Automation and the Automobile Worker

Abstract

have been congressional hearings, hundreds of conferences, and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles dealing with the possible consequences of automation for American society. This concern has not yet, however, manifested itself in a comprehensive program of research designed to discover what the effects of automation may actually be. To the extent that social scientists have become concerned with the problem at all, their attention has been focussed primarily upon the possibility of technological displacement of workers and its attendant problems. The question of individual and organizational adjustments to the changes in production techniques has received much less attention. This paper is not concerned with the problems of workers who have lost their jobs as a result of automation but with the adjustment problems of what is currently a much larger group of workers: those who are still working but who have recently experienced the changes in their jobs resulting from the introduction of automated machinery. We will consider, first, the nature of the changes in the job of the individual worker in the automated plant and then the effect of these changes upon work satisfaction and attitudes toward industrial work.