From Iron to Steel: The Recasting of the Jones and Laughlins Workforce between 1885 and 1896

Abstract

From Iron to Steel: The Recasting of the Jones and Laughlins Workforce between 1885 and 1896 DAVID JARDINI Technological progress has been one of the most po­ tent forces in history in that it has provided society with what economists call a “free lunch,” that is, an increase in output that is not commensurate with an increase in effort and cost necessary to bring it about. [Joel Mokyr, The Lever ofRiches (New York, 1990)] A “free lunch,” or Pandora’s box of evils? Scholars have long de­ bated which idea better characterizes technological change and its social consequences. Over the past two centuries, the extent and ra­ pidity of technological change have been perhaps the most dramatic features of the world economy. This was especially true during the “Second Industrial Revolution” of the late 19th and early 20th centu­ ries when mechanization, the adoption of mass-production tech­ niques, and evolving organizational structures multiplied both worker productivity and the gross productive achievement of industrialized nations. Despite the remarkable gains in output and productivity real­ ized during this period, however, historians have been sharply di­ vided in their appraisals of technology’s net social value. Prominent in this debate has been the issue of technology’s effects on the industrial workforce. Here, scholarship concerning the conse­ quences of growing capital intensity on workforce skill content has been characterized by a distinct polarization. On one hand, many Mr. Jardini is a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation studies the history of the RAND Corporation, focusing on RAND’s development of analytical methodologies and its diversification from national security into domestic social research during the 1960s. This article is based on a paper that won the Society for the History of Technology Levinson Prize in 1992. The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the comments and criticisms of David Hounshell, John Komlos, Richard Oestreicher, the members of the Pittsburgh Center for Social History, and the Technol­ ogy and Culture referees, as well as the technical assistance of Stephen Verba.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/95/3602-0002W1.00 271 212. DavidJardini writers argue that rising capital intensity stimulated disproportion­ ately large increases in demand for skilled workers, thereby enhanc­ ing workers’ overall living standards and work experiences. These authors find that entrepreneurs, motivated to pursue technological advance by the attraction of greater productive efficiency, replaced the preponderance of brutish labor with highly productive semi­ skilled operatives. On the other hand, a second body of scholarship concludes that technological change had a generally deskilling effect and converted the workforce into a more or less homogeneous mass of laborers. These historians argue that capitalist-sponsored technol­ ogy was a thinly veiled weapon used to break labor’s bargaining power by destroying its knowledge and control of production processes. It was thus strategically employed to crush labor organization and multi­ ply profits. The first school of thought is composed primarily of economic historians and historians of technology. They find that the mechani­ zation of production technology has created a general upward shift in skill content across the occupational structure and that capital and skill are complementary factors of production.1 More recently, work in this vein has focused on the idea that complex, mechanized pro­ duction systems increase the degrees of responsibility and flexibility required of workers.2 At the same time, technical change is also ar­ gued to have raised the general level of workers’ technical under­ standing to a more advanced state despite reducing the demand for specialized craft skills. The scholarship that takes a more pessimistic view of the conse­ quences of technological change is founded largely on the Marxist 1 For the development of ideas of general skill uplifting, see Simon Kuznets, “Quanti­ tative Aspects of the Economic Growth of Nations: Industrial Distribution of the Na­ tional Product and Labor Force,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 5, no. 4 (1957): 3—111; Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and Industry (Chicago, 1964); and Daniel Bell, The Coming ofPost-industrial Society (New York, 1973). The argument that capital and skill are complementary factors of production is largely founded on H...