As for her fear of an Apple system cluttering up her living room—well, the home computer of tomorrow will probably be smaller and better looking. Or it’ll be part of your TV. If not? You may hide your equipment in a handsome, wooden cabinet that will convert to a genuinely ergonomic table of adjustable height. No, I don’t know of a product like that now. But already stores in trendy Yuppie areas are springing up with names like “Computer Support,” and some of their offerings may be as fit for your living room as for your office.
Less easily answered, however, is Blood’s worry of “a Mae West employment profile”—broad at the top, narrow at the middle, wide at the bottom. That is, there might be lush job opportunities near the top around the equivalent of Mae’s bust. A few senior managers could electronically monitor the masses toiling at home—could count and time their keystrokes.
But between the top people and the ones entering the data, companies would need many fewer run-of-the-mill supervisors.
And that would pinch off some promotion opportunities for the clerical workers.
In some ways, however, companies might make nonsupervisory work more palatable. They might, for instance, pay clerks not by individuals’ keystrokes but by those of small “telegroups,” where peer pressure would keep every member productive.
Also, companies might follow the example of Volvo, the Swedish automaker, and rotate some workers’ tasks. Some numbers crunchers might swap assignments with word-processing people. Indeed, companies could pay extra for versatility. Word-processing work today is sometimes more complicated than regular typing; but that might not always be so, and corporations could relieve some of the boredom of repetitious jobs simply by letting employees exchange them.
Still another legitimate worry is the distribution of the economic benefits of telecommuting. What’s to prevent employers from abuse of the piecework payment system if the government lets it become the norm? Could piecework be just a gimmick to help impersonally squeeze the last drop of blood from the clerical telecommuters? Is telecommuting a mean-spirited or enlightened response to the day-care problem? I suspect some companies are mean spirited. Not all. But some. Ideally, however, this won’t deprive society of telecommuting’s benefits. Munytels, after all, could help solve the child-care problem, and changes in the labor laws could guarantee the fairness of the piecework system for all. Existing ones do cover clerks doing piecework. They must, for instance, keep time records to show they’re collecting the equivalent of the minimum wage.
In a related matter, a controversy was swirling in 1984 around a 42-year-old federal ban on commercial home knitting—an issue of interest to companies considering telecommuting. Unions were fighting for the ban; the Reagan administration, for courts to overturn it.[[71]] Perhaps the Reaganites would want no restrictions on corporate use of telecommuters, which is unfortunate considering the opportunities for electronic sweatshops, of which the sleazy will certainly want to avail themselves. Ideally, either (1) I’m wrong about the Reaganites or (2) future administrations will take a more enlightened attitude.
Telecommuting also has energy implications—good ones. With widespread telecommuting, oil price increases would no longer be so scary if another energy crisis threatened the United States.
Jack Nilles once calculated that the typical computer terminal uses less than 125 watts, and a phone line takes up no more than a watt. Then he matched those figures against a private automobile’s typical energy use during commutes, and he found that telecommuting would have a twenty-nine-to-one energy advantage. Compared to mass transit systems loaded to capacity—a rarity in most American cities—it would still enjoy two-to-one superiority. With ten million telecommuters, the country might save three-quarters of a billion gallons of gasoline a year.[[72]]