Labor's End

How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work

Jason Resnikoff (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

272 Seiten

2022
University of Illinois Press (Verlag)
978-0-252-08629-8 (ISBN)

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Labor's End traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. As Jason Resnikoff shows, the term automation expressed the conviction that industrial progress meant the inevitable abolition of manual labor from industry. But the real substance of the term reflected industry's desire to hide an intensification of human work--and labor's loss of power and protection--behind magnificent machinery and a starry-eyed faith in technological revolution. The rhetorical power of the automation ideology revealed and perpetuated a belief that the idea of freedom was incompatible with the activity of work. From there, political actors ruled out the workplace as a site of politics while some of labor's staunchest allies dismissed sped-up tasks, expanded workloads, and incipient deindustrialization in the name of technological progress. A forceful intellectual history, Labor's End challenges entrenched assumptions about automation's transformation of the American workplace.

Jason Resnikoff is a lecturer in the Department of History at Columbia University.

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1. “The Machine Tells the Body How to Work”: “Automation” and the Postwar Automobile Industry 15

2. The Electronic Brain’s Tired Hands: Automation, the Digital Computer, and the Degradation of Clerical Work 39

3. The Liberation of the Leisure Class: Debating Freedom and Work in the 1950s and Early 1960s 64

4. Anticipating Oblivion: The Automation Discourse, Federal Policy, and Collective Bargaining 89

5. Machines of Loving Grace: The New Left Turns Away from Work 114

6. Slaves in Tomorrowland: The Degradation of Domestic Labor and Reproduction 136

7. Where Have All the Robots Gone? From Automation to Humanization 160

Conclusion 187

Notes 193

Bibliography 221

Index 241

Erscheinungsdatum	29.12.2021
Reihe/Serie	Working Class in American History
Zusatzinfo	8 black & white photographs
Verlagsort	Baltimore
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 235 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte
	Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre ► Makroökonomie
ISBN-10	0-252-08629-5 / 0252086295
ISBN-13	978-0-252-08629-8 / 9780252086298
Zustand	Neuware