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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. 
 
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