History of automation shows shift in power

When James Watt invented the steam engine in 1769, he launched a series of economic and social changes that was eventually christened the Industrial Revolution.

Those changes, which didn't fully hit the United States until the end of the Civil War, marked not only a shift from a stable agricultural and commercial society to a modern industrial society, but a shift in the way workers and owners saw their relationship -- as well as the way they conceived of work itself.

In 1886, Mergenthaler's Linotype machine was introduced as a remedy to the slow, labor-intensive process of hand-picking type out of a case. It was among the earliest impacts of the Industrial Revolution on the newspaper industry. Only 15 years later, close to 4000 Linotypes were in use.

In 1911, Frederick Taylor conducted a series of time-and-motion studies in the coal industry that, within a few years, had 140 workers doing the same work previously undertaken by 400 to 600 miners. His was a new way of thinking about work: It shifted control of the labor process from the worker to management.

Two of Taylorism's key premises are that workers should be paid for individual rather than group output, and that the level of efficiency can be increased by breaking a task into its smallest component movements, a process known as "de-skilling."

Unsurprisingly, the adoption of Taylor's program brought a virtually simultaneous increase in workers' productivity and the intensity of their work.

While Taylor hoped that his "Scientific Management" would bring harmony, cooperation, efficiency and prosperity to the workplace, the worker and the employer, this approach was among the first in which the worker was, in the words of one critic, "essentially perceived as a human appendage to the industrial machine."

Regardless of the benefits Linotype machines brought to the newspaper industry, operators -- according to one history of the International Typographers Union -- universally agreed that the new nature of their work made it far more exhausting than it had been by hand, as a smaller number of workers could produce the same or greater output.

Although typecasting machines required less manual dexterity than before, it wasn't until second generation modifications in the 1950s that teletypesetting machines became simple enough to use that "within six months a good typist [could] punch tapes at 400 or more lines per hour."

At the end of the '70s, A.H. Raskin, former labor reporter for the New York Times, said: "Automation is inexorably weakening the American labor movement. Despite the considerable economic and political clout the unions maintain, the balance of power is shifting -- and management knows it. In no industry is the future more visible than in the newspaper business. ..."

In 1977, George White, then of Camex, said, "Partial automation of the page production process has not radically altered traditional relationships between publishers, printers and their distribution channels.

"Complete automation," White said, "will change these relationships completely and forever."

-- LCC

From THE COLE PAPERS, June 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, 1995, All Rights Reserved.

From THE COLE PAPERS, June 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, All Rights Reserved.