The Changing Role of the Process Worker

Areport published on a research project into process working by the Institute of Employment Studies (Giles et al 1997) revealed that management structures designed in response to technological advances and competitive pressures are transforming the role of process workers.


Increasing automation and the application of new technologies to the production process mean that low-skilled manual jobs continue to disappear, and that process workers are becoming progressively less involved in manual operating tasks. Instead, they are being given more responsibility for the processes they work on, while being expected to become more customer and business oriented and, in many cases, to carry out simple engineering and maintenance tasks.

The flexible firm 

The concept of the ‘flexible firm’ was originated by Atkinson (1984) who claimed that there is a growing trend for firms to seek

● Functional flexibility is sought so that employees can be redeployed quickly and smoothly between activities and tasks. Functional flexibility may require multiskilling – craft workers who possess and can apply a number of skills covering, for example, both mechanical and electrical engineering, or manufacturing and maintenance activities. 

● Numerical flexibility is sought so that the number of employees can be quickly and easily increased or decreased in line with even short-term changes in the level of demand for labour. 

● Financial flexibility provides for pay levels to reflect the state of supply and demand in the external labour market and also means the use of flexible pay systems that facilitate either functional or numerical flexibility.

The new structure in the flexible firm involves the break-up of the labour force into increasingly peripheral, and therefore numerically flexible, groups of workers clustered around a numerically stable core group that will conduct the organization’s key, firm-specific activities. At the core, the focus is on functional flexibility. Shifting to the periphery, numerical flexibility becomes more important. As the market grows, the periphery expands to take up slack; as growth slows, the periphery contracts. At the core, only tasks and responsibilities change; the workers here are insulated from medium-term fluctuations in the market and can therefore enjoy job security, whereas those in the periphery are exposed to them.