ABSTRACT
"Technical changes are producing a wholesale transformation of the workplace and jobs in industry," Solomon Barkin told an international audience at the conference Employment Problems of Automation and Advanced Technology held in Geneva, Switzerland, in July 1964. The machine is replacing human and intellectual skills. The worker on the production job is being converted from a manual or clerical employee into a machine-minder. In the survey of modernizing rural southern firms, employees indicated that they derived more personal satisfaction from working with advanced production technologies than from working with conventional processes. Employees involved in their firms' investments in new technologies seemed to be dedicated to their companies and grateful for both retraining opportunities and their firms' confidence in them. The unwillingness or perceived inability to pay for more highly skilled employees may be as much a barrier to competitiveness in the rural South as the lack of skilled workers.
