Division of labor
A comment about some columnist or another I just read gave me an idea. Any division of labor that divides enough so that a task goes below the minimum threshold for the employee to be fully engaged and challenged by it, creates long-term inefficiences in that machines can always do rote tasks much better than people, and that people who are less than fully engaged by their work will have less opportunity to invent these machines. Far from Adam Smith’s firetruck boy, who replaces his job with some well-placed scrap of metal so that he has more time to play, the vast majority of workers actually have incentive *not* to replace their own jobs with machinery.
Incidentally, while I strongly believe that worker unions are necessary to keep quality of life reasonably high for workers, it seems to me like unions also have the effect of slowing down automation, which is a really good thing in the long term. But unions have a strong incentive to oppose any developments that automate and deprecate jobs.
April 16th, 2006 at 9:19
But of course unions do precisely the opposite: they encourge automation. I am reminded of the UMW President who, when challenged that incresing coal miners’ wages would cause the companies to replace men with machines, said (in effect) “great! the fewer nasty, dangerous coal mining jobs the better.”
It is not unions that prevent automation, but scabs like illegal aliens who drive wages down and reduce management’s incentive to automate nasty, soul-destroying dangerous tasks.
To drive down wages you can fight for scab and wetback labor, or you can automate. Japan has chosen the latter. The Democratic and Republican elite have chosen the former, causing all that resist “isolationists” “nativists” and “racists”.
But of course the Democrats gave up on the workng man decades ago, choosing to pursue Penis Politics and racial pandering. The Republicans in comparison choose not to alloy their pure greed with the base metal of hypocrisy like the Democrats, so I am marginally (but less and less so over time as they tax us into oblivion) more inclined toward them.
April 16th, 2006 at 19:28
It seems to me that while unions do, as you say, drive up wages and thus give companies more of an incentive to automate jobs, the unions themselves still do have an incentive to work against that. I’m not sure I can accept your example of the UMW president as being typical.
Any individual worker is going to be opposed to their own job being automated away. If the worker accepted the job, it’s obviously worth the risk to them. That isn’t to say we should oppose the conditions that often lead people to be desparate enough to take dangerous jobs, or the conditions that let employers get away with poor working conditions. But any given worker has decided that they’re better off mining, and getting paid whatever for it, than they are not mining. And a miner replacement machine is not something they’re going to welcome. (A miner-helper machine that eliminates 20% of the jobs and makes the rest of the jobs much safer? Well, the miners that get laid off are going to be opposed, but overall the miners will probably support such a thing.)
Insofar as the union represents those miners’ interests, the union is going to opposed that automation.
Now, perhaps the miners’ interests aren’t very rational. For instance, 70% could overestimate their own skill and value to the company and believe they’re very likely to be one of the 30% kept on after the machines are introduced. But I doubt that’s really a factor here.
Or perhaps unions consistently misrepresent their members in this fashion. But I don’t particularly see that, either.
Now, an argument from history, that most unions have not opposed such automation and technical progress, I would accept as invalidating my argument. Since I’m ignorant of this history (big surprise) I can’t really say.