Policies for Automation: A Labor Viewpoint

Abstract

Labor has no quarrel with technology itself. Its criticism goes to the quality of social imagination brought to bear upon problems created or aggravated by technological change. Technology has lately aggravated an already seri ous imbalance between productive capacity and effective de mand. It has contributed to a decline in manufacturing em ployment which has not been made up by rising employment in other sectors. The situation will deteriorate still more with further automation and increases in the potential labor force, in the absence of private and public policies which assure a na tional growth rate commensurate with full employment of our physical and human resources. Industrial workers have borne the brunt of automation's impact. The transitional problems of displaced workers must be solved by the whole community, because the whole community benefits from the process of technological development and because the losses resulting from unemployment are social as well as personal. Solutions must come both from collective bargaining and from public programs. Labor and management have only begun to deal with the problems of wage-earners in an environment of rapidly changing technology. Even at best, however, collective bar gaining can bring only partial solutions. Federal action is needed in a variety of fields. Also needed is revision of the ground rules governing corporate behavior in the matter of ad ministered price increases and plant relocation.