Automation and the Unions
Seligman, Ben B.
In the first quarter of the 19th century, secret societies of English working men banded together to defend themselves against the machine. Determined to destroy the looms that were displacing...
...But since one guess is apt to be as good as another, I should think that structural distortions in the economy account for perhaps half of the "non-frictional" unemployment...
...A final touch of unwitting irony is provided by the slogan: "An equal opportunity employer...
...In 1959 Armour closed a number of plants in the midwest so suddenly that the workers had no time to think about what they might do...
...The five on-train operators' unions immediately threatened strike if the workrules changes were carried out, for they insisted that not only was train safety involved, but that firemen posts provided training for future engineers...
...The U.S...
...And Yale Brozen, an economics professor who writes for the American Enterprise Association, sees seven million more civilians at work in 1961 than in 1950 and concludes that automation is a blessing...
...Old nuts and bolts were hoarded like a housewife saving twine...
...The scheme includes a guarantee that no worker will lose his job—at least for one year—because a machine has taken his place...
...Steel company representatives hesitate to commit themselves for fear that their statements will return to haunt them at the bargaining table...
...Part of the reason for the drop, according to some observers, stems from the company's installation of certain cost cutting operations at the mine, displacing work formerly done in the plant, and since the sharing applies only to Fontana, the workers have lost out...
...However, as A. H. Raskin has shrewdly observed, early retirement on improved pensions and profit-sharing and sharing in cost savings protect only the worker who is in...
...The railroad operators immediately announced the layoffs: as many as 15,000 jobs will be eliminated before the arbitration law expires in January, 1966...
...But what these might do for a man already out of work is not clear: this question is beyond the present practice of collective bargaining...
...UAW's American Motors Council members admit that it isn't popular in the shop: two-thirds of the profit sharing fund pays for such fringes as pensions and medical care...
...This hardly suggests that private industry is able to meet the challenge of the new technology...
...By November 1963, only 220 of some 2500 eligible workers had been "retrained...
...In a decade, a million and a half jobs irrevocably lost...
...For as Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz reported in his latest manpower study, of the over four million new jobs created between 1957 and 1963, only five per cent were full time jobs generated by private demand...
...They want an end to speed up, they want more coffee breaks to relieve fatigue, and they want a halt to TV monitoring of toilets—but above all they want early retirement, they want release from the filth and dirt of making insolent chariots...
...Such a machine, developed by IBM in 1963, was gobbled up by the New York Daily News, the Washington Star and the South Bend Tribune...
...And the unhappy consequences are magnified because it is precisely the latter, those most vulnerable to automation, which generally have been the more progressive and socially responsive...
...The need for skilled workers is considerably lessened when the computer dumps the right amount of raw materials into the furnace at just the right moment and is then able to shape the beam and plate for a new office building or for an atomic submarine...
...The Steelworkers stressed shorter time and secured 13-week sabbaticals for long-term employees in the hope that this would absorb some of their members without jobs...
...their frustration is expressed by fruitless picketing of Bridges' headquarters...
...No one has yet come up with the idea of "bargaining" for those outside the gates...
...R. Wilcock and W. Franke, two University of Illinois economists who studied the Armour situation, report that most of the severance allowances went to pay off company credit union loans which were called in immediately after the shutdowns...
...To be sure, some of the loss above frictional levels may be attributed to what Walter Heller calls inadequate effective demand...
...During the first year, workers submitted over 900 cost-cutting ideas, 80 per cent of which were good enough to be adopted...
...Automated milling and tape-programmed riveting illustrate what can be done to an ancient craft...
...The techniques employed range from ordinary drive and speed regulation, to be found in three-fourths or more of the nation's plants, to automatic measuring, process sensing, tape and punched card controls and complete computer installations...
...People might be drawn into voluntary community activity (vide the fantastic response to the domestic Peace Corps idea...
...As an old Russian writer once asked: What Is To Be Done...
...And finally, let us simply give money to those who have not enough and will never earn enough—the aged, indigent and shattered (it might sound better if this were called more extensive transfer payments...
...An Armco mill in Houston, replete with computers, produces steel slabs from 70,000 pound ingots and can be converted quickly to the production of finished steel plates up to 144 inches wide and 60 feet long...
...At Ford's Cleveland plant the line can supply a couple of thousand Galaxie hoods, a thousand different ones for the Falcon and throw in five hundred or so for the Comet, shifting back and forth in a few hours...
...A computer calculates the car's proper speed from trackside devices, while radar records the actual speed...
...The Oklahoma City Times sets 12,000 lines of editorial and classified ad matter with an IBM 1620 computer...
...The latter may be controlled by point-to-point positioning or by having the tool move in a continuous path for two or more axes...
...Last October the West Coast mariners' unions were asked by the Pacific Maritime Association, 'which 'bargains •for the shipowners in western ports, to reduce their manning requirements...
...If that is the case, then almost 12,000 jobs a month have been destroyed: the figure, modest as it is, suggests the magnitude of automation's net impact—after all upgrading, new hires and rehires...
...Last July Life magazine, suddenly excited by the phenomenon of automation, told the story of Walter Peterson of San Diego, California...
...Whether this will meet the needs of the displaced auto worker depends on conditions far beyond the union's control, but at any rate it is one small way of meeting a difficult situation...
...Why not give longer vacations, sabbaticals, travel grants (as Herbert Gans says, this might "professionalize" a good many occupations...
...To maintain roughly the same number of jobs in 1970 as were available when the fifties had run out would require an expansion of output by almost half—an un likely prospect...
...Now, much larger loads, glued or strapped together, flow smoothly from truck to hold...
...One man controls the entire operation: eighteen would be needed for a conventional road system...
...Keep teenagers in school (but for heavens' sake...
...Potentially, we can have the same newspaper in every town at the same time...
...and display advertising is set by a photographic typesetter fed by paper tapes from a computer...
...Firemen with low seniority and those working irregularly are to go first...
...The structural argument—that economic strata shift and can threaten an earthquake—was for them just another Jeremiad...
...All of these are standard, but in the absence of action by the whole society they remain palliatives, at best delaying the arrival of Doomsday...
...All these, of course, are computerized operations...
...PMA, with its longshoreman's contract in mind, magnanimously said that it was...
...But the men who know only railroading are left standing at trackside biting their lips in quiet desperation...
...Not only the skilled worker, but the educated engineer has his worries, so rapidly does the technology advance...
...In the protracted bargaining session with the NMU, the employers suggested that two men instead of three be stationed on deck as lookouts after sunset...
...The union must necessarily employ its local work rules embodied in the original contract's section 2B, a set of practices that makes management howl, "Featherbedding...
...Repair facilities are combined and some even closed down...
...While the Machinists' Union acknowledges that automation poses problems, all it can think of is another conference or perhaps better severance pay...
...Numerical control in the machine shop is an excellent example of the way single unit production can be automated...
...More important, it signifies a change in the thinking of the UAW hierarchy...
...The Armour Automation Committee, which administers the Fund, was hailed as a pioneer effort to deal in a statesmanlike manner with the effects of a changing technology, but its behavior is odd to say the least...
...Moreover, there is little the union can do for the unemployed, and it is still irritated by those who dig non-union coal, for this means no welfare royalty...
...Reducing the number of workers can be accomplished in any industry...
...Harvey Swados, who talked to union officials, workers and employers on the West Coast docks, reports that after PMA's "historic" agreement with Harry Bridges' longshoremen, which gave the green light to automation on the docks, work was converted into a continuous, almost oppressive stream...
...Hence, curtailing the supply of labor does have historical precedent...
...otherwise, a vast trauma awaits us all...
...But like a puppy discovering its tail, the discussion goes round and round and no one knows what to do...
...He must depend on his union and his union has been immobilized by the force of technology...
...For the craft unions automation is not yet a burning problem...
...The fact is that the Fontana plant is now able to operate at full capacity with 1400 fewer workers than it did a few years ago...
...It is a painful situation: programs must be sold to a Congress inhabited by an assortment of troglodytes (there are exceptions) for whom the Federalist papers and the speeches of Calhoun are the touchstones of eternal wisdom...
...The control room, with its numerous switches and gauges, resembles a scientific laboratory more than it does a ship's bridge...
...Several recent arbitration and NLRB cases make it clear that management has the right to transfer work under such circumstances...
...The situation may become still more critical than these crude estimates would suggest, for long-term unemployment is quite severe...
...So well do they love their jobs that they want to escape from the monotony and mindlessness of the computer-controlled assembly plant...
...As a result, enthusiasm for the scheme has declined sharply: the incentive workers who used to average $50 to $60 a month in bonuses above their base pay, are particularly bitter...
...In March, 1963, the Steelworkers' Union and the Kaiser Steel Corporation, a maverick among manufacturers, agreed to "share the progress" at the latter's plant in Fontana, California...
...better severance pay...
...relocation allowances...
...As experience is gained in converting discrete operations into flows, and in measuring, it becomes easier to introduce the computer...
...Yet this in no way solved the problem, for there were frequent disputes between local unions and lower echelon management over crew sizes, seniority, layoffs, incentive payments and lunch hours...
...The UAW wants to compel management to respect the dignity of the worker and urges its locals to resist the erosion of its bargaining units...
...History discloses no tragedy more horrible," says Marx, "than the gradual extinction of the English hand loom weaver, an extinction that was spread over several decades...
...The situation in this industry, particularly in the U.S...
...It was one of the few bills that moved over the Hill to the White House that year with more than deliberate speed...
...Moreover, the computer supplies the railroad chieftain with a command and control technique of unparalleled efficiency...
...He argued that it was "better to have a half million men working in the industry at good wages...
...The method has been spreading rapidly...
...It is all too easy for a union to cut away from the larger part of its work force, as did Bridges' organization or John L. Lewis' United Mine Workers...
...They were reluctant to believe that changes in technology would leave permanent gaps in auto's labor force...
...Congress, however, went further and imposed compulsory arbitration—which the President accepted...
...The employers have complete freedom to mechanize and assign jobs...
...It is merely necessary to convert discrete production into a flow, add feedbacks and servomechanisms, attach the computer, and the task is done...
...While the bonus has gone as high as 66 cents an hour, for the last seven months of the plan's initial year it dropped steadily, until in May, 1964, it hit but $14 for each of the 5000 workers participating in it...
...The men, however, want to eat...
...Knowing in his bones that man serves the machine, the auto worker wants to get to that fishing rod just as soon as he can...
...At the age of 45, with a family, two cars, and a house on a hill above the Pacific, he had been enveloped by an impersonal, nameless trouble...
...Few listened to the plaints of the workers or their unions...
...Presumably a more responsible tack has been developed in steel...
...While still a small part of the machine tool market, it is expected that numerical control methods will dominate the industry by 1967...
...Last January, President Johnson pressed a button in the White House to start a welding machine at the Avondale shipyards in New Orleans...
...Not without reason, they have charged the company with chisel ing...
...Equipment and flow variations are reported instantaneously, well production data computed, and the transfer of oil from field to pipelines controlled—all by electronic devices...
...The fact is that with multiple purpose devices to lend flexibility, automation need not be limited solely to mass production...
...Lockheed Electronics enthusiastically advertises the first computer controlled oil field to operate 180 oil wells in the Poso Creek oil field from a central office located seven miles away...
...Diesels haul longer trains, dispensing with men for operating crews...
...The McLouth Steel Corporation plant near Detroit has a continuous casting operation in its rolling mill complete with computers...
...What this suggests, of course, is an utter loss of hope of ever creating a work process with human meaning...
...The fact is that the computer is increasingly being attached to machines in factories to convert manufacturing into automatic processes requiring no human hands...
...Dissidents in Western Pennsylvania and the northern sections of West Virginia have said: "A wage increase is not justified...
...The AFL-CIO has officially called for a Presidential Commission on Automation, an idea that Congress has finally accepted...
...Total employment dropped from 1,400,000 in 1947 to 800,000 in 1960...
...Roughly one-third of the savings goes to the workers, a formula derived from the proportion of labor cost to total cost...
...Last August, the National Maritime Union, headed by Joseph Curran, agreed to cuts in crew sizes on automated ships and shortly after another of the sea unions, the Marine Engineers, had to follow suit...
...Another 22 per cent were shifted to the Buffalo stamping plant...
...In this manner, numerical control does away with templates, jigs and fixtures, and reduces set-up and work time...
...But, as usual, President Kennedy understood full well what was in their minds, and armed with the Council of Economic Advisers' prediction that 6 million workers would be out of jobs one month after a rail strike and that the ensuing depression would endanger the national security, he asked the Congress in July, 1963, to forbid railroad strikes for two years and to compel the operators and Brotherhoods to keep talking to each other...
...for the industrial and even white-collar unions it is...
...This is no fantasy: The Palm Beach Post-Times uses electronic computers to set type, eliminating the skilled human typesetter...
...The union, too, is sponsoring a retraining program for its members under the Federal manpower act, perhaps the first under such auspices, with mechanical drafting, clay modelling of new cars and other white collar skills the main courses...
...of the $500,000 which had been accumulated $300,000 was still lying idle, unused...
...Since a key problem in automation is not so much the one fired, although that is troublesome enough, but the one not hired, the Kaiser plan, interesting as it is, offers no answer to the questions raised by the 1V2 million young people who enter the job market each year...
...However, the skilled or semi-skilled worker has a good deal less prospect for retraining than the engineer...
...This, at least, was the sentiment expressed by Henry Knight, Secretary-Treasurer of UMW Local 6330 in Waynesburg, Pa., and John Mayo, District 4 president in Uniontown, Pa...
...The Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, and now the Railroad unions, too, call for higher wages to be paid whenever new equipment is to be installed, a response sure to be used as an excuse to bring in more machines...
...Steel Corporation, for a long time has been quite complicated, with technology exerting its impersonal pressures on available jobs and established work standards...
...The companies screamed "featherbedding" in full-page newspaper ads throughout the land...
...In the end, the angry outbursts were to little avail, for the 200,000 hand loom weavers were reduced to almost half their number within three decades...
...The displaced need to be shifted to jobs still available (the printing trades' unions in Washington claim there are several hundred openings for which people might be trained: government bureaucrats disbelieve the unions...
...But the employers obtained enough extra work for each labor dollar to absorb without strain a 20 per cent increase in cost...
...Whenever the union has discovered new construction and insisted on transfer rights, the company has refused...
...The conversion to computers takes place most rapidly in companies with which the International Typographical Union has no contracts—the Palm Beach Post-Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Newhouse chain...
...It was this fear of the future that really underpinned the strike last year in the East and Gulf ports, the settlement of which contained a proviso for the Labor Department to study work conditions on the docks...
...The union is engaged in a holding action...
...Additional problems have been created by the movement of assembly plants closer to markets, and with this tendency workers and whole communities have been stranded...
...by 50 per cent for the automated ships now under construction...
...Jobs evaporate under them, while new ones, like miracles, are in the future and elsewhere...
...Thus, a 14 per cent increase in the labor component may be but a two or three per cent increase in comparison to revenue...
...As a consequence, the most recent bargaining demands include such items as advance notice of automation...
...But they were striking against the International Union, not the employers...
...Severance pay...
...fortunately, they had been reabsorbed by the end of the year...
...But they were mainly preoccupied with retirement schemes...
...But the Machinists' Union is as yet merely apprehensive, enough at least to establish a joint study project with U.S...
...But finally—immediately, too—it all comes down to politics, not in the narrow sense of maneuvers and endorsements, but in the fundamental sense of planning and perspective...
...Soon there will be no humans at all...
...In Flint, Michigan, the UAW local membership dropped from about 28,000 in 1956 to 13,000 in 1962 and the men still produced the same number of cars...
...Is the likely future of the trade unions one of declining power and influence...
...That it cannot succeed in saving jobs in the machine shops and aerospace plants is obviously not its fault...
...There is no easy way out...
...Several years ago the Machinists recommended certain collective bargaining demands to their local lodges for dealing with automation...
...All this needs to be done soon...
...Membership in the Union is now less than 100,0001 Armour alone closed down 17 plants in that period, stranding over 12,000 workers...
...Now, evidently, pressures from the men in the shops have impelled them to alter their positions...
...Consider the steel industry: within the last 25 years it has witnessed the development of the oxygen furnace, continuous casting, computer control of mills, continuous galvanizing, electronic measurement of sheet thickness, continuous welding and continuous annealing...
...Twenty-five years ago everyone knew that John L. Lewis was president, everyone knew what he stood for, everyone listened to what he said...
...These may come from anything that helps reduce the cost of steel—elimination of waste, working harder, or finding a new way to turn a dial on the control panel itself...
...One union trying desperately to think of all its members is the International Association of Machinists...
...Granted the plants were obsolete, yet the burden of the change was simply dumped into the laps of the employees and the social service agencies of Oklahoma City, East St...
...The unions are paralyzed—with frustration, anguish and nameless fear...
...In fact, computer engineers can sell their hardware because they promise to eliminate people...
...They work out solutions for variations in standard product lines in a half-hour as compared with six days required by a man with a slide rule...
...While crewless engines thus far have been used for shuttling, equipment makers are promising crewless inter-city trains...
...There is nothing irrational about this, for with present-day technology the populationwork force pyramid can be readily inverted...
...It will not be difficult now for the ship operators to cut their crews...
...Evidently he is unaware that virtually all of these jobs were provided by Federal, State and Local governments and non-profit institutions, either directly or through "procurement programs...
...Social Security further reduced the work force by telling men that they did not have to work up to the very moment they dropped dead...
...As a direct result of automation, over 80,000 fewer production workers could produce as much steel at the end of the eleven-year period as at the start...
...The labor saved in moving the same quantity of freight amounted to 200 men, adding perhaps another million dollars or more to the net savings in equipment...
...It is estimated that the somewhat more than 400 factory computer control systems will swell to 4000 by 1970...
...Data are stored in the computer's memory as numerical symbols which are then translated by the circuitry into directions for machine operations...
...by 1972 because of the advanced technology brought on by the computer...
...they do little for the worker who has been shunted aside and even less for the younger worker who wants to get in...
...Moreover, they did not go to work in the factories, for as the new system spread, the hand loom weaver was left to rot in misery...
...Just two years ago, the Department of Labor told an Arden House conference that 200,000 manufacturing jobs a year would be lost This article forms part of a larger study on automation...
...The owners are not averse to utilizing automation as an excuse to speed-up those who remain on board...
...He contended that automation had cut the work force as low as it could safely go, but the operators insisted that even more advanced equipment was necessary if they were to stay in business...
...As an astute labor reporter, John Herling, remarked, the nature of the problem is economy size and collective bargaining in a single area or industry offers only retail help for a wholesale condition...
...Some studies have been sponsored, conferences held, proceedings published...
...Such a presumption is sustained by the fact that unemployment jumped 78 per cent in the 16 years from 1947 to 1963 as contrasted with a 20 per cent increase in the work force...
...Even materials handling, once thought to be the most intractable of industrial operations, has been automated...
...However, the "B" men and the casuals—the unregistered and those waiting for regular jobs—have not fared nearly as well...
...On November 26, the arbitration panel established by the statute ruled that up to 90 per cent of the contested firemen positions could be eliminated—a crushing blow to labor that few noticed in the agony of the President's death...
...In the new style freight yard, for example, of which some 45 have been built in the last decade, the number of incoming cars is scanned on a closed circuit TV to obtain a quick reading of car numbers...
...And this, of course, is the nub of the problem...
...The device, about the size of a couple of shoe boxes, takes over the work of the men on the bridge...
...The 125,000 men who worked last year mined about 450,000 tons of coal, compared to the 293,000 men needed to produce about the same amount a decade ago...
...Most unions, however, turn to a shortened work week rather than longer vacations or paid furloughs...
...New York's subway riders have their automated train between Grand Central and Times Square...
...it is hard to predict how long it can maintain its desperate grip...
...Yet all this has not halted the advance of automation in the Fontana plant...
...Between 1948 and 1952 three thousand Diesels replaced four thousand locomotives each year...
...This system too is archaic, for now a computer with sensory apparatus stands guard over the line...
...To be sure, coal mining is once again a profitable business, so much so that the business men who used to curse Lewis now call him a "labor statesman...
...The machine is fed the necessary instructions on direction, speed, distance, depth of cut and when to turn on the coolant or change tools...
...Louis, West Fargo and Columbus, Ohio...
...In addition, the company now feels that the union ought to relax its stubborn grip on Section 2B, the work rules clause...
...Lewis decided a long time ago not to worry about the unemployed at the pits and to help the mine operators become "more competitive...
...The machine joined two plates for the keel of a Lykes Line freighter that was to be the first of eight semi-automated 14,000 ton ships, each to be operated by a crew of 32 men instead of the 46 needed on conventional vessels of the same size...
...At the other end of the age scale, compulsory education laws have helped keep youngsters out of the work force...
...Moreover, the government's report said nothing about those file clerks and accountants whose positions evaporate every time a piece of data processing equipment is installed in an office...
...Computers design motors and decide on the best shapes for drying kilns...
...This method became archaic in the middle 1950's...
...Thus printing is becoming an industry rather than a craft, and the story of the English hand loom weavers may be retold...
...linecasting machines are operated by perforated tape punched by a teletypesetter...
...If there is no other job available, he goes into a reserve pool and is assured of his income even if he is placed in a lower rated position...
...The Iatter, headed by John I. Snyder, agreed a few years ago to set up the American Foundation on Automation and Employment...
...Detroit automation is an old story...
...The latter, while applied in a minority of plants as yet, more than doubled between 1959 and 1963...
...They know he has been their savior...
...Indeed, was this not the history of hours reduction over the last half century when on the average the work week had been reduced 15 minutes a year...
...With such flexibility, little wonder that Ford can turn out over 40 models each year...
...In October, 1960, a Presidential Railroad Commission was created which produced several immense volumes of statistics that sounded the death knell of the firemen...
...But such arithmetic stops short of a complete analysis, since labor cost as a proportion of total cost or of revenue may be as low as 25 per cent...
...The workers began to think of the company's money as if it were their own...
...The ILA knows what is to come: it is prepared to hold down wage demands in return for some guaranty of job security...
...Further, all the workers can share in any cost saving achieved through greater efficiency...
...Lewis agreed to let the operators mechanize and automate, presumably to meet the competition of rival fuels, and the payoff is to be seen in the several hundred thousand idle miners in Pennsylvania and West Virginia and a current employed work force of about 125,000...
...National Steel touts its computerized 80 inch hot mill at River Rouge as the fastest and most highly automated strip mill in the business...
...The decline in man-hours was even more precipitate-34 per cent...
...those with two to ten years' seniority will be offered "comparable" jobs elsewhere...
...The scheme is plant-wide, so that everyone has a share in making the pie bigger...
...An automatic scarfer, a machine that burns blemishes off unfinished steel, will replace not only the workers who used to do the job with oxyacetylene torches, but the cranemen, hookers and inspectors as well...
...Semiannual and annual model changes, plus shifts in demand for cars have led to all sorts of job splits and reshuffling...
...PMA was encouraged to make the request by the Federal Maritime Subsidy Board, which is willing to pay - , for half the cost of the new ships...
...One computer supplies near perfect hyphenation as well as automatic justification by storing rules of English and 10,000 exceptions in its memory unit...
...Enough has been written by now to demonstrate that automation destroys jobs...
...the other third is used to purchase company stock to be distributed this fall...
...Meanwhile, the operators were looking avidly to the day when they would sail forth with substantially less than half the men they used to have...
...But the time to think, to worry, to discuss is now, when there are still a few years of grace...
...As might be expected, this suggestion always sets devotees of the conventional wisdom to shivering as they warn that a reduction in weekly hours from 40 to 35 implies an intolerable labor cost increase of 14 per cent...
...And one must still add to the official figures at least 1% million of the "invisibles," those forced out of the labor market a long time ago because they had become too discouraged even to search for jobs...
...Severance pay and supplemental unemployment benefits do not give the protection that in better times it was thought they would...
...They have an inescapable feeling that they are next on automation's agenda...
...Meanwhile, the operators continue to introduce automatic machinery and to set the size of work crews: these are "management prerogatives" deemed to be inalienable...
...We make enough money...
...Who, today, so much as knows the name of his successor...
...Marine engineering was once a relatively simple matter, but with nuclear reactors and other advances a new field has been opened...
...The auto workers have had their share of turmoil stemming from a variety of changes in the plant, mainly as a result of automation...
...Helstein recited cases of employees moving their families to new locations, only to find themselves laid off virtually upon arrival...
...No union, no inhibitions...
...We ought to encourage secondary wage earners to stay home (they will if the breadwinner earns enough...
...The publishers are quite delighted with the new technology, to judge by the 1963 meeting of the American Newspaper Publishers Association...
...The real test will come when a high-speed automated production line is installed in 1965 in the tin mill...
...Conventional riveting of stiffeners for aircraft wings once required 20 to 25 riveters: the automated operation needs but one man to watch the machine...
...But this is profit sharing and it has little to do with meeting the problem of automation...
...The company, on the other hand, counters that raw materials prices have gone up and that improved fringe benefits—the cost of which is charged to the saving fund—have eaten into the amounts the men might have otherwise received...
...If the present trend continues, they may come to represent an entrenched but dwindling minority and will be cut off from—if not violently at adds with—the lower, poorer strata of the working class...
...Boyle did obtain some gains unique for the UMW—mine-wide seniority to protect older workers facing layoff, higher overtime rates, more vacation and more safety protection—but many of the locals were dissatisfied and they struck, for they had no guarantee of even the present level of employment...
...Central to these advances is the replacement of hot metal in printing by other ways of forming type as well as the use of the computer to juggle type to make it fit into the proper places on the page...
...Further, the arrangement in no way inhibits U.S...
...Payments into the Fund were halted in 1963...
...The computer also figures how much energy it takes to haul a loaded freight train up a given grade...
...in 1952, the number had been 15 man-hours per ton...
...Up to now, a broad base of actively employed had supported a narrow apex: today this can be turned around—in fact, it must be turned around if the society we know is not to founder...
...The auto worker himself does not think much of the scheme...
...What may await some unions in the not-too-distant future is the likelihood of becoming "ghost unions," top-heavy with officialdom, excellently financed, but reduced in size and national influence...
...The operators were ready, but the unions once again stalled: they were biding their time to hit the railroads the only way they knew how—the strike...
...Ways must be found to organize and represent the workers thrown out of jobs by automation...
...However, the market value of the stock has dropped by over a fifth since the plan was initiated, costing the workers at least a cent an hour per share...
...but now with little influence beyond the constricted limits of the coal fields...
...In effect, the line runs continuously, with standardized machine tools doing the milling, drilling, turning, boring, tapping, and grinding operations automatically...
...The Sailor's Union of the Pacific wanted to know how the total number of men might be reduced without injury to those registered on its books and "without ultimately destroying the union...
...The fact is that with computers and feedbacks the work of an entire industrial complex can be controlled automatically...
...Last year's output rose 13 per cent from 1961 levels, but employment dropped 12 per cent and it is expected to go down still more this year...
...is ripe for automation...
...Developed at MIT, numerical control had been initially sponsored by the Air Force to save time in the manufacture of airframes and aircraft engines (one more case of technology serving war...
...and above all, "income security," meaning an annual salary for line workers...
...The latest wrinkle is "flexible" automation which makes it possible to produce any number of items on the same line...
...But these were subsidized ships...
...Edward Neilan of the U.S...
...Three years after the shutdowns 30 per cent of the East St...
...Little wonder that unionists speak so feelingly about automation...
...The pace of the work is still controlled by the machine and frequently is so intense that workers have had to resort to wildcat strikes, especially in Chrysler, to enforce relief...
...The NMU wondered whether this too was automation...
...By using the computer with its fantastic mathematical capacities, the engineer can direct the machine to automatically drill, mill, grind, bend, punch, form, and cut metals...
...Electrical engineers retrain themselves for aeronautics and unless they learn all about lasers, masers and bio-engineering, they are apt to discover themselves jobless...
...The few who might remain were to be rewarded with a two per cent wage increase...
...Since the Fund was established Armour has closed at least one plant a year, leaving almost 4000 workers to shift for themselves...
...And beyond that the Machinists have done nothing...
...The 13-year decline almost equalled the loss that occurred between 1920, the peak year for railroad jobs, and 1947...
...million persons out of work for reasons other than ordinary economic adjustment...
...In West Labrador four crewless shuttles carry iron ore over a six-mile run at a constant speed of a quarter a mile an hour...
...Grateful acknowlegment is made to the Philip M. Stern Family Fund for a grant to further the research for the present article...
...Long-term unemployment of 27 weeks or more increased as a proportion of total joblessness from 6 per cent in 1949 to 19 per cent in 1961...
...and in the absence of hard thought and a sense of acute crisis, there will be no way out at all...
...Louis Armour workers were still unemployed...
...As he walked through the front door he told his wife: "Well, you're now looking at an unemployed husband...
...It is this problem—antecedent to all the proposed solutions for automation—to which the unions as well as others must face up if we are to escape the tyranny of the machine...
...Railroad bridges move up and down, wheels are oiled and mail bags handled, all automatically...
...And in Corning, N.Y., the same tape is automatically relayed to eight other papers, serving the entire Southern New York tier...
...The Washington grapevine says that the report will be most pleasing to the employers: it will reveal that featherbedding plagues the waterfront...
...Ewan Clague, Commissioner of Labor Statistics, observed in connection with this study, that most unions are to be found precisely in those industries where technology has hit the hardest and where offsetting employment increases are the least...
...As the Research Institute of America remarked in one of its recent reports, automation has just begun to bite...
...To be sure, there was a slight increase in some railroading jobs— shop electrical work and signal operations—but the age of automation now threatens these too...
...What happens to those pushed out by automation is revealed in the experience of the displaced meat packer...
...According to Helstein, the company has built replacement plants in complete secrecy, and often in Southern towns not notably hospitable to the union organizer...
...the agreement, in part, was Curran's way of hitting back at his rival, Paul Hall, whose members work mainly on non-subsidy vessels...
...retraining to be paid by the companies...
...But in the printing trades, the struggle for job security and the effort to deal with technology's impact is of long duration, dating back at least to Mergenthaler's linotype machine in the 1880's...
...The unemployed coal miner who no longer looks for a job is indeed a victim of structural change even though he may not be counted by Labor Department enumerators...
...When the Supreme Court refused to question the constitutionality of compulsory arbitration, another nail was driven into the automated coffin carrying the Brotherhoods to their doom...
...The previous February Peterson had received a 20-year service pin from his employer, General Dynamics...
...Packinghouse jobs dropped from about 200,000 in 1955 to less than 160,000 in 1962...
...Kaiser, of course, is not playing philanthropist, for with each dollar of the bonus, it saves two...
...Perhaps the Kaiser Fontana plan offers a partial answer...
...Complex local work rules, chiefly to forestall speedup, were part of the collective bargaining agreements ever since Benjamin Fairless and Philip Murray signed the first contract in 1937...
...What happened to the remaining 45 per cent is unknown...
...The agreement, of course, with its handsome settlement and pension, is intended to encourage retirement and it has worked well enough to cut the "A" list from about 14,000 a few years ago to about 10,500 in 1963...
...Essentially, it is necessary to develop a smaller active work force, or as Robert Heilbroner puts it, to shift the supply curve of labor to the left: that is, reduce the number of workers...
...Automatic drafting machines draw aircraft wings and lay out circuits in electronics...
...But so to violate the sacrosanct principles of private property merely brought on an outlaw existence and eventually the gallows...
...Yet there are those who are so enamored of contemporary affluence and its conventional wisdoms that they seriously believe the fear of automation to be ill-founded...
...The IUE, the Rubber Workers, the Retail Clerks and several other unions have asked for joint study committees, but there has been no answer from the corporations which continue unhampered in substituting machines for men...
...Since 1955, Swift, Cudahy and Armour have shifted their operations to small towns, often in the South, leaving most of their workers to fend for themselves...
...Steel Corporation proudly displays its computer op erated structural steel mill in South Chicago which rolls uniform standard and wide-flanged shapes...
...A TV camera scans the water directly ahead of the ship...
...Perhaps the introduction of new equipment ought to be licensed (not to inhibit or eliminate them, but to apply them in accordance with a time-table that would avoid the present helter-skelter uses of technology...
...Those who fear the burden of costs stemming from a shorter work week must explain how it was possible to get down to 40 hours today...
...Half the numerical control units now on factory floors were delivered in 1961, by which time nearly 40 instrument makers and 50 machine tool builders had entered a business that reached a $75 million annual level...
...Boyle's claim of better seniority, holidays and control of crew size seemed to them vastly exaggerated once they read the fine print in the contract...
...Moreover, the work of different yards can be coordinated, so that one master need not load up another: the computer advises them which cars to switch and which to hold...
...Steel in introducing new equipment and new techniques, as witness the arrival of the oxygen furnace, continuous casting and the computer...
...Perhaps new structures will be needed, amalgamated unions of workers cutting across industrial lines, just as in the thirties the CIO cut across craft lines...
...Those out of work for more than six months total over 500,000, or 12 per cent of the unemployed: the number of persons unemployed for 15 weeks to 26 weeks is even greater-1.2 million or 26 per cent of the jobless...
...Still, when a newspaper publisher joyfully exclaims: "I can visualize a composing room of the future that will automatically compose a page in the newspaper starting from a typewriter page to a finished page without any human hands touching it until it is finished and ready for the press,"—the printer has ample reason to worry...
...By 1962, numerically controlled machine tools could be found in plants making pumps, kitchenware, turbines and jet engines...
...Meanwhile, a fair number of miners in desperation went to work in non-union shafts—only to find Lewis and the modernized operators arrayed against them...
...The Packinghouse Workers wants a year's notice on plant closings, transfers for the displaced, more separation pay, and a shorter work week...
...consequently, no training program...
...Mooring is handled by automatic hawser winches at the bow and stern that allow resin fiber hawsers to be reeled in or pulled out by a pedal on the deck...
...The industry no longer needs people with talents for stuffing and tying hot dogs, for an electronically controlled machine can take a meat mixture and make a frankfurter ready for cooking...
...Automatic retarders make the cars conform to the computer's reckoning...
...than to have a million men working in the industry in poverty and degradation...
...Henry Ford II asserts that those who blame job loss on automation speak dangerous nonsense...
...The particular approaches of the unions to automation, considering the limitation of bargaining to the unit in the plant or company, are at best, holding actions, or at worst, helpless rhetoric...
...At one time, the union had insisted that no more than 2100 pounds in a single load could be lifted in or out of a ship...
...Cable lengths used by overhead cranes which used to be junked when they snapped were retrieved and cut into smaller pieces for smaller cranes...
...transfer, where possible, of blue collar workers to whitecollar jobs...
...At any rate, the Machinists' Union is willing to think about automation and it has—together with U.S...
...In fact, this is precisely what has been happening ever since the National Origins Act cut off our foreign labor supply in 1921...
...At this rate, the work force would be completely abolished by 1999...
...In the new system the block was taken from the foundry by a conveyor belt and an engine untouched by human hands was produced in under 15 minutes...
...The union in return got a $29 million fund to provide voluntary retirement at age 62 or a $7,900 bonus at age 65, plus a guaranteed 35-hour week for its elite, the so-called "A" member...
...An emergency board under the Railway Labor Act then proposed retraining, special allowances for redundant workers and arbitration of displacements disputed by the union...
...With 64 per cent of the country's machine tools more than ten years old, the situation...
...Usually, three seamen rotate a night watch, with one out for a coffee break: the companies thought that two men and a thermos bottle would be sufficient...
...In 1959 the railroad companies wanted to lay off all firemen working on Diesel locomotives in freight and yard service and insisted on an unrestricted right to set crew sizes...
...All told, at the start of 1964, those out of work for 10 weeks or more represented a third of the unemployed...
...Subcommittees meet, discussions are amicable, yet the observer must wonder at the lack of accomplishment...
...After a year almost half the displaced in two of these cities had not yet found jobs...
...This assumes, after the fashion of Leon Keyserling, that "true" unemployment should include more than the official figures—short-time workers (essentially disguised unemployment) and those who have simply given up...
...In 1963, a ton of finished steel incorporated 10.6 man-hours (production and maintenance...
...By this reckoning there may be almost as many structurally "disemployed" as there are those who are without jobs because of inadequate demand...
...The information is then checked against waybills and the cars automatically sorted...
...Sooner or later the grasp will be loosened, even as in the railroad industry where some of the nation's most powerful unions are caving in before technology and politics...
...Job attrition in steel goes on without abatement...
...These are relatively new developments and the unions are puzzled and stunned...
...The Packinghouse Workers Union, operating in an industry that invented the automatic assembly line, is continually confronted by plants that have closed down and been replaced by up-to-date abbatoirs, usually built elsewhere by the meat packing companies...
...A year later it was down to 730,000...
...No doubt the rebellion in the union's ranks had something to do with the change in the top officers' attitudes...
...The Japanese have gone even further: their Mississippi Maru has more pushbuttons than men...
...Industries...
...prepared to provide the necessary funds...
...From 1953 to 1959, a short span of six years, 80 per cent of the decline in factory openings could be traced to automation...
...If this were to be the case then we should all be the worse for it: the patent fact, despite the many strictures levelled at them, is that American unions have made the material lot of the ordinary workingman, and indeed for all of us, far better than it would have been had they not existed...
...Some private observers are even gloomier—estimates ranging up to 40,000 lost jobs a week, or two million a year, are offered as the tribute exacted by the computer...
...Nowhere is this more evident than on the docks and in the ships that berth alongside...
...over a five-year period to permit a reduction of the total work force to induce earlier retirement, severance arrangements, or other programs that may be negotiated, as well as by attrition...
...Industries, a manufacturer of automated machinery...
...Needless to say, the unions rejected the Commission's proposals...
...A vision of empty idleness haunts us all...
...Human monitors watched lights and dials to adjust the line...
...Affluent shells of their former selves, they would resemble the present United Mine Workers, only 25 years ago a major social force in the U.S...
...Beyond that the labor movement urges an expansion of retraining, relocation aid, and area redevelopment...
...When Ford closed its Buffalo assembly plant in 1958, only a third of the 1100 hourly employees went to Lorain, Ohio...
...Perhaps it has been the virtual civil war in such towns as Hazard, Kentucky, that has impelled the present UMW leadership to have a few second thoughts...
...The men who are still on the line are ready to explode and they made their sentiments known at the last UAW convention in unmistakable ways...
...In effect, the Board told the owners that to qualify for operating subsidies—which since the war have amounted to $1.6 billion—they would have to "centralize" engine room and bridge controls...
...Of course, this is all to the good, since it helps "arouse" people...
...The latter's only answer thus far has been reproduction or "bogus work," a form of non-work that the printer dislikes intensely as an insult to his pride of craft and to be traded off sooner or later for another coffee break...
...Kaiser thinks that the normal 8 per cent work force turnover will keep down the number of bodies gathering in the reserve pool: union leaders are not so sure, but they hope it will...
...The operators, in turn, were to establish an "employment security fund" for the Curran organization based on 25 cents per man-day to retrain land-locked seamen...
...Developments in such techniques as high energy rate forming, electrochemical and torqueless machining plus numerical control, suggest what may be in store for the skilled machinist in the next five years or so...
...Naturally, the number of engines required for the system is reduced, as is the number of work crews...
...The product does not vary, the tolerances are more exact, and there is less likelihood that human errors will build up the scrap pile...
...The displaced go into the labor reserve pool: at one time there were several dozen men in the pool awaiting reassignment...
...other unions are fully awake to the decimation of their ranks by the onslaught of automation...
...Today about 28,000 Diesels and 1,000 old steamers with their picturesque cowcatchers do all the work...
...But we do want fringe benefits, job security and safety...
...The prospect for many workers appears quite grim, and the companies, with rare exceptions, do little about it...
...Yet the frustration of the newer labor organizations would be compounded if they were to look to the printing crafts for solutions...
...Can the social effects of automation and large-scale unemployment indeed be handled via the ritual of collective bargaining...
...If one assumes frictional unemployment of two per cent, as used to be done (one wonders where and when the Council of Economic Advisers' 4 per cent figure got into the discussion) , then with a work force of 72 million and total unemployment of over 4 million there would appear to be almost 23...
...Not many years ago, certainly within our memory today, an automobile engine block came from the foundry to an assem bly line where some 300 men transformed it into an engine in 3%2 weeks...
...These urged advance notice, transfer rights, moving allowances, retraining at full pay, severance pay, early retirement and "equitable distribution of the gains resulting from greater productivity through general wage increases...
...Data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal an occupational upheaval on the railroads of enormous proportions...
...The profusion of car models is almost infinite...
...Finally, in 1960 a settlement provided for setting up a Human Relations Committee to deal with the exacerbating issues stemming from the changing character of work in the mills...
...An examination of the efficacy of these programs would call for a further article...
...The photograph accompanying the advertisement shows computers and wells, but no people...
...At the same time he was told that his tool-and-die making skills were no longer needed because automatic machinery now made jigs and templates with sharper tolerances than he could ever hope to achieve...
...The one saving grace is that a fireman in the senior group may receive up to $8,000 in severance pay if he chooses to leave...
...This would have meant the abolition of almost 60,000 jobs...
...All the unions were able to do was to ask for "some sort of compensation for the loss of jobs...
...Auto workers produced a million more trucks and cars in 1963 than they did in 1953 with 20 per cent fewer workers...
...They also acceded to 20-year retirement regardless of age...
...In the first year the monthly bonuses averaged about $65 per man...
...The union officials were still "lovebirds with the coal operators...
...A retraining program in Fort Worth gave to those who secured new jobs $1.61 an hour on the average as compared to the Armour average of $2.60 an hour...
...Considering industry's incessant push for more and more sales and its great capacity to produce, such a modest jump in cost could be absorbed quite easily...
...Most of the loss has been attributed to technological change—there is little argument among the experts on this...
...let's improve the education system...
...And in virtually every case, the "new" skills brought a lower-rated job with less pay than had been earned at the old Armour packing house...
...Chamber of Commerce deplores the Luddite panic of labor leaders and Keynesian economists...
...How did this condition come about...
...When the Somerville, Massachusetts assembly plant closed, only 15 per cent of the workers moved over to other Ford operations...
...Let us try to estimate automation's final impact on jobs, even conservatively...
...For the first time in the memory of our generation, the Miners' union was seemingly worried about job security rather than money...
...Steel employment, covering both maintenance and production workers, dropped from a high of 568,000 in 1951 to about 400,000 in 1962 or about 28 per cent...
...Not too long ago, Reuther and his very capable brain trust put all their faith in raising the level of aggregate demand as the only way of halting the erosion of jobs...
...The best the UAW has come up with is its 1961 "progress sharing" plan with American Motors...
...At the Pennsylvania Rail road's Conway yards, which was computerized at a cost of X34 million, freight can be moved with some 13,000 fewer cars, saving the company $100 million in rolling stock...
...Yet it is clear that without 2B, job destruction would be even more rapid...
...Will Walter Reuther break the circle of frustration...
...In the first quarter of the 19th century, secret societies of English working men banded together to defend themselves against the machine...
...Little wonder that Ralph Helstein, president of the Packinghouse Workers' Union, described the Automation Fund some time ago as nothing more than a "publicity gimmick" for the company and a cloak for "a ruthless program of mass termination...
...in recent years there has been a loss of some 200,000 jobs in that industry...
...The product mix is easily altered and a great variety of bodies, roofs, lids, hoods, bumpers, transmissions, axles and engines roll off the automated belt...
...ways must be found to organize and consider the millions of illpaid "marginal" workers who scrape along on the minimum wage and suffer the consequences of racial discrimination...
...Determined to destroy the looms that were displacing them, they roamed through West Riding and Lancashire and Nottingham hammering into junk the frames and gigs that had disrupted a settled way of life...
...Some later received training through the Armour Automation Fund set up in 1959, but the value of the program seems to have been quite limited...
...The elimination of steam by Diesel locomotives, which do not need as much servicing, has reduced maintenance jobs...
...But what if the computer does make it easier for the job to be done at another location...
...Such ships may have computers on board to calculate bearings and provide data on speed, course and time of arrival...
...That too remains to be seen: the UAW has prepared no public material on automation since its first pronouncements in 1955...
...In any case, W. A. Boyle, the union's new president, tried to obtain a job freeze in his recent negotiations with the Northern bituminous coal industry...
...The West Coast experience worries the longshoremen in the East...
...This metalworking technique replaces both human control and energy...
Vol. 12 • January 1965 • No. 1
