The parallels with the technological unemployment debates of the 1920s and 1930s are many. Like the National Research Project of the 1930s, the commission of the 1960s was set up to investigate the role of technology in unemployment. Though the findings of the commission were more conclusive, both bodies failed to settle the debate and, as in World War II, ended the technological unemployment concerns in 1940; another war effectively stopped the automation debate in 1965. As Woirol writes, “Automation then remained a major popular issue through the mid-1960s. Only after unemployment fell below 4 percent during the Vietnam War did automation begin to disappear as an everyday topic in popular publications.”37
What is missing from most commentary and scholarship, however, is an understanding of how workers felt about technical progress. As we have seen, in Britain during the classic years of the Industrial Revolution, workers made their voices heard in one way or another. They petitioned Parliament, urging it to block the spread of worker-replacing technologies. They expressed their frustration in novels and poems. And they rioted against the spread of machinery. While the sentiment of union leaders like William Green suggests that workers were not interested in blocking the progress of technology in the twentieth century, there is little direct evidence of workers’ attitudes toward mechanization during the days of the technological unemployment debates. One rare source of information is letters written to the Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression. These letters include policy proposals by ordinary citizens that provide some insight into the concerns of the American public. Using a sample of eight hundred letters, Woirol recently classified a small percentage of their proposals.38 Most common were plans intended to increase consumer purchasing power through the implementation of minimum wages, price controls, government loans, pension or unemployment insurance programs, and direct job-creation plans. Other plans favored the expansion of public employment in work projects of various kinds. But some citizens also favored policies to stop job displacement forces: 5 percent of the letters argued for restrictions on labor-saving machinery.
While Woirol’s sample might not be representative of the American public, it does suggest that even during the years of most extreme hardship, few people believed that restrictions on machinery were a good idea. However, this somewhat limited evidence does not shed any light on how workers whose jobs were directly affected by technical progress perceived it. But during the 1950s and 1960s, sociologists made serious efforts to study workers’ attitudes toward mechanization. Their findings underline the intuition underpinning this book—that attitudes depended very much on how workers adjusted to the technology. In the context of the installation of an IBM 705 computer in a large public utility, for example, William Faunce, Einar Hardin, and Eugene Jacobson found that “for many individuals this was a period of growth; for others a period of failure and disillusionment. The change severely tested marginal employees and supervisors, while at the same time giving the more experienced and able ones the opportunity to develop and to demonstrate their work potential. The dislocation and the loss of duties and jobs was a serious problem for some employees.”39
Similar studies were also conducted in a factory setting. Surveying workers in two power plants, Floyd Mann and Lawrence Williams found that operators in the more automated plant on average liked their current jobs more.40 They had to spend less time doing dirty work, felt they had more responsibility, and had more contact with other employees. This, of course, tells us little about how they perceived the transition associated with mechanization. To that end, Faunce, a sociologist, investigated how people fared as they were transferred to an automated automobile-engine plant in 1958.41 He found that workers overwhelmingly preferred the automated factories to the old ones, primarily due to the reduction in the handling of heavy materials, which made their jobs less physically demanding. But attitudes toward mechanization were not always favorable from the onset. In a study of an automated steel mill, Charles Walker found that job satisfaction varied significantly throughout the process of adjustment: “The same job characteristics, all stemming from the automatic or semiautomatic operations of the mill which had at first been feared and hated, were later the source of satisfaction.”42 Once the new became the familiar, attitudes shifted.
Thus, in a review of the literature, Faunce and coauthors aptly summarize the matter as follows:
Field research suggests that the impact of office automation upon job satisfaction varies depending on … whether the employees are in electronic data-processing departments which gain work tasks or in other affected departments that lose tasks, whether the computer is of large or medium size, and on several other circumstances. Office employees think the broad impact of office automation is to eliminate jobs and regard the methods changes as temporarily disruptive, but they often welcome change and rarely reject mechanization as such. Attitudes toward change appear to depend on the ability of the individual to deal effectively with change and on the skill with which the organization manages the change. Studies of factory automation suggest that automated plants are preferred as work places to less advanced plants, although they provide important sources of dissatisfaction. The sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction vary over the course of adjustment to automation.43
To be sure, none of these studies surveyed displaced workers, and it stands to reason that those who found their jobs taken over by machines had less favorable attitudes toward automation. Indeed, even if no displacement took place, attitudes toward technological change were evidently shaped by how workers were affected in their current roles. When workers found part of their jobs transferred to machines, the loss of duties was more likely to be accompanied by fears of losing their jobs. In contrast, when new tasks and duties were created, workers often felt a sense of increased responsibility, although they sometimes worried about inadequate training. While their perception of technological changes was clearly always contextual, attitudes in large part depended on whether the technology augmented or replaced workers’ skills. For the most part, as we shall see, technical progress did the former. Mechanization made workers’ skills more valuable in existing tasks and created many entirely new ones, thereby increasing the bargaining power of labor and allowing workers to earn better wages. This also helps explain why there were few Luddites in the twentieth century.
8
THE TRIUMPH OF THE MIDDLE CLASS
How did the accelerating pace of change affect the majority of working Americans? Despite rapid mechanization, twentieth-century America never experienced machinery riots on a comparable scale to those in Britain during the classic period of the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century, in contrast, there were some incidents of workers rebelling against machines. In 1879, the year that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, the New York Times reported the story of Elias Grove, whose wheat-threshing machine was destroyed in a fire. Ten days later a letter arrived with a warning: “Mr. Grove: You will stop your other machine or next will be your life. We intend to stop steam threshing. We do not get enough work through the Winter and Summer.”1 The article noted that a number of farmers had received similar threatening letters. However, more recent examples of American workers destroying machinery for fear of losing their jobs are hard to come by. The historian Daniel Nelson writes:
The mechanization of agriculture was not painless. As early as the 1830s, the advent of threshing machines provoked protests, occasionally violent, from men who devoted their winters to flailing wheat. More serious opposition appeared in the mid-1870s, when recession coincided with the appearance of the labor-saving twine-binder, a machine that substantially reduced the size of harvest crews. Strikes and terrorist acts punctuated the normally placid midwestern summer of 1878. Ohio, still an important wheat-producing state, was the center of violence.… As the economy improved in 1879 and fewer city workers turned to the countryside for employment, the crisis passed. Thereafter there was little or no overt resistance to mechanization.2
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This is not to suggest that U.S. labor history was otherwise peaceful. The renowned labor historian Philip Taft and Philip Ross, a professor of industrial relations, have argued that “the United States has had the bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world.”3 But labor violence in twentieth-century America rarely targeted machinery. It is indeed somewhat telling that Taft and Ross’s detailed review of the causes of strikes and incidents of labor violence does not provide a single reference to the introduction of labor-saving technology as the cause of such incidents. Other studies examining the determinants of strikes in the period 1900–70 do not even consider mechanization as a potential cause of workers’ decisions to strike.4 One reason for the absence of any machinery riots might be that white Americans in the twentieth century had other means of expressing their frustration. Instead of casting their votes with sticks and stones, they could simply show up at the ballot box. However, despite the privilege of being able to vote, workers frequently showed their frustration about their wages and working conditions in general through violence. So why did they not violently oppose mechanization? The most convincing explanation is the simplest one: labor, for the most part, greatly benefited from the steady flow of new technologies.
The emergence of trade unions, it is true, also provided a mechanism for settling disputes that was not available to British workers in the early nineteenth century: labor unions became legal in Britain in 1825, when a very small percentage of workers joined them, and their members obtained the legal right to strike only in the 1870s.5 And the approach taken to mechanization by the unions in the twentieth century sheds light on its benefits for their members. Union leaders were well aware that the pay a worker takes out of his envelope at the end of the week depends on the amount of mechanical power standing behind him. Factory electrification allowed workers to produce more and thus earn more. Instead of raging against the machine, workers and trade unions battled to maximize their gains from progress. From the perspective of trade unions, mechanization was a way of achieving many of the benefits their members demanded, including higher wages, shorter hours, and earlier retirement. Walter Reuther, who had spent a large part of his career leading the union of American automobile workers, was evidently not opposed to mechanization. His attitude was simply that people’s purchasing power must grow in tandem with the productive capacity of American industry. Reuther was also a vocal proponent of a guaranteed annual income. In an interview, he said that he looked forward to “the day when the worker would spend less time at his job and more time working on a concerto, a painting or in scientific research.” He confidently predicted: “Technological advances will make that possible.… In the future an auto worker may only work 10 hours at the factory. Culture will become his main preoccupation. Working for a living will be sort of a hobby.”6 Technology, he believed, would turn the backyard of the American worker into a Garden of Eden.
Most trade union officials may not have shared Reuther’s utopian vision, but as long as their members gained from progress, mechanization was equally in their interest. A series of separate case studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) illustrates this point by showing that unions frequently took an active role in the mechanization process. In one bakery, the introduction of semiautomatic production techniques was handled through collective bargaining, which allowed managers and union officials to resolve issues of displacement, downgrading, and compensation: “The consensus of the workers, as expressed by the local union president, was that the results of the changes on the whole were advantageous to them.… The local union president believed the workers have shared in the greater productivity of the plant through the wage increases and fringe benefits obtained in the past few years.”7 Naturally, the change to increased automation meant some shifting of people from jobs in reduced activities to jobs in expanding ones. And in some cases, the shift meant a downgrading in skill level, while in others upgrading took place. When informing the union business agent about the company’s plans, including estimated displacement, management guaranteed that any workers downgraded into jobs of lower pay would continue to be paid at their current rate. This announcement was perceived to reduce automation anxiety and was later formalized into a union contract. In every case that a union was involved, the BLS shows, its approach was to make sure that its members reaped the benefits of mechanization rather than stood in the way of it.8 The benefits of technology to labor as a whole were simply too large, even if some workers lost out in the process. And any transitions were helped by the fact that companies often compensated workers who lost their jobs to machines. Unlike in the nineteenth century, the focus of labor in the twentieth century was on managing the transition instead of blocking technological progress. And the unions, acting in interest of their members, were for the most part a helpful facilitator in this regard. Looking back in 1984, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment noted that “labor-management relations play an important role in the introduction of new technology. Using collective bargaining, organizing, and political strategies, unions in the United States have attempted to minimize what are perceived to be the socially harmful effects of new technologies on the labor force. Their efforts have generally been directed toward easing the adjustment process rather than retarding the process of change.”9
Labor had good reason to praise progress. As the winds of technological change swept through the workplace, jobs became more pleasant, less hazardous, and better paid. Mechanization made it possible for people to move away from sweat and drudgery to well-paid jobs that were less physically demanding. The outflow of workers from agriculture to blue- and white-collar jobs laid the foundations for the emergence of a growing and increasingly prosperous middle class. The American experience before the 1980s thus contrasts markedly with that of the British in the classic period of the Industrial Revolution, where the human costs of displacement were high because workers were left little choice but to take lower-paying jobs. As the factory replaced the domestic system, few had the means to acquire costly human capital to become managers, accountants, clerks, mechanical engineers, and so on. Instead, they were left competing for low-skilled production jobs that were simple enough to be performed by children. But if workers are able to shift into less hazardous, more enjoyable, and better-paying jobs, any distress will be short-lived. In the twentieth century, the abundance of semiskilled jobs in America’s offices and factories, brought by the Second Industrial Revolution, provided the best reassurance for those who feared unemployment. Some Americans, it is true, failed to climb the economic ladder. As noted, older workers with highly specialized skills living in isolated areas often struggled to adjust and could be forced to shift into low-skilled jobs at lower wages and reduce their standards of living, at least temporarily. But while mechanization made a few workers worse off individually in the short run, the expectation that they would benefit in the medium term seemed justifiable to the vast majority of ordinary people.
The End of Drudgery
Perhaps the greatest contribution of mechanization was that it made the workplace safer and less physically demanding.10 Consider for a moment the stark contrast between the air-conditioned offices in which most Americans work today and the environment in which most citizens worked a century ago. In 1870, almost half of working Americans were still employed in agriculture. The occupation of farming was not just hard work, it was also economically risky. Because most people derived their subsistence from the natural world, they had to contend with heavy rains, droughts, forest fires, swarms of insects, and so on. The farmer was thus left coping with many variables beyond his control that could have devastating economic consequences. The dust storms in the 1930s, for example, blew vast quantities of topsoil off the farmland. On “Black Sunday” in 1935, “one such storm blanketed East Coast cities in a haze.”11 By the 1940s, many Great Plains farms had lost more than 75 percent of their topsoil, and farmers had lost around 30 percent of the per-acre
value of their land as a result.12 And if the outdoor nature of the job made things unpredictable, the uncertainty of maintaining a steady income was made even greater by the constant risk of injury. Long working days with animal power as the only help meant a constant strain on muscles. Danger and drudgery were part of everyday working life.
Miners were hardly better off. Workers could spend several days underground without sunlight. Before electrification, kerosene lamps provided the only light miners would have. In addition, mine workers were constantly exposed to cave-ins, explosions were always a risk, and lung disease often came as part of the work package. In the late nineteenth century, roof collapses, flooding, and accidental explosions meant that coal-mining deaths occurred on a daily basis.13 And although the introduction of machines in the factories meant that exceedingly hard and laborious tasks were replaced, they rarely made the workplace safer. Statistics on industrial accidents associated specifically with machines remain sparse, but such accidents were evidently frequent enough for the New York Times to run out of phrases to describe such incidents: “killed by machinery,” “killed in the machinery,” “mangled by machinery,” “terribly mangled by machinery,” “crushed by machinery,” and “scalped by machinery” appeared in the many headlines of reports on deaths from industrial accidents during the 1870s and 1880s. Among the many casualties, one proprietor of a large paper mill in Lambertville, New Jersey, got his clothing caught in the shafts and “was thrown violently to the floor and the top of his head was torn off.”14 Another engineer in Newark, New Jersey, was “crushed to a pulp” after he was trapped in the shafts of the engine. Beyond machinery accidents, explosions and fires were a constant threat. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in New York City, described by the news media as the “the worst calamity that has befallen us since the burning of the Slocum,” cost the lives of 148 workers, most of them young women.15 As fire ravaged the factory, many people jumped out of the windows—only to be picked up either squashed or fearfully injured. Few of the workers who escaped death but were left seriously injured or disabled received any meaningful compensation to support themselves and their families.
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