The Workplace, Technology, and Theory in American Labor History (original) (raw)

1989, International Labor and Working-class History

Assessing the state of American labor history nearly a decade ago, David Brody hailed the emergence of "the study of workers within the workplace" and argued that, among all the fresh initiatives in the "new" labor history, "the shop-floor approach is probably the most important." For Brody, the difficulties encountered in operationalizing "the notion of a unified working-class culture" made attractive the pursuit of "an economic approach, taking as its starting point not culture, but the work and the job, and broadening out from there." 1 These comments intersected what has been a rising, though not uncontested, 2 wave of "labor process" and "worker control" studies that recently culminated in David Montgomery's The Fall of the House of Labor, a synthetic portrait of American workers and their struggles from 1865 to 1925. However, by concentrating on the social relations of the workplace, it seems to me that researchers have elided the question of how to regard technology and technological change as one of its core elements. The purpose of this essay is to explore the problems inherent in coming to terms with technology, the different ways solutions to those problems have been framed, and the theoretical implications of those solutions for the practice of labor history. In so doing the essay will move from the terrain of historians to that of geographers, economists, and social theorists in order to return with questions about the diversity of experience and the possibility of synthesis, a matter Brody also raised and to which Montgomery's volume is, in a sense, a response. What elements constitute the "labor process"? As much recent work has flowed from the reconsideration of Marx's work, it is useful to begin with his classic formulation. In Donald MacKensie's words, Marx's conception of the labor process displays three elements: "purposive activity" (i.e., work), "objects on which that work is performed" (i.e., materials), and "the instruments of work" (most commonly, tools). Practically, the labor process is social, rather than private or individual, and in capitalism (not to speak of all existing socialisms) has an economic character as a "valorization process," in that it adds determinate value to products realized from inputs. 3 The necessity of accumulation, competition among capitalists, and conflicts between capital and labor over the fruits of