Automation and Computerization

Automation and Computerization. Automation and computerization are related but separate phenomena. Automation means the mechanization—and usually the speeding up—of production, not only in manufacturing but also in service. Computerization is an advanced form of automation. Fantasies and anxieties about automation predate the nation's founding. The golem of Jewish legend, for example, is a powerful automaton. But Americans' historic receptivity to technological innovation and their need for machines to compensate for scarcity of labor have made the United States a center for automation.

American automation began in the early New England textile mills and other communities of the 1820s and 1830s, where workers labored amid rows of complex, noisy, and dangerous machines, and in the pioneering Midwestern slaughterhouses of the 1840s and 1850s, where workers butchered, divided into parts, and packed hogs in “disassembly” lines. In both enterprises employees stood in place while the work came to them and repeated their respective assigned tasks day after day. By contrast, in the much smaller early American craft and machine shops, employees had moved about more freely from task to task as the work itself remained stationary. Automation severely limited workers' physical movement and occupational diversity alike.

Nevertheless, automation does not inevitably result in “deskilling,” or the steady loss of skills, both technical and intellectual, to machines. In the iron and steel industry, new machines may have diluted skills, but in textiles and other industries, the number of semiskilled workers actually increased as employers required a labor force with the knowledge and dexterity to operate complex machinery. Mere physical strength mattered ever less. Hence the irrelevance to industries not dependent on sheer manual labor of Frederick Taylor's system of scientific management (Taylorism)—the elimination of allegedly extraneous work motions and the acceleration of others.

Although scientific management, as conceived by Taylor, and automation were thus two quite different concepts, Taylorism provided ideological justification for subsequent automation in industry. For Taylor, workers as well as machines lacked intelligence and performed most efficiently when controlled completely by engineers and managers.

Automation usually means the substitution of machines for workers, causing “technological unemployment.” The term became popular during the economic depression and mass unemployment of the 1930s, when for the first time the American public singled out President Herbert Hoover and other engineers for being as responsible as greedy industrialists for the efficient large‐scale manufacturing machines hitherto lauded as engines of prosperity and job creation. Although America has never experienced anything comparable to England's eighteenth‐century Luddites, or “machine breakers,” both white‐collar citizens and industrial workers of the 1930s did finally associate automated machinery and job losses.

Automation need not, however, always mean fewer workers. At Henry Ford's pioneering Michigan automobile assembly lines at Highland Park (1910s) and River Rouge (1920s), low‐cost mass production and increased efficiency created thousands of new jobs. In fact, the process of mass production characterized much of the American industrial landscape. Yet these two huge Ford plants came to epitomize automation in popular culture, technological history, and scholarly discourse under the rubric “Fordism.” They were also the models for the classic critique of automation in Charlie Chaplin's 1936 movie Modern Times.

Recovery from the Great Depression through World War II military production, followed by postwar prosperity, lessened concern about automation until the mid–1950s, when another wave of technological innovation arose. Now the threat that computers might replace white‐collar workers, even intellectual workers like librarians, generated growing unease. The 1957 movie Desk Set, starring Spencer Tracy as an efficiency expert computerizing a corporate research department headed by Katharine Hepburn, popularized postwar anxiety about technological unemployment.

Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut's novel Player Piano (1952) envisioned the United States as a prosperous welfare state dependent on one huge computer for all major decisions. In Vonnegut's technological dystopia, only a few engineers and managers hold meaningful jobs while most citizens resent their menial daily tasks despite the domestic comforts provided by technological progress. Significantly, the term “computer,” hitherto applied to men and women skilled in numerical calculations, was now applied to the mechanical devices that replaced them. (Years later, automatic programming codes would replace human computer programmers.) Congressional hearings on automation in 1955, which revealed that substantial numbers of blue‐ and white‐collar workers alike were being displaced by machines, made automation a public issue.

Not until the radical critiques of American technology of the 1960s and 1970s, however, did earlier piecemeal condemnations of automation and computerization become parts of a broader indictment of the overall quality of work. Harvey Swados's pathbreaking 1957 essay in The Nation, “The Myth of the Happy Worker”, vigorously argued that assembly‐line workers' high pay and good benefits hardly compensated for their daily grind and loss of autonomy.

White‐collar workers less threatened by technological unemployment, particularly those in presumably lifetime corporate positions, often thought themselves immune to the ills endured by production workers. Studs Terkel's Working (1972) and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's Work in America (1973) amply demonstrated otherwise. In the 1980s and 1990s America's largest corporations discharged large numbers of managerial and white‐collar employees. Technological innovation now seemed to threaten even more educated employees, though blue‐collar workers lost still more jobs owing to automation. Half as many factory positions existed in 1996 as in 1966.

By the 1990s, the computerization of America had become a fact of life. In the 1940s and 1950s, computer pioneers like John Mauchly and John Von Neumann never anticipated more than a few giant computers that would be operated by skilled programmers employed by the largest national and international institutions to solve the most complex quantitative problems. By the 1980s, computers had become available to ordinary Americans and embedded in their lives in countless ways.

At the end of the twentieth century, many Americans anticipated an ever more automated and computerized high‐tech utopia. But other citizens, aware of actual and potential technological and environmental disasters, retreated from the nation's historically uncritical embrace of technological progress and saw automation and computerization as, at best, profoundly mixed blessings. For them, chess champion Gary Kasparov's 1997 loss to International Business Machine's (IBM's) Deep Blue computer symbolized the human implications of technological triumphs.
See also Automotive Industry; Business; Fifties, The; Global Economy, America and the; Industrialization; Industrial Relations; Labor Markets; Meatpacking and Meat Processing Industry; Sixties, The; Textile Industry.

Bibliography

Harry Braverman , Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, 1974.
James B. Gilbert , Work without Salvation: America's Intellectuals and Industrial Alienation, 1880–1910, 1977.
David F. Noble , Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, 1984.
Paul Ceruzzi , An Unforeseen Revolution: Computers and Expectations, 1935–1985, in Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future, ed. Joseph J. Corn, 1986, pp.188–201.
David Montgomery , The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925, 1987.
Harvey Swados , On the Line, 1957; rpt. 1990.
Amy Sue Bix , Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America's Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981, 2000.

Howard P. Segal