Thinking Twice About Automation: May Day 2017
Automation
is now the main reason for the loss of jobs in the US, yet no one,
either on the right or the left, is critical of it. President Trump and
his supporters are vocal about wanting to deport illegal immigrants and
engage in trade wars, but about automation they are silent. The
sociologist Herbert Gans has called for ameliorating the effect of
automation by shortening the workweek to 30 hours and by economic
stimuli for labor-intensive industries, but the value of automation
itself he doesn’t question.
Automation
is an old sacred cow. The term for a small-minded person who opposes
progress is “Luddite,” a member of the band of early nineteenth century
English workers who destroyed machinery – machinery they thought was
destroying their jobs. Although Marx recorded in great detail the misery
and starvation that automation inflicted on workers, he nevertheless
saw the Luddites as misguided. He thought automation was a good thing,
so long as the method of its control passed from bosses to workers.
But
in fact a lot of automation is harmful, and its blanket endorsement is
dangerous. Automation is harmful when it pollutes the air and soil and
it is also harmful when, in order to facilitate it, the products it
creates must be altered in undesirable ways. Cases of harmful
automation are all around us.
The
bar-code sticker that is glued to every tomato, apple or pear we buy is
perhaps the most visible case. This sticker is made of paper and ink
and glue, and all three must of course be first produced, polluting the
air, and then be disposed of in landfills, polluting the soil. Then
still more pollution is produced by the machines that affix the stickers
to the fruit. Finally, to prevent the fruit packers from using cheaper
but potentially toxic 
glues,
the government must spend resources to regulate them. And on the
bright side? With these stickers grocery-store-owners can employ
untrained and inexperienced clerks who need not know the difference
between a Bosc and a D’Anjou pear, and even if they do, are unlikely to
know their numerical codes.
glues,
the government must spend resources to regulate them. And on the
bright side? With these stickers grocery-store-owners can employ
untrained and inexperienced clerks who need not know the difference
between a Bosc and a D’Anjou pear, and even if they do, are unlikely to
know their numerical codes.
In
agriculture, the poster child for polluting, wasteful automation must
surely be the tomato harvester, along with the square tomato that it
begat. Pre-harvester tomatoes, today’s heirlooms, get squashed by it,
so researchers at the University of California at Davis, the same state
school where the harvester itself was invented, bred a tough tomato that
can survive the rough handling. The lack of taste posed a problem, but
it was solved by adding sufficient quantities of salt and sugar to the
tomatoes when they were canned. For the tastelessness of fresh tomatoes
there is no cure, so the habit of eating whole fresh tomatoes has
largely disappeared.
Of
course, the replacement of agricultural workers by polluting machines
did not start with the tomato harvester; the cotton picker is one of the
main reasons for the Great Migration to the North through much of the
twentieth century, and finding work for workers who would have otherwise
been picking cotton remains, to this day, a major social issue. Both
tomato and cotton picking are, no doubt, back breaking jobs, but
pollution and, as in the case of the tomato harvester, a bad product,
are not the only cure. A high minimum wage, for instance, would
alleviate the back problem because it would make it possible for
laborers to work shorter hours. To cite hard labor as the excuse for
destroying labor is deeply cynical.
To
be sure, not all automation is polluting. The treadle sewing machine
is perhaps the best-known example of automation in manufacturing, and
this technology does not trade labor for pollution. But the
electricity-driven sewing machine is a different matter altogether.
China, the world’s biggest manufacturer of textiles in the world, is
choking from pollution, and this pollution is caused by its power
plants. Bringing back the treadle would instantly save lives, while
maintaining most of the enormous productivity gains automation brought.
There
is also no doubt that some automation is worthwhile even though it is
polluting. In bad weather, a traffic light is probably better at
directing traffic than a living person would be. The MRI scanner saves
lives, and it couldn’t operate without electricity.
The
question about any automation or machine, be it a traffic light, an
MRI, the bar-code scanner or the tomato harvester should, therefore, be
this: Putting benefits on one side and costs in terms of pollution and
the quality of the product that the automation would produce on the
other, would we be better off with it? Embracing machines and
automation — no questions asked — is an act of blind faith that is
unwarranted.
Automation
must be carefully evaluated not because we are small-minded Luddites
who are against progress but because while some automation is
worthwhile, some of it is harmful and should be banned. Regulated
automation would be better for workers and better for the world.
Weekend Edition
April 28, 2017
Friday - Sunday
April 28, 2017
Friday - Sunday
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