FOR RELEASE: June 22, 2001
Contact: Franklin CrawfordOffice: 607-255-9737E-Mail: [email protected]
ITHACA, N.Y. -- The telecommunications services industry continues to undergo major technological changes affecting the nature of work, skills, training and income in a commercial sector vital to the international competitiveness of the U.S. economy. In order to further analyze the consequences of technological changes on employees within this sector, two professors in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University have launched a follow-up study funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The original study, also funded through the Sloan Foundation, was completed in 1999.
Titled "The Impact of Technological Change on Work, Skills, Training and Income in Telecommunications Services," the latest study will continue under the direction of Harry Katz, professor of collective bargaining, and Rosemary Batt, assistant professor of human resource studies. Jeffrey H. Keefe, an associate professor at Rutgers University who received his Cornell doctorate in 1987, worked on the original study with Katz and will serve as a field research consultant. The core of the previous study was a survey of roughly 600 telecommunications firms and focused on employee incomes.
With the new Sloan grant, researchers will create a longitudinal extension of earlier survey data on the shifting workplace dynamics and conditions caused by new technology that affect frontline employees in customer service and technical-support staff as well as middle- and upper-level managers.
"Large telecommunications firms, such as AT&T and World Com, continue to be transformed by mergers and restructuring, while the Internet service providers are dealing with the aftershocks of the dot-com shakeout," said Katz. "Our research will identify how employees and work are being affected by this corporate restructuring and ongoing technological changes."
The grant funding also will cover the cost of two graduate student researchers, travel to field sites, establishment of a telephone survey and final-report printing and mailing.
Katz's expertise is in the transformation of American industrial relations, labor relations in the U.S. automobile and telecommunications industries, worker participation, trade unions and collective bargaining, industrial and work restructuring, and worker training.
Batt's expertise includes service-management strategies and competitiveness, high performance work systems, teams and group processes, the telecommunications industry and internal labor markets and institutions.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic non-profit institution, was established by Alfred P. Sloan Jr. in 1934. Sloan, the chairman of the board of General Motors from 1937 through 1956, devoted much of his time and energy to philanthropic activities, including this foundation, which was established to promote the positive impact of science and technology on society.
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