Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work

Abstract

On January 10, 2017, President Barack Obama warned in his farewell address that “the next wave of economic dislocations won't come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.” Nearly three years later, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang declared bluntly in the pages of the New York Times: “Yes, Robots Are Stealing Your Job.” These were not only electoral musings. A substantive literature has recently emerged attempting to make sense of automation's past and its potential future. Some books, like John Danaher's Automation and Utopia (2019) and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams's Inventing the Future (2016), are learned works that advocate embracing automation to overcome work. Others, like Joel Burges's Out of Sync and Out of Work (2018), take on the cultural history of automation in film and literature and complement older works like Amy Sue Bix's Inventing Ourselves out of Jobs? (2000), which told a long discursive (political) history of technological unemployment. More recently, Jason E. Smith (Smart Machines and Service Work, 2020) has attempted to dispel the myths of automation, highlighting sources of stagnation at the heart of our contemporary political economy. Read together, these works offer little consensus about the future of automation but collectively show the persistent and discordant politics that the idea of automation provokes.Jason Resnikoff's Labor's End makes a unique and fascinating contribution to this literature by examining automation discourse in a period when, in his view, it was largely seen for its potential. That alone makes the book an important intervention in a literature that too often oscillates between utopian futurism and doomed defeatism. But Labor's End is more than a history of the idea of automation. Resnikoff shows how the discourse around automation reconfigured the relationship between work and freedom in American intellectual history. Through its nimble traversing of intellectual and labor history, Labor's End offers an exciting addition to the revival of labor history in US historiography.Resnikoff begins with the postwar auto industry, where the term automation first originated, then examines a diverse set of social factions that grappled with the meaning of work and automation before ending, again, with the auto industry in the 1970s. Throughout he makes three interrelated arguments. First, automation was not a technology but an ideological conviction about the inevitable obsolescence of human labor that effectively extinguished politics within the workplace itself. Second, echoing scholars like Harry Braverman and David Noble, he argues that often what “automation” actually meant for workers was not the elimination of their jobs; rather, it was the jobs’ intensification and degradation.His final and most conceptually ambitious argument is about freedom. Resnikoff rightly notes that American Jeffersonian ideology had long posited that labor gave one a claim to property, which in turn gave one a claim to citizenship. Industrialization and waged labor troubled this notion of independence, but workers insisted that worker control of the workplace could ensure their freedom. By contrast, automation discourse promised that the only freedom worthy of the name was an escape from the necessity to work at all. This, Resnikoff argues, was how intellectuals, business and political figures, and even leftists and union leaders removed the politics of freedom from the workplace and placed it in the hands of impersonal technology.A particularly interesting example of this discourse comes in Resnikoff's examination of second-wave feminist thought. In most conventional views, there is little commonality between liberal feminist Betty Friedan and radical Shulamith Firestone. Resnikoff's perceptive reading of The Feminine Mystique and The Dialectic of Sex nevertheless shows an affinity for self-directed, intellectua