Hicks 5

Britain applied several times to the European Economic Community (the Common Market, what became the European Union) before being accepted in 1973

• equal pay was an EEC requirement
• required less protection of domestic industry

Now we see Brexit

The British computer industry was failing

• government purchasing had not helped because it encouraged large systems when the market was going towards smaller
• the government could no longer justify paying more for British made computers
• fear that women workers would strike like coal miners had--avoid this not by treating them more fairly but by decentralizing and training executive class workers (managers) to do more of the work themselves
• that became another reason not to promote them--they might bring their union ideas
• centralized computer systems were no longer the best way to do the job
• part of making computer programming a middle class/administrative job was that now computers were exciting and important the people with more power in society wanted it for themselves, but also having administrative level computer programmers meant they wouldn't go on strike the way lower level workers would
  

Computers were a technological fix to much broader problems
what was holding England back?