Skill, Automation and the Future of Work

• In Event: Labor and Workplace Control

Abstract

The paper explores how workers’ knowledge is fundamental to the development of effective new technology. Technology developers, business analysts, and economists largely believe that the impact of Taylorism has left most workers in unskilled, repetitive, and mind-numbing jobs. If workers are unskilled, what do roboticists and computer scientists have to learn workers who don’t understand even the basics of computer coding or intelligent machine design? However, the labor process literature unpacks this notion of skill, recognizing the presence of craft or supplemental knowledge as well as embodied knowledge, which is fundamental to the labor process. We explore these notions of skill and their connection with new technology in two case studies: UNITE HERE and workers in the hospitality industry, and the IAM and robots in the construction of the Boeing 777X. While they are in very different kinds of industries, both cases demonstrate the centrality of workers' knowledge in the development of new technology.

Author

• Tom Juravich, University of Massachusetts-Amherst