Automation Madness

An Interview with David Noble
David Noble, historian and author of America By Design, is a well known and respected critic of government, industry, and labor policies on science and technology. Noble taught until recently in the department of science, technology, and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and for the past year has acted as the curator of the Division of Mechanism at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History.
This summer, the Smithsonian will sponsor an exhibit designed by Noble entitled "Automation Madness: The Boys and Their Toys. "As described in his proposal for the exhibit, "Automation Madness" will try to explain "how the traditional and noble impulse to reduce human drudgery, and thereby uplift the spirit and dignity of human worker, became transformed instead into a morally blind yet socially sanctioned compulsion to degrade and intensify work, deskill jobs, and, ultimately, to eliminate the very working people on whose behalf and in whose name the effort has presumably been undertaken. " The exhibit will include displays of some of the first computer aided manufacturing systems, examples of industrial robots, case studies of labor-management struggles over automation, and models of machines that were developed to enhance skills rather than decrease labor-but never used.
A summary of Noble's somewhat controversial views on technology can be read in a three part series he wrote for the journal Democracy in 1983, entitled "7n Defense of Luddism. "
Noble was interviewed by Multinational Monitor editors Tim Shorrock and Kathy Selvaggio in his office in the Smithsonian in February.

You have talked about technology having a "homogenizing effect" on industry. Can you explain what you mean by this term?

It used to be that if you were working in an industry, you were facing unique problems, sometimes unique to a craft and certainly unique to the industry. So in the 1950s when the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers were essentially wiped out by computerization of refineries, they were fighting the battle alone. Then the printers, when they were fighting teletypesetting were fighting alone; it was the printers against their particular form of automation. On the docks, dockworkers were fighting containerization, which had no parallel anywhere else. It was a unique thing.

So my argument is that the pervasiveness of computer based systems across industries, as well as in offices, warehouses, retail and wholesale supermarkets, produce sales, everything, has fundamental similarities. Everywhere you go it looks the same. You go into a machine shop and there's a CRT screen, you go into a supermarket and there's one. That's what we mean by homogenizing.

What I am suggesting is that homogenization is possibly laying the basis for a cross industry, and certainly international identity of interest.

A number of unions here are promoting ideas on technology that originated in Europe. Can you explain the background of these proposals?

Under the social democratic governments and parties, beginning with Norway but also Sweden and Denmark and somewhat less in Germany, legislation was passed concerning the impact of technology on the work environment, protecting workers. And in Norway, which was really the birthplace of this, they hammered out technology agreements on the national level and also on the plant level. This was really far-reaching; it had hardly been done before. It started in the beginning of the 1970s, following an upsurge in rank and file militancy.

What is your evaluation of the program?

I was in Norway in 1977 for the first time and went to this plant and people were really excited, very enthusiastic. Then when I went back a year or so ago, I went back to the same plant and I was amazed, they had every piece of equipment that you could imagine. There were things like production cells for automated line assembly which are designed explicitly to eliminate workers. And I said, my god, why did you let this stuff in? They said, no problem, we are strong enough to control the manning on this. And I asked them if they had ever heard of the story of the Trojan horse and they laughed and they said, oh no, you don't understand.

Then about a week later there's a massive layoff in that plant. So I was wrong and I learned that by that time, 1977, it was already apparent that it was a charade. No, that's too strong; it was not effective. What it did do effectively was provide the appearance of some regulation, but in fact was greasing the wheels for the introduction of equipment. And to date in that plant, the work force has never opposed a piece of equipment.

You're touching on something that is important for our readers. What is the struggle over technology? How do you view this struggle?

It's very important to distinguish between a motivation that is an expectation, and a reality. Automation, despite the lowering cost of computations, is very expensive. Very rarely if ever are post audits made, that is, to assess whether this was an economic thing to do. That's very important because there is a mythology that's very strong in our culture, an ideology that these guys know what they are doing and their motive is economic, that they wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't economic, that if they make a mistake they'll go under, and that the people who don't make a mistake will stay afloat.

Now this [ideology] tends to be flawed on every level. Scientists and engineers never consider all possible options; everything they do is predetermined.

I think it's unchallengable that the people who are buying this equipment are hoping that it will reduce or eliminate their labor problem. Either by enhancing managerial control over the work force, that is, taking all control of the production process off the floor and centralizing it into the office, or by eliminating the work force. There was a study done on the automatic factory which showed that, in metal working manufacturing, something like 10 percent of the cost of production are direct labor costs. And 80 percent of the engineering effort is to reduce that. Isn't that interesting? You wonder what that's about.

Getting back to what you were saying about homogenization and the implications of the same type of technology being adapted in a lot of industries; what do you think that implies for a different strategy for labor, a different strategy than the European model which you imply has basically failed?

Take a firm like General Electric. They consider themselves the world's supermarket in automation, and they are selling automation equipment all over the world, and using their own plants as testing grounds for the equipment. Take the plants across the country, like in Lynn, Massachusetts, Schenectady, New York, Erie, Pennsylvania, Louisville, Kentucky: these are the large manufacturing plants. And you see that the company is introducing robots like gangbusters.

And what is the IUE, the UE, or the UAW or the Machinists doing about it? Nothing, nothing. Except some sort of half-hearted attempt at negotiations which have done nothing to stop or prevent the introduction of this equipment. Yet GE announces publicly that they are out to eliminate half of their work force.

So what do you do? Well, what I say is if the workers in those four or five plants joined together, crossed unions - and meetings like this have already happened - and identified a couple of particular types of systems which they find particularly onerous and say, we're united in our opposition to the introduction of these and we say no. And across those plants they just told GE no. If that happened, it would be a new ball game.

Some people have characterized you as a "neo-Luddite. " Do you have any comment on that?

Well, I don't identify myself that way. Luddite, the word, has become an epidemic, it means lunatic. But the Luddites were quite rational and were very effective. Their rebellion was essentially warfare, and it took the British army about 15 years to put it down.

In a series of articles I wrote for Democracy magazine, I linked their struggle with the situation now, and in particular I described the smashing of the presses by the Washington Post pressmen in 1975. Very dramatic - these people were not lunatics, they were very serious people who were being destroyed. And so they systematically destroyed all the presses in the Post, and set fire to them. They were charged with arson, sabotage, assault, but it was all settled out of court. One guy went to jail for one year for punching out a reporter and that was it. They got suspended sentences. The union was busted, and they were scattered around to different places. But the important point is, why were the sentences so light? I talked to the guy from the Washington Post who was officially charging all those people. And he told me, I think it's a real scandal that they have got off scot free, but it's better than if we had a jury, they probably would have gotten off even better. Now that's profound. What it means is, there's a real undercurrent of not only disenchantment but identification with such acts as this.

Can you think of some examples of technology that are not destructive to workers' interests?

I wrote a book which was a detailed history of the design and use of automated machine tools. And what it is about, and what we are talking about here, is how class criteria actually formed the design of the equipment. I have a chapter called "The Road Not Taken," which details other ways of designing that would have had quite a different effect. It would not have facilitated the centralization of control over production. It would have enhanced the use of existing skills, would have vested control over the productive process in the hands of the workforce. All that was technically possible.

But in fact it's really clear that the people who develop technology don't have any contact with the workforce. One of the reasons I got fired at MIT is because of this book. A lot of this technology was designed at MIT and the people there had absolutely no contact with the workforce. Now all these people, a large percentage of them are in unions. Their unions have names, addresses and phone numbers, and at any point in time of the seven years this project went on they could have called these people up and said we are making a revolution in metal work, are you interested in talking to us. But they never did, they only talked to managers in industry and the Air Force. Why? Because they are the ones who own them.

In your view, what stands in the way of developing more humane forms of technology?

Let's say we came up with an alternative criteria for technology. Well, we have a couple of obstacles. One is you need a social revolution in order to get into a position to develop this technology. We don't have that now, so that's one obstacle. The other is technical: to design things in another way is turning a corner on the industrial revolution. Things have been designed according to the criteria of reducing skills and simplifying tasks for 100 years. It's called engineering. And people don't know how to do anything else. It's hard to exaggerate the effort of Mike Cooley and others to try to develop what they called human-centered technology. It required tremendous imagination. So we've got the political obstacles as well as the conceptual and intellectual obstacles, all of which are surmountable. But we shouldn't fall though the trap of thinking that it's going to happen tomorrow.

Take the Machinists. Their [technology bill of rights] is great and it's very important. Meanwhile the Machinists are losing half their membership, the introduction of technology in their shops is proceeding at such a pace that there is no effort whatsoever to stop it. By the time we have this strategy for a technology bill of rights defined, the Machinists won't exist. That's a serious problem.

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