The Full Automation Fallacy
21st June 2021
Let’s start with a more basic question. What is automation? Machines have replicated and augmented human work processes for centuries, and that is often the colloquial use of “automation” in our current moment. But “automation” was not used to describe this process until 1947, when Delmar Harder, vice president of manufacturing at Ford Motor Company, created its Automation Department. The department’s engineers redesigned automobile production so that materials were automatically conveyed from one process to another, obviating the need for laborers to load and unload machines. Further, the process was itself increasingly machine-controlled, through a system of timers, switches, and relays—what technology historian David Hounsell calls the “electromechanical brain.”
Most of the technologies involved in automation had been developed and implemented in other industries years before their incorporation into Ford’s production process. What made automation new was its centrality to Ford’s manufacturing strategy, coming at a time of historic unrest among autoworkers, and in particular, on the heels of a costly twenty-four-day strike at Ford’s massive River Rouge plant in May of 1949. Not only would the new technologies dramatically reduce an unruly labor force, but they allowed Ford to decentralize its production away from the roiling unrest of Detroit as the company opened new automated factories, with new less militant employees, in Cleveland and Buffalo. Workers immediately perceived the threat, and automation was, from its inception, a deeply politicized issue. The history of automation reveals it as a political tool to subvert worker power, not simply an economic one to increase productivity.
…
Investigating grocery store self-checkout, researchers found that Luddite customers hated and avoided the technology. In response, management cut staff to make lines so unbearable that customers gave up and used the machines instead. Even then, cashiers were still required to assist and monitor transactions; rather than reduce workload, the technologies were “intensifying the work of customer service and creating new challenges.”
…
“There is NO MORAL ISSUE with stealing from a store that forces you to use self checkout, period. THEY ARE CHARGING YOU TO WORK AT THEIR STORE.”