Walter Reuther, the UAW, and the dilemmas of automation

Abstract

Historians have slighted the importance of automation both as a cause of organized labor's decline in America and as a lively issue among labor leaders in the early post-WWII period. In part, this disregard stems from labor's own ambivalence about technological change. This essay considers that ambivalence by looking at Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers. Reuther and his colleagues shared widespread hopes that the new production processes would relieve the burdens of assembly-line work and increase the working class's access to cultivated leisure. At the same time, however, they recognized that unchecked technological change would generate a wave of structural unemployment by displacing experienced workers while denying new, unskilled workers necessary jobs. Reuther and his colleagues feared that automation in this form would destroy the consumer capacity that the working class had so recently acquired, and in so doing would undermine the health of the entire economy. Reuther's strategy, therefore, was not to resist automation but to manage its implementation through both collective bargaining and progressive political victories.