Labor's End
Jason Resnikoff
Abstract
Between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, the word “automation” in the United States stood for a revolutionary development, although few could agree as to precisely what it described. Rather than a specific technology, however, this book shows that “automation” was a discourse defining work as mere biological survival that saw the end of human labor as the inevitable result of technological progress. In premising liberation on the end of work, subscribers to the automation discourse made political freedom contingent not on the distribution of power but on escape from the limits of the human body. Ironically, much of what was called “automation” in the postwar period did not actually abolish human labor. Abandoning the workplace as a site of political contest, unions largely failed to resist managers who sped up workers, broke unions, and sent jobs where non-unionized labor could be had more cheaply—all of which managers, lawmakers, and even union officials called progress. This book considers how different constituencies deployed the automation discourse to advance a politics that sought the abolition of work. Although existing scholarship concerning “automation” presumes that the word describes a clear-cut technology or industrial process, this book returns the concept to its ideological roots in the postwar United States. What most called “automation” often created more human labor or intensified labor already present.