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Published by EH.NET (September 2000)
Amy Sue Bix. _Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?: America's Debate
over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981_. Studies in Industry and
Society. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2000. x + 376 pp. Illustrations and index. 5.00 (cloth). ISBN
0-8018-6244-2.
Reviewed for H-Business and EH.NET by Robert H. Ziegler, Department
of History, University of Florida. <[log in to unmask]>
Men (and Women) at Work?
_Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?_ is an able and lucidly written
account of the ongoing debate in the United States over the effects
of technology on employment. Drawing on a wide range of published
materials as well as on corporate, labor, and governmental archives,
Amy Sue Bix traces in rich detail the views of three generations of
policy makers, labor leaders, engineers, and business executives to
come about the relationship between expanding productivity and the
availability of jobs. A notable feature of the debate has been the
absence of a definitive empirical method for weighing the impact of
technology on employment. Thus, over the seventy years covered in
the book (which deals with developments over the past twenty years as
well as with the period indicated in the title), celebrants and
critics of workplace technology have tended to make the same
arguments, often with the same rhetorical embellishments. According
to corporate leaders, engineers, and other partisans of labor-saving
technology, expanding production inevitably lowers prices, increases
consumption, and boosts employment. Labor leaders, social critics,
and troubled politicians, on the other hand, have focused
technology's role in work force reduction and have argued that
promises of long-term growth in job opportunities have proved unduly
optimistic or even illusory.
In Bix's telling, however, virtually no one called for an end to
technological advance. Laborites, for example, have accepted and
even celebrated technology-facilitated productivity gains, arguing
only that workers should share in them through shorter hours, higher
wages, and greater voice in the actual implementation of new
workplace regimes. Three generations of labor leaders, from William
Green and John L. Lewis in the 1930s through Walter Reuther in the
1950s and John Sweeney currently have repudiated Ludism, confining
their critique of job-related technology to advocacy of
worker-friendly regulation, job training, and the passing on of
productivity savings to workers and consumers. Critical of the
blithe optimism of corporate spokesmen and their scientific and
engineering allies that productivity gains lead inexorably to
expanded (and enriched) employment opportunities, even those most
troubled by job loss have accepted the inevitably of continuous
workplace transformation.
Employers have dismissed concerns about job loss, although often in
a defensive idiom. Equating technological advance with progress,
and, in turn, a commitment to progress with national identity,
corporate leaders and their scientific allies have painted a bright
new world of abundance and ease. Rejecting calls for public
intervention in the development and application of labor-saving
devices, business leaders such as Henry Ford and machine-tool
innovator John Diebold acknowledged that inevitably some workers
would be displaced and might suffer local and temporary hardships.
But the advantages of expanded production and its concomitant
proliferation of consumer goods far outweighed these minor side
effects. Popular writers and editorial cartoonists might depict
soulless robots and inexorable machines spitting out superfluous
unemployed workers as well as appliances and amenities, but
resistance to the machine was in fact ignorant, self-defeating, and
even unpatriotic. "Workplace mechanization," writes Bix in summary
of industrialists' views, "represented the inevitable, the only
possible way to attain national success." (166-67). She quotes
economist Benjamin Anderson: "on no account," declared this banking
analyst of the 1930s, "must we retard or interfere with the most
rapid utilization of new inventions." (166)
The debate over technology and unemployment has waxed and waned since
the onset of the Great Depression. It raged most fiercely during the
1930s, when joblessness rose to catastrophic proportions. During
World War II, full employment and military needs dampened it. It
re-emerged, now stimulated by early computerization and other forms
of electronic replication, during the prosperous era of the 1950s and
early 1960s, with labor leaders such as Walter Reuther calling
attention to the problem of lingering unemployment amidst otherwise
bright economic prospects. Congressional hearings in 1955 on what
was now called "automation" demonstrated that even during good times,
the specter of worker redundancy walked hand-in-hand with the promise
of a brave new consumerist world. By the late 1970s and into the
1980s, of course, the computer revolution raised these issues in a
new idiom, although corporate down-sizing, globalization, and
widening income disparities have tended to merge discrete
apprehensions about technology's adverse effects with broader
concerns about job security and living standards.
Bix touches on a wide range of industries and employment situations
in surveying the technology-vs.-unemployment theme. Drawing on TNEC
and WPA studies, she examines the experiences of telephone operators,
musicians, steel workers, coal miners, and railwaymen buffeted by the
demands of new technologies in the 1930s. In the 1950s and 1960s, it
was the turn of packinghouse workers, longshoremen, clerical workers,
and electrical workers. Unions attempted various strategies in an
effort to cope with mechanical displacement. In the 1930s, the
musicians union, faced with the substitution of recorded music for
live orchestras in movie houses, launched a massive public relations
campaign, hoping futilely to stimulate an outraged public to demand
live music. In the 1950s, the West Coast Longshoremen's Union
followed an opposite course, capitulating to what its leaders
regarded as the inevitable inroads of containerization while securing
for its existing membership generous severance and manning reduction
payments.
Bix's account of the protracted and continuing debate over
technology and work is enlivened by frequent references to popular
literature and films. In addition, drawings and cartoons, some
hailing the brave new future of a worker-less future, others
depicting with grim foreboding the social chaos sure to afflict
hapless displaced workers, give the debate vivid expression.
_Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?_ also brings to attention
governmental efforts in the 1930s, primarily through studies
conducted by the Works Progress Administration and testimony offered
at the Temporary National Economic Committee congressional hearings,
to establish an empirical basis for weighing the impact of industrial
technology on employment. The latter chapters ably survey a wide
range of opinion drawn from more contemporary sources, attesting to
the continuing pertinence of concern about the relationship between
employment and technology.
_Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs_ touches on but explores only
briefly a number of key themes that the general subject would seem to
entail. The book is more of a history of discourse about employment
and technology than it is a social history of the subject. Thus,
themes of gender and, especially, race receive only brief explicit
exposition, for example. The social context in which employers and
engineers devise and implement labor-saving devices likewise is only
glancingly dealt with. Thus, for example, some observers have argued
that rapid mechanization of labor- intensive departments in metal
working, paper making, and meat packing after World War II
represented less a technological imperative than an effort on the
part of employers to curtail African American employment in
operations that had proven unusually susceptible to worker militancy
and trade union pressure. This is not an issue that captures Bix's
attention, however.
Likewise, Bix invokes but never quite explores in detail the
implications of the consumerist justifications to which employers
increasingly turned in justifying their resort to labor-saving
measures. In 1951, Fortune magazine published a special edition
titled "USA-The Permanent Revolution," boldly proclaiming that mass
affluence and its attendant consumerism constituted the real
revolution of the 20th century. In the 1960s, social critics such as
Herbert Marcuse, Charles Reich, Paul Goodman, E. F. Schumacher, and
Christopher Lasch-none of whom receives mention in _Inventing
Ourselves Out of Jobs?_-expressed the reverse of this kind of
celebration of material plenty, which in corporate America's view
depended on continuous technological innovation. In a sense,
competing visions of America centering on consumerism (and, thus,
technology) are the modern echo of the 18th century debate between
adherents of the civic republic and partisans of a commercial
republic.
Implicit also, but underdeveloped in the book, is the question as to
whether work can remain an adequate vehicle for the social identities
that before the Great Depression it conveyed. Many of the jobs that
Americans hold today are far removed from productive enterprise, at
least as it has traditionally been understood. Technological advance
and productivity gains have made it possible for televangelists, day
traders, and historians to flourish. Why these particular
occupations should attain public certification while other kinds of
non-productive employment languish or are suppressed is a question of
culture and politics, not one of technology per se.
Bix suggests rather than asserts her own sympathies. Her prose comes
alive when she exposes the fatuities and excesses of technology
celebrants while taking on a more troubled and somber tone when
exploring the plight of the displaced and dissident. Her dismay with
those who equate America's purposes and promises with technological
progress and consumerist indulgence is evident, although never
strident. She seems reluctant to concede that ordinary people might
have benefitted from technological innovation and at times flirts
with nostalgia for the good old days of man-killing coal mines and
lethal railroad work. Even so, _Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?_ is
a useful survey of the ongoing debate over the relationships between
technology and work in the modern United States.
Robert Zieger has worked extensively in the fields of American labour
history and twentieth century history. His latest book is _America's
Great War: World War One and the American Experience_, Rowman &
Littlefield, 2000.
Copyright (c) 2000 by EH.Net and H-Net. All rights reserved. This
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contact the EH.Net Administrator ([log in to unmask]; Telephone:
513-529-2850; Fax: 513-529-3308). Published by EH.Net (September
2000). All EH.Net reviews are archived at
http://www.eh.net/BookReview.
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