This article reads a lot like one of the best frustrating books I have read: David F. Noble's Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. N

This article reads a lot like one of the best frustrating books I have read: David F. Noble's Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. Noble's book is about the introduction of computer numerically controlled machine tools in American manufacturing after WW II, covering the technology but focusing on CNC's effect on the balance of power between skilled workers and management. The technology was very expensive and fragile when first introduced, and was more effective at cowing workers than at quickly making high precision parts. American makers of CNC machines started with defense industry applications and couldn't manage to make machines competitively priced for civilian use even after they had stopped making wholly defective ones. The chronology ends in the late 1970s; the book was published in 1984. Management forces crazy process changes into a business, and is forced to backtrack after wasting years and huge sums of money -- a familiar story, right? Except that's not how it ended. There was no backtracking. The optimistic early claims about CNC became, after much time and money, realistic claims. German and Japanese machine tool manufacturers eventually produced the priced-for-civilian-work machines that American tool manufacturers couldn't or wouldn't. Nowadays, no American manufacturer would pay high wages for someone to precisely guide the motions of a lathe by coordinated hand-eye movements. They wouldn't even pay low wages for that particular task; human performance is too inconsistent. What of this vignette from the article, that also takes place between the immediate postwar and the 1970s? In 1946, some 550,000 auto workers had produced a little more than three million vehicles, but in 1970 some 750,000 auto workers had produced a little more than eight million vehicles.” The rapid pace took a devastating toll of people’s health and lives, leaving millions of workers disabled or dead; one study from the period estimated “sixty-five on-the-job deaths per day among autoworkers.” Auto industry executives credited the industry’s productivity boom to advances in machinery, but the predominantly black workforce knew it was in fact due to old-fashioned exploitation, not automation: heavier workloads and unsafe, unhealthy conditions. Today, General Motors employs 180,000 people and sells 9.6 million vehicles per year. Simultaneously, injury rates in manufacturing are down a lot since the 1970s. I think that both Noble's book and this article would be more persuasive if they committed to one major rhetorical thrust. Either "management is bluffing about how labor can be substituted by machines, so workers shouldn't be intimidated" or "machines can substitute for labor, so workers shouldn't expect the market economy to always provide paid work", but not both.