Effect of Changes in Civil Engineering Profession

Are bigness and unions influencing the professional engineer? The civil engineering profession is changing due to firms going public, purchasing of smaller companies, merger or joint ventures, and the desire by some professional engineers for unions. The young engineer has a desire of working closely with his employer and achieving self-satisfaction–difficult in big business. The giants of big business, in order to maintain efficiency and organization, must create standardization. By specializing, the professional engineer in a large company may one day become obsolete. Unionization is attractive for many unorganized professional engineers because it offers the opportunity for discourse between management and labor over terms and conditions of employment. The Professional Engineer should support the participation of ASCE in studying union problems and also support legislation such as the anti-trust laws.