style="margin-top: 2em">[In Depth (published in 1999)]

The first ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence was held in January 1997 at the headquarters of ILO (International Labor Office) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Peter Leisink, associate professor of labor studies at the Utrecht University, Netherlands, explained: "A survey of the United Kingdom book publishing industry showed that proofreaders and editors have been externalized and now work as home-based teleworkers. The vast majority of them had entered self-employment, not as a first-choice option, but as a result of industry mergers, relocations and redundancies. These people should actually be regarded as casualized workers, rather than as self-employed, since they have little autonomy and tend to depend on only one publishing house for their work."

This international symposium was held as a tripartite meeting with employers, unionists and government representatives. Some participants still thought our information society would generate jobs, whereas it was already stated worldwide that multimedia convergence was leading to a massive loss of jobs.

Michel Muller, secretary-general of the French Federation of Book, Paper and Communication Industry, stated that the French graphics industry had lost 20,000 jobs - falling from 110,000 to 90,000 - within the last decade, and that expensive social plans had been necessary to re-employ those people. He explained: "If the technological developments really created new jobs, as had been suggested, then it might have been better to invest the money in reliable studies about what jobs were being created and which ones were being lost, rather than in social plans which often created artificial jobs. These studies should highlight the new skills and qualifications in demand as the technological convergence process broke down the barriers between the printing industry, journalism and other vehicles of information. Another problem caused by convergence was the trend towards ownership concentration. A few big groups controlled not only the bulk of the print media, but a wide range of other media, and thus posed a threat to pluralism in expression. Various tax advantages enjoyed by the press today should be re-examined and adapted to the new realities facing the press and multimedia enterprises. Managing all the social and societal issues raised by new technologies required widespread agreement and consensus. Collective agreements were vital, since neither individual negotiations nor the market alone could sufficiently settle these matters."

Quite theoretical compared to the unionists' interventions, here was the answer of Walter Durling, director of AT&T Global Information Solutions: "Technology would not change the core of human relations. More sophisticated means of communicating, new mechanisms for negotiating, and new types of conflicts would all arise, but the relationships between workers and employers themselves would continue to be the same. When film was invented, people had been afraid that it could bring theatre to an end. That has not happened. When television was developed, people had feared that it would do away cinemas, but it had not. One should not be afraid of the future. Fear of the future should not lead us to stifle creativity with regulations. Creativity was needed to generate new employment. The spirit of enterprise had to be reinforced with the new technology in order to create jobs for those who had been displaced. Problems should not be anticipated, but tackled when they arose." In short, humanity shouldn't fear technology.

In fact, employees were not so much afraid of the future as they were afraid of losing their jobs. In 1997, our society already had a high unemployment rate, which was not the case when film was invented and television developed. During the next years, what would be the balance between job creation and lay-off? Unions were struggling worldwide to promote the creation of jobs through investment, innovation, vocational training, computer literacy, retraining for new jobs, fair conditions for contracts and collective agreements, defense of copyright, protection of workers in the artistic field, and defense of teleworkers as workers having full rights. The European Commission was expecting 10 million European teleworkers in the year 2000, which would represent 20% of teleworkers worldwide.

Despite unions' efforts, would the situation become as tragic as what we read in the report of the symposium? "Some fear a future in which individuals will be forced to struggle for survival in an electronic jungle. And the survival mechanisms which have been developed in recent decades, such as relatively stable employment relations, collective agreements, employee representation, employer-provided job training, and jointly funded social security schemes, may be sorely tested in a world where work crosses borders at the speed of light."