Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work by Jason Resnikoff (review)

Reviewed by:

• Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work by Jason Resnikoff
• Andrew L. Russell (bio)

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work By Jason Resnikoff. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2022. Pp. 272.

Labor's End charts the formative years of automation as the concept was embraced and debated across a variety of interest groups in the United States. Americans—including technologists, executives, politicians, intellectuals, and organized labor—latched onto it as part of their broader efforts to define the meaning and future of industrial work. Historians of technology will appreciate Jason Resnikoff's starting point, which is that automation was not merely a dispassionate description of engineering and industrial practice; rather, it was the site of ideological conflict, a confluence of technology, business, politics, and labor at a time of American ascendance.

The book builds from a provocative assertion: Americans believed automation would drive industrial progress, ultimately leading to the full-scale abolition of human labor. Resnikoff emphasizes that automation was seen widely as the harbinger of utopian outcomes, including the elimination of human oppression, a new era of leisure, and the resolution of the conflict between capital and labor. But it was never robust or stable enough to carry [End Page 707] this world-historical burden and did not, in fact, liberate workers or substitute freedom and leisure for labor. Rather, Resnikoff argues, automation doubled down on Taylorism, sped up industrial work, and undermined worker autonomy and well-being.

Readers will not have to guess about the moral commitments of the author, who on the first page of the book expresses gratitude for the lessons he learned as an organizer for the UAW. Accordingly, there is little surprise that the villains of Labor's End include capitalist managers and technocrats, as well as science fiction authors, intellectuals of the New Left, and leaders of organized labor who, seduced by the promises of liberation via automation, too easily surrendered their leverage to control the means of production. Resnikoff displays no interest in or sympathy for, say, the dilemmas faced by Chandlerian managers fighting gales of creative destruction.

The first five chapters in Labor's End investigate the early history of automation in the postwar automobile and computing industries, as well as the discursive contests around automation among intellectuals (including science fiction writers), federal policymakers, and the New Left. The latter chapters deal with automation and domestic work, and the compelling movement for the "humanization" of industrial work in the early 1970s. A brief conclusion skips ahead to our twenty-first-century world of Amazon's style of automation, continued labor degradation, and the irritating tendency for popular discourse to be drawn to imaginary future scenarios, instead of attending to injustices occurring here and now. Resnikoff draws from a rich and diverse set of archival collections and engages sensibly with the sprawling secondary literatures that pertain to his subject. Readers encounter a narrative that is structured well and easy to read, featuring a fascinating set of characters from Andy Warhol and Arthur C. Clarke to John Diebold and John F. Kennedy.

Resnikoff succeeds in fortifying connections between labor history, political history, and the history of technology. Automation is a subject that is too important to leave to any one subfield of historical inquiry, and Resnikoff should be commended for recognizing this fact and writing a book that will find its way onto a variety of seminar syllabi and comprehensive reading lists. Since the book is situated at the level of discourse, readers should not expect to find empirical data about industry adoption of tools or economists puzzling about how to measure productivity gains. Beyond historians, Labor's End also will appeal to general skeptics of buzzwords and hype. More than a nuanced history of postwar America, it is a cautionary tale about technology and power, and a reminder of the difficulties of sustained resistance against the agents of capital. [End Page 708]

Andrew L. Russell

Andrew L. Russell is professor of history at SUNY Polytechnic Institute, where he has served in a variety of administrative roles. He is coauthor of The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work...