Jim Dator
>What in your opinion (and I ask others on the list, too) were the main
>reasons, or forces, which prevented the logic of automation moving towards
>a shorter work week and eventually the end of work from playing out--or
>even being considered seriously now?
>
>I know to some extent that is the focus of this entire list, but how would
>you specifically answer that question?
I don't believe that automation has ever been about creating a shorter work
week or ending work. When one looks at what has happened retrospectively,
one finds that it seems to have had two purposes - to displace labor and to
greatly expand the volume of work given human resources can undertake. You
could, I suppose, argue that the displacement of workers into unemployment
has shortened the work week on average - i.e. if you take the total
participating labor force, both employed and unemployed, and divide it into
the total number of hours worked, you might get a smaller number now than
you would have for a similarly defined labor force thirty years ago. The
amount of leisure may thus have increased relative to the amount of work for
the labor force as a whole, but its distribution is highly unequal and it is
not the kind of happy leisure once envisioned by social theorists.
But I would argue that automation has had little to do directly with
shortening the work week. The work week was shortened because the power of
labor grew during the past two centuries. This lead to a negotiation of
shorter hours and to supporting legislation. It may also have led to
automation. That is, it was not automation that led to a shorter work week.
Rather a shortening work week may have led to automation. A given amount of
work had to be done in a decreasing amount of increasingly expensive time.
The problem therefore became one of how to make that time more productive.
The solution became to invent something that would help the producer do so.
Ed Weick
