Jim Dator:
>>Gail Stewart wrote under the thread Basic Income:
>
>>"In the early 1970's in Canada, with the threat of
>>"automation" in the offing, the social policy struggle at
>>departmental level was between income maintenance on the one
>>hand and community employment on the other.
>
>
>I am interested in documenting specific instances where the advantages of
>automation were actually weighed against the social costs of unemployment
>(or income maintenance). I am especially interested in any instances where
>people were specifically kept employed, and automation avoided (or
>incorporated in such a way as not to require layoffs). But I am mainly
>just interested in learning what the arguments were, pro and con in
>ACTUAL situations.
>
>I believe that such a discussion went on in the early days in Detroit, etc.
I believe it was Henry Ford, the inventor of the assembly line, who thought
it would be a good idea to keep workers working so that they could buy his cars.
Usually, however, there is little discussion of balancing employment against
automation. Most often its a pitched battle between unions, who of course
favor employment, and management, who want to automate. Cases that come to
my mind are whether it was necessary to continue to have a "fireman" in
locomotives or an "engineer"(or whatever he was called) on the flight deck
of a jet aircraft. Unions said yes; management said no. Management won.
These are just a couple of examples. There must be thousands of others -
e.g. timber harvesters displacing loggers; a computer in every office
displacing steno pools; big fish boats displacing little ones; no ticket
takers on buses (they still have them in Brazil). It's a continuous
process, and it would seem that automation always wins in the end.
Ed Weick
