Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work (Working Class in American History) - Softcover

Resnikoff, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252086295 ISBN 13: 9780252086298

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2022

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252086295
• ISBN 13: 9780252086298
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272