Calling All Jobs: Labor, Management, and the Postwar Struggle for Automation

• In Event: Labor Politics, Class, and Inequality

Abstract

During the postwar period, both unions and management asserted themselves as the proper stewards of technological progress, offering contending proposals which charted distinctly different social visions of the automated future. While the former was social democratic and worker-oriented, warning of automation’s dangers without proper political and shop floor regulation, the latter was strictly market-oriented, disavowing any potential social disadvantages and claiming that it was only by the private investment decisions of firms that automation would serve citizens at large. Management then presented itself as the representative of the general interests within a trans-historical narrative of technological progress. Labor, it was claimed, was self-serving and parochial, seeking to monopolize technology’s gains to the detriment of both people and productivity. It was only per “natural economic selection,” according to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), by which automation was guaranteed advancement to the benefit of all. Any kind of “interference”—save the self-governing activity of capital—was bound to deform technology’s inherent logic. However, simultaneously contemplated by experts was a highly narrow vision of the future labor market in which the majority of workers would inevitably be redundant—most specifically gendered and racialized populations—while a minority of skilled white male workers would remain vital. Today, postwar business promises regarding the fruits of automation—better jobs, higher civilizational opportunities, expanded free time, generalized leisure—are notably absent in a labor market characterized by both over- and under-work, precarity, stagnant wages, and menial jobs. A direct result, it will be argued, of abandoning technology to the “natural” dictates of the market, absent politics.

Author

• Kevin Michael Dwyre, University of Delaware