% of employed and 44% of self-employed individuals in managerial occupations work from home (Akyeampong and Nadwodny 2001, 15; Peruuse 1998).

The polarization of the home-based labour force around the figures of the "cyberserf" and the professional "telecommuter" suggested by the above figures is reproduced at the level of working conditions. A semi-skilled single parent engaged in home-based teleservice work because she is unable to afford childcare is far more likely to be poorly paid, enjoy few benefits and little protection of the law. She is more likely to suffer job-related injury, will be cut off from vital social networks, training, advancement, and union-organizing opportunities available at conventional workplaces, and will experience the intrusion of surveillance and the blending of work and home-life as an imposition (Bernstein, Lippel and Lamarche 2001; Felstead and Jewson 2000, 107-108; Gurstein). The well-educated, self-employed, home-based consultant, meanwhile, often enjoys considerable flexibility and autonomy, opportunities for creative collaboration with associates, and access to tax write-offs for business expenses, including a portion of his or her home (Symons 1997, 203-205). Having said that, the story for each of these figures is often more mixed. The home-based teleservice worker can save on transportation, food, and clothing costs associated with working outside the home, and, ironically, may be in a stronger position to lever employer compliance with labour standards as a result of electronic monitoring, record of which can be valuable as proof of time worked, wages owed, and the all-important "employment relationship" (Bernstein, Lippel and Lamarche 2001, 12). The average professional "telecommuter," meanwhile, also risks isolation and diminished access to social networks as a result of reduced face-to-face contact with clients and colleagues (Gillespie and Richardson 2000, 230-232). And while touted as enabling workers to balance better their work and family commitments, ICTs have failed to halt a steady increase in the number of workers experiencing conflict and stress as a result of attempts to do so.18 Indeed, new technologies are part of the problem, as they facilitate working at home after the regular work day and increase expectations of "24/7" availability (Duxbury and Higgins, 8; Canadian Policy Research Networks). In addition, the anticipated traffic congestion and environmental advantages of telecommuting have not materialized, which we return to below. All of which is to say that it is impossible to generalize about the experiences of those workers whom new ICTs have enabled to return to the "electronic cottage".

Mobile Work

In addition to contributing to the resurgence of home-based work, new ICTs like cell phones, pagers, PDAs, and mobile e-mail devices have enticed or compelled many workers into mobile work, where the closest thing to a regular place of work is their cars, delivery van or truck. Innovations in ICTs have spawned new patterns of travel associated with work, in which workers find themselves increasingly working in their cars, at the premises of associates or clients, and periodically "hot-desking" for brief periods at a central office. Reliable figures on the number of such nomadic, mobile workers in Canada are difficult to come by. Place of Work statistics from the 1996 Census reveal that just over 1 million workers have no fixed workplace address, but its figures are too broad to accurately capture the extent of the phenomenon, as they do not distinguish mobile teleworkers from other mobile workers, such as tradespersons, whose work is less dependent upon enabling ICTs. One 1993 study put the total of nomadic desk jobs in the U.S. at 7 million, or around 5% of the workforce, a figure which has no doubt been surpassed since the explosion of cellphone, pager, and PDA use in the late 1990s (Gillespie and Richardson 2000, 238-239). Assuming a figure in the range of 5% to 10% of Canada's workforce, the number of nomadic, mobile teleworkers could exceed 1 million.

Mobile work has obvious advantages for employers. Having workers spend less time in the office and more time in the field can help salespersons "get closer to the customer", reduce office overhead and increase productivity. However, not all managers are comfortable with it since, as with telecommuting, it diminishes opportunities for managerial oversight and surveillance of work. Mobile employees pay a certain price as well. Reduced time in a regular office also means diminished opportunities for face-to-face interaction, socializing, and networking with colleagues, and reduced visibility of the sort that can lead to advancement and promotion within the company. Mobile workers report other disadvantages as well.19 Finally, while ICTs have been traditionally portrayed as suppressing the need for travel, the phenomenon of mobile telework appears to be part of a trend toward what the authors of one study refer to as "hypermobility," in which new ICTs change the locational dynamics of work in such a way as to increase rather than decrease the car-dependence of work by, for example, increasing the number of car trips made during the day (Gillespie and Richardson 2000, 228, 243; Miller 2000). According to U.S. studies, the increased incidence of home-based work has also produced little net reduction in vehicle miles traveled, and has resulted in an increasing number of trips throughout the day within residential neighbourhoods, leading to greater noise, pollution, and congestion at off-peak periods (Gillespie and Richardson 2000, 228-245). One can see this reflected in the fact that some of the "smartest" cities in North America in terms of labour force skills and ICT infrastructure, such as San Francisco, Seattle, and Ottawa, have experienced worsened rather than improved traffic congestion.20 With fewer workers engaging in traditional commutes while increasing their daytime car use, ridership on public tansportation has dropped as well, threatening the future quality and viability of such services (Gillespie and Richardson 2000, 236-238).

High-tech "Clusters": The Geography of Work in the New Economy

The decoupling of work and place enabled by ICTs is also affecting the location of work and employment on a regional and international basis. Within Canada, there are signs that the nature and location of work in the knowledge-based economy are having uneven effects on the development of regional, urban, and rural economies, and that the growth of the international teleservices market presents both opportunities and challenges for those aspiring to gain entry to or succeed within it.

One of the keenly anticipated benefits of new ICTs has been the potential to promote economic development in rural and remote locations throughout Canada, including aboriginal communities; areas traditionally dependent upon declining agricultural and primary industries. The vision, here, articulated most recently by the federal National Broadband Task Force, is of remote communities, connected by broadband digital networks, peopled by skilled knowledge workers able to overcome the barriers to employment and economic opportunity posed by distance. According to the Task Force:

"By reducing or even eliminating the economic costs traditionally associated with

distance, broadband communications offer all Canadian communities the

potential to capitalize on their natural and human endowments, and to compete

effectively in markets of whatever scale in their areas of comparative advantage."

(National Broadband Task Force 2001, 24).

However, notwithstanding concerted attempts by both federal and provincial governments to lever ICTs to lessen the economic disparities between regions and between urban and rural communities, such as New Brunswick's attempt at refashioning itself as the call centre capital of Canada, there is mounting evidence that the knowledge-based economy, and the importance of ICTs to it, reinforces rather than reduces historic patterns of regional disparity.

Even as rural and remote communities promote themselves as increasingly "wired" and ready to participate in the new economy, a consensus has emerged around around the increasing importance of "clustering" the development of high tech, knowledge-based industries around largely existing urban centres in order to compete internationally. Cities have become more rather than less important in the new international division of labour, as nodal points for controlling the flow of goods and services and as hubs for R&D and specialized economic activity such as international financial services (Castells 2000, 424-440; Huws et al. 2001; Sassen 1998). Business leaders and policy makers alike now argue that so-called high-tech "clusters" or "learning regions" such as Kitcherner-Waterloo, Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal, are key to competing in the global economy, because it is in such places that innovative, job-creating companies have access to so-called "untraded interdependencies" which are specific to locales, including: a critical mass of highly skilled labour; communications and transportation infrastructure; access to public and private R&D institutions and potential partners; large pools of venture capital; and the kind of quality of life that attracts new workers (Courchene 1998, 268-296; Nankivell 2001, 85-91; Wolfe 2000). The emphasis on clustering the development of knowledge-based industries around existing urban centres and surrounding suburban zones, however, flies in the face of expectations that ICTs would result in a more even spatial distribution of work across Canada, and threatens to exacerbate existing regional economic disparity and tension as governments focus investment and services on the economies of already privileged clusters.21 Meanwhile, attempts to incubate and foster high-tech clusters in historically "low tech" provinces like Alberta, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia have achieved limited success, and have more often than not pitted jurisdictions against one another in intense "locational tournaments" involving competition for investment in industries such as call centre services, with each trying to out-do the other in offering tax holidays and job subsidies to potential investors (Jang 2001; Tutton 2001).

Success in the knowledge-based economy has come at a price too, however. While ICTs were supposed to ease the pressures of suburban sprawl and its attendant traffic congestion and pollution by enabling new forms of remote teleworking, this has turned out not to be the case. Such problems are more acute than ever in places like Toronto (City of Toronto, 2000), and have spoiled the party in newer centres like Ottawa. A victim of its own success, by 2000 the quality of life in what had come to be called "Silicon Valley North" was imperiled by an aging transportation infrastructure ill-equipped to deal with the daily movement of tens of thousands of workers to suburban high-tech "campuses" built by companies like Nortel, Cisco, and JDS Uniphase in Kanata and West Ottawa (Singer 2000; Laucious 2000; Hill 2000).

Such high-tech cluster regions are noteworthy not only for their prosperity relative to rural areas, but for the heightened degree of economic and social polarization within, as local labour markets themselves become bifurcated between high-tech professionals and low-tech workers in janitorial services, electronics assembly, and personal services work. Castells refers to this as the phenomenon of the "dual city" increasingly characteristic of high-tech cluster regions (Castells 1999, 27-41). Silicon Valley and other high tech clusters have increasingly taken on the form of what one commentator calls the "resort economy," in which a highly affluent minority enjoys fat salaries, lavish homes in gated communities, exclusive club memberships, and premium shopping and recreational opportunities insulated against the intrusions of the wider community, all supported and surrounded by the labour of a nearly invisible underclass of service and manual workers. While employees in the software industry, for example, routinely pull down salaries in excess of $100,000 (U.S.), average salaries in the industry with the largest employment in Silicon Vallley, local and visitor services, are under $23,000 (U.S.). As recently as 1997, wage levels for those in the lower half of the labour market had yet to climb back up to pre-1990 recession levels (Benner and Dean 2000, 365). Canadian communities such as Toronto and Ottawa-Hull are well down the path to social polarization laid down by high-tech meccas like Silicon Valley, as evidenced by overheated real estate markets, affordable-housing shortages, gentrification, and increased evictions and homelessness (Hill 2000; Solnit and Schwartzenberg 2000; Layton 2000; Goodell 1999).

Finally, combined with the liberalization of trade, the growing international trade in informational goods and services is reshaping the international division of labour and Canada's place within it. Canada has achieved some noteworthy successes exporting computer and software services and telemediated customer services. However, the ease with which such work can be outsourced or transferred elsewhere is a constant threat. In computer and software services, for example, Canada's trade balance has been narrowing throughout the 1990s, steadily eroding a modest surplus, suggesting that the time when Canada becomes a net importer of such services may be near (Prabhu 1998, 8-9; Industry Canada 2000, 27). The low-wage call centre industry in the Atlantic provinces and elsewhere, meanwhile, faces increasing competition from teleservice outsourcing firms in India and the Caribbean, where generally well-educated English-speaking employees can be hired for less than half of what it costs to pay Canadian workers (Call Center News 2001; McElroy 2001). Places like New Brunswick may find such work disappearing through the very same network from which it came. While the magnitude of the threat remains small for now, the trend toward outsourcing teleservices to off-shore locations such as India is accelerating.22

Finally, this essay concludes with a brief discussion of one final aspect of ICTs and their effects on workers and workplaces - the increasing prevalence of electronic monitoring in the workplace.

Electronic Monitoring and Workplace Privacy

Part of the allure of applying ICTs to work is not only the labour cost savings achieved through process automation, but the ability to use these same technologies to monitor the production process. Such technologies enable firms not only to track sales, inventory, and production speeds, but to track the performance, whereabouts and, increasingly, private thoughts and personal communications of employees. Today, the location and activities of millions of workers are more closely monitored than ever thanks to innovations such as GPS locators, computer keystroke logs, and software designed to monitor employee e-mail and Internet use. Indeed, technology is now available to employers to review the Web surfing habits and histories of prospective employees even before they are hired (Privacy Commissioner 1999). Aside from the anxiety and atmosphere of suspicion that such monitoring can foster among supervisors and employees, the intensification and spread of electronic monitoring poses a growing human rights challenge.

First, let us get a handle on the scope of the phenomenon. An initial indication of the spread of electronic monitoring and its effects on workers has been signaled by the rising frequency of media reports involving employee abuse of e-mail and Internet tools at work, uncovered by employer monitoring (CBC News Online Staff, 2001; Canadian Press "New Brunswick cracks down" 2001). Firming up these anecdotal impressions of the increased use of electronic monitoring are recent statistics on employer uses of electronic monitoring. A recent survey of workplace monitoring and surveillance practices in the U.S. by the American Management Association (AMA) found that nearly 78% of firms record and monitor employee communications and activities on the job, including their phone calls, e-mail, Internet site visits, and computer files (American Management Association 2001, 1). The U.S.-based Privacy Foundation, meanwhile, estimates that up to one third of the online workforce, or roughly 14 million U.S. employees, is under continuous surveillance for improper e-mail and Internet use (Privacy Foundation). While no equivalent figures are available on the extent of the practice by Canadian employers, there is little doubt that it is widespread (Bryant 1995, 505-521).

Not only the extent and intensity of surveillance have changed with new technologies but the targets as well. While the work of cashiers, data-entry clerks and call centre agents has long been susceptible to electronic monitoring, new software tracking workflow, e-mail communication and Internet use facilitates increased surveillance of professional, managerial and technical personnel as well.

The main reasons cited by employers for adopting such technologies are the need to limit legal liability, conduct performance reviews, measure productivity, and ensure the security of proprietary information against disclosure (American Management Association 2001). The AMA study showed that limiting liability was the primary reason for introducing such technologies. The proliferation of computers, e-mail, and Internet access in the workplace has given rise to inappropriate uses of the technology, including visits to gambling and pornography sites, and the transmission of harassing e-mails of a sexual, racial, or religious nature. Arguably, such monitoring systems have helped enforce policies against racism and sexism in the workplace. However, the trend toward continuous monitoring, which effectively casts a pall of suspicion over all employees, begs the question of whether employees' privacy rights and some form of the presumption of innocence should be sacrificed at the altar of limiting corporate liability.

Privacy legislation in Canada currently provides little protection to employees, particularly in the private sector. Canada's Privacy Act 1982 covers government uses of citizens' personal information, while the more recent Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act 2001 focuses on protecting consumers, in order to shore up confidence in the beleaguered e-commerce sector. The latter signals the ascendancy of an e-commerce conception of privacy and the displacement of a rights-based conception from the current debate within Canada (Steeves, 49-56).23 Privacy advocates, including Canada's Privacy Commissioner, increasingly worry that Canadians surrender their privacy rights, often unwittingly, immediately upon entering the workplace. Workers should be entitled to some expectation of privacy in the workplace in order to communicate with family members and interact with colleagues in a natural manner, which may include venting frustrations about employers and working conditions; freedom to do so without fear of surveillance or reprisal is an essential ingredient of a reasonable quality of working life. Such a right to privacy, as one advocate argues, "cannot be conjured away by means of an employment contract." (Privacy Commissioner of Canada 2000)

Chances of meaningful legislative action being taken on this front are slim at the moment. Few involved in workplace issues, including trade unions, have given much more than half-hearted attention to the consequences and potential abuses of workplace monitoring, particularly while it affected only those in relatively unskilled, low wage positions such as call centre agents and cashiers. However, with the rapid spread of computers and the Internet in professional workplaces, the issue of employee privacy was set to move to centre-stage in 2001 as a widespread human rights issue.24 Other professional groups set to awaken to the intrusion of surveillance include physicians, engineers, lawyers, judges and public servants. The hope for some movement on the issue of employee privacy may well rest on the strength of resistance to such tools by professionals. Aggressive pursuit of the privacy agenda, workplace or otherwise, has been eclipsed, however, by security concerns in the aftermath of the recent World Trade Centre terrorist attacks.

Conclusion

This paper provides a cursory overview of the complex and far-reaching effects and implications of ICTs for paid work in Canada. As a counternarrative to the boosterism of high tech gurus and leaders in business and government, it maps areas of pressing concern seldom acknowledged as anything more than "potholes" on the information highway to a world of economic prosperity, social harmony, and cultural enrichment. In our view, however, the connections between ICTs and workplace and employment trends like labour force polarization, the growth of non-standard employment, the gendered division of labour , increased stress and hours of work, and the social and environmental costs of clustered development raise serious doubts about how benign the information economy and society of our near-future will really be. We conclude with a series of recommendations on ways to mitigate the more disturbing effects of ICTs on work and workers in Canada.

- modernize legislation in areas like employment insurance, occupational health and safety, pensions and benefits, and employment standards in order to prevent the growing numbers of contingent workers from being excluded from enjoying full rights of economic and workplace citizenship.

- funding for empirical research aimed at better understanding the various populations of teleworkers and the challenges they confront.

- rededication by governments to long-term labour adjustment and retraining policies and programs abandoned in the 1980s and 1990s, especially for workers displaced by new technology.

- facilitate opportunities for the formation of institutions and mechanisms of collective representation, including trade unions, for contingent and home-based workers.

- investigate the health and environmental impacts of ICTs and the forms and locational dynamics of work they support.

- develop and enact privacy legislation related to individuals as workers, in addition to protection already in place for citizens and consumers.

- recommitment by governments to regulating and planning the development of urban and suburban regions with a view to creating livable cities.

- increased public investment in mass transportation.

1 Statistics Canada reports that by 1999 Internet and cellphone penetration of Canadian households reached 42% and 32% respectively. See: Ertle, Heidi, "Beyond the Information Highway: Networked Canada," Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2001, 38, 40. Elsewhere, Statistics Canada reports that there were 9.9 million cellular phone subscribers in Canada by 2001. See: Statistics Canada, "Telecommunications Statistics: Third quarter 2001," The Daily, December 21, 2001.

2 Betcherman and McMullen report as little as 16% of workers using new ICTs like computers as recently as 1985. See Betcherman, Gordon, and Kathryn McMullen, "Impact of Information and Communcation Technologies on Work and Employment in Canada,"CPRN Discussion Paper No. 10, February 1998, Ottawa: Candian Policy Research Networks, 1998.

3 This is not to deny the emergence of some disturbing trends, such as growing underemployment, and rising unemployment among certain groups, such as single mothers and young, unskilled males. See: Burke, Mike and John Shields, "Tracking Inequality in the New Canadian Labour Market," in Burke, et al, eds., Restructuring and Resistance, 98-123; and Jackson, Andrew, David Robinson, with Bob Baldwin and Cindy Wiggins, "Falling Behind: The State of Working Canada 2000," Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2000, 47-73.

4 The Liberal Party Red Book of 1993 stated, for example, that: "it is the information and knowledge-based industries with their new products, new services, new markets for old and new products, and new processes for existing businesses that are providing the foundation for jobs and economic growth". Quoted in McBride, Stephen, "Policy From What? Neoliberal and Human-Capital Theoretical Foundations of Recent Canadian Labour-Market Policy," in Burke, et al, Restructuring and Resistance, 163.

5 Betcherman and McMullen find little proof of a direct connection between ICT use and overall job growth. Their study reveals the strongest influence on job growth to be sales growth rather than ICT investment. Betcherman and McMullen, "Impact of Information and Communications Technologies on Work and Employment in Canada," 11.

6 Almost the entire net increase of jobs in the 1990s is accounted for by increases in own-account self-employment and part-time work, neither of which are associated with high rates of pay or economic security. See: Burke and Shields, "Tracking Inequality in the New Canadian Labour Market," 103; and Jackson, et al, "Falling Behind," 47-73.

7 Traditionally associated with agricultural and construction work, the use of temporary workers is high in "knowledge sectors" like management and administrative services (24%) educational services (19%) and public administration (15%) as well. CPRN, JobQuality.ca.

8 See, for example, "A Report on Wages and Working Conditions in the IT sector in Seattle: Washington Alliance of Technology Workers/CWA," and "Disparities Within the Digital World: Realities of the New Economy," Prepared by The Worker Centre, King County Labor Council, 2001, <http://www.washtech.org>.

9 For example, amendments to Ontario's Employment Standards Act in 2000 repealed provisions regulating and licensing temporary employment agencies, and raised from 44 to 60 the maximum number of hours in the work week. The latter provision was eagerly sought by the ICT industry, which had sought exemptions under the previous Act on a routine basis. See: The Association of Canadian Search, Employment and Staffing Services (ACSESS), "National Staffing Industry Association Commends Repeal of Employment Agencies Act," Press Release, May 4, 2001, <http://www.acsess.org/english/acsess.php?id=12j>

; and Ministry of Labour, "Your Guide to the Employment Standards Act," <http://www.gov.on.ca/LAB/esa/esa_e/guide_e.html>.

10 An alliance between the organized professional IT workers of Washtech and the members of Day2, an organization of customer service agents at on-line bookseller Amazon.com, was an encouraging sign. The experiment fizzled when Amazon laid off hundreds of employees, including Day2 members, in the spring of 2001.

11 For information on the federal SchoolNet program see: <http://www.schoolnet.ca/home/e/>.

According to the Association of Community Colleges of Canada, 34 out of 41 of community colleges surveyed in 2001 offer e-commerce related certificates. See: <http://www.accc.ca/english/advocacy/e-commerce.cfm>.

12 For more detailed demonstrations of this link see, for example: Betcherman and McMullen, "Impact of Information and Communications Technologies on Work and Employment in Canada,"15-17; and Hughes, Karen and Lowe, Graham, "Surveying the 'Post-Industrial' Landscape: Information Technologies and Labour Market Polarization in Canada."

13 U.S. call centre firm ARO, for example, introduced a telecommuting policy four years ago, which it claims to accommodate workers with disabilities. See: Clifford, Stephanie, "Case Study: When Telecommuting Actually Works." Research results from the UK, however, suggest little impact so far. The proportion of UK teleworkers with disabilities stands at 9%, which is roughly the same proportion as in the traditional workforce. See: Huws, Ursula, et al, 1999. While there is little research in this area, the following details the major work ahead to ensure people with disabilities have equity in relation to these technologies. See People with Disabilities and ICTs:, 1999.

14 Galabuzi, G., "Canada's Creeping Economic Apartheid: The Economic Segregation and Social Marginalisation of Racialised Groups," 111.

15 The most serious consequences for accessibility are to be found at the university level, where undergraduate tuition fees have increased 120% per cent, on average, in Canada since 1990. See: Statistics Canada, The Daily, August 2001.

16 Almost of Canadian 60% of workers with only high school diplomas reported receiving no training during 1999, whereas only 30% of those with university degrees reported receiving no training. Statistics Canada, "Workplace and Employee Survey Compendium: 1999," 30.

17 In a notorious case from the early 1990s, Pizza Pizza closed its call centres for computerized order-taking and laid off most of its unionized order-takers and hired 150 self-employed home-workers instead, at a savings of roughly $4 an hour per worker (Maloney 1993).

18 A 2000 survey found that 58% of employees experience high levels of work-family role "overload," up from 47% in 1990. Such stress is most acute among professional and managerial employees. See: Johnson, Karen L., et al, "Work-Life Compendium 2001: 150 Canadian Statistics on Work, Family & Well-Being,," 53-54. Similar findings have been reported in Duxbury and Higgins, 2001. See also: Church, 2001.

19 A Cornell University study of the "ecology" of mobile work found that while only half of mobile workers felt that they worked more effectively in this manner, three quarters reported that professional communication was worse or much worse, and fully 93% felt that their ability to socialize with colleagues was undermined as a result of becoming mobile workers (Becker, et al., 1995).

20 No content in this note?

21 For the most part, decentralizing forces observed in the new economy have involved the movement of work and business away from central business districts to suburban nodes, rather than from metropolitan to rural or remote regions.

22 In its World Employment Report 2001 the International Labour Organization (ILO) suggests that up to 12 million service-sector jobs (5% of the total) in industrialized countries have the potential to be relocated to off-shore teleservice operations in the developing world. India has added 250,000 teleservice positions in the last four years, while the much more sparsely populated Caribbean employs 5,000 in its off-shore data processing facilities. If the ILO's analysis is correct, Canada faces a potential job loss of at least a half million positions. International Labour Organization, World Employment Report 2001: Life at Work in the Information Economy, 2001,

23The clash between surveillance and basic legal rights in the workplace are discussed at length in: Information and Privacy Commissioner/Ontario, 1992.

24 The growing phenomenon of professional white-collar resistance to surveillance was typified in the summer of 2001 by the case of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, where federal judges ordered systems employees to pull the plug on a software program installed by the Administrative Office of the federal court system to monitor the e-mail and Internet use of all 30,000 court employees, including the judges themselves. The revolt forced the issue onto the agenda of the 27-member Judicial Conference, presided over by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Rehnquist, which revised the AO policy to allow only for limited monitoring of employee Internet use to discourage visits to "inappropriate" sites, such pornography, gambling, and music file-sharing sites (Weisman, 2001).