Join Jason Resnikoff and Nelson Lichtenstein for a discussion of Resnikoff's new book "Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work." This event aired on March 1.

About the Book:

"Labor's End" traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. As Jason Resnikoff shows, the term automation expressed the conviction that industrial progress meant the inevitable abolition of manual labor from industry. But the real substance of the term reflected industry's desire to hide an intensification of human work--and labor's loss of power and protection--behind magnificent machinery and a starry-eyed faith in technological revolution. The rhetorical power of the automation ideology revealed and perpetuated a belief that the idea of freedom was incompatible with the activity of work. From there, political actors ruled out the workplace as a site of politics while some of labor's staunchest allies dismissed sped-up tasks, expanded workloads, and incipient deindustrialization in the name of technological progress. A forceful intellectual history, "Labor's End" challenges entrenched assumptions about automation's transformation of the American workplace.

Learn more here: https://go.illinois.edu/f21resnikoff

Jason Resnikoff is a Core Lecturer in the History Department at Columbia University. He specializes in labor history, the history of global capitalism, intellectual history, and the history of technology. His book, Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work, explores the ideological origins of automation in the US in the middle of the twentieth century. You can find his work in Labor,  International Labor and Working-Class History, Tropics of Meta, Zócalo Public Square, Western Humanities Review, Paris Review Daily, and the Encyclopedia of American Recessions and Depressions. He is affiliated with Columbia University’s American Studies Department, where he advises undergraduate senior theses, as well as Columbia’s Justice in Education initiative, through which he teaches incarcerated students. His time working as an organizer for the United Auto Workers grounds his scholarship. His current research interests include the intersection of racism and technology.

Nelson Lichtenstein is Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An historian of labor and political economy, he is the author or editor of 16 books, including a biography of the labor leader Walter Reuther and State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2013). With Gary Gerstle and Alice O’Connor he edited Beyond the New Deal Order: From the Great Depression to the Great Recession. (2019); and with Roman Huret and Jean-Christian Vinel he edited a companion volume, Capitalism Contested: the New Deal and Its Legacies (2020). Other publications include, The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination (2012), edited with Elizabeth Shermer, and The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (2009). Lichtenstein is currently writing a history of economic thought and policymaking in the administration of Bill Clinton. He writes for Dissent, Jacobin, New Labor Forum, and American Prospect.