The machine tells the body how to work: "automation" and the postwar automobile industry -- The electronic brain's tired hands: automation, the digital computer, and the degradation of clerical work -- The liberation of the leisure class: debating freedom and work in the 1950s and early 1960s -- Anticipating oblivion: the automation discourse, federal policy, and collective bargaining -- Machines of loving grace: the new left turns away from work -- Slaves in tomorrowland: the degradation of domestic labor and reproduction -- Where have all the robots gone? From automation to humanization.
Summary:
"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"---Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.