“Productivity in Transatlantic Relations: A Statistical Measure between the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Marshall Plan”

Corinna Schlombs (Rochester Institute of Technology)

This paper examines the statistical measure of productivity in transatlantic relations. In the 1920s, the young economist Ewan Clague was among a group of officers at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) who developed productivity measurements of output per worker to assess the impact of new technologies on industrial production. Moving away from narrative accounts, Clague devised productivity indexes that measured increases in productivity. While the indexes presented a seeming objectivity, Clague argued that there was no “immediate and direct” connection between productivity and the wages paid in an industry. Two decades later, however, officers for the Marshall Plan’s Productivity Program demanded that gains from productivity be shared equally between industrialists, workers and consumers. In 1946, Clague had been appointed BLS commissioner, and in this function, he brought productivity measures to the Marshall Plan’s Productivity Program and Technical Assistance Program. A programmatic core of the Marshall Plan, it carried the concept of a dynamically growing economy to European countries. Promising higher standards of living through higher productivity, it also sought to lure European workers away from Communist promises. BLS officers conducted productivity surveys of European economies that provided seemingly objective—although, at least from the Europeans viewpoint, highly contestable—assessments of European productivity. Based on BLS and Marshall Plan records at the US National Archives, this paper calls into question the seeming quantitative objectivity of productivity measurements, revealing integral political assumptions about economic and labor relations that served at shaping European economic orders in the emerging Cold War competition.

“U.S. Labor’s Modernizing Mission: Exporting Industrial Pluralism in the “Development Decade

Jeff Schuhrke (University of Illinois at Chicago)

In the post-World War II decades, industrial relations scholars and modernization theorists in the U.S. crafted a set of ideas about the centrality of labor in international development. Industrial pluralism— the political and legal paradigm that defined U.S. labor relations from 1945 to the 1970s, emphasizing class collaboration, productivity, and limited state intervention—was one of the defining features of what social scientists, labor leaders, and liberal policymakers in the 1960s considered to be “modern.” They endeavored to export this paradigm to the global South in the name of development and antiCommunism. By fostering the rational, collaborative, modern ethos of industrial pluralism, U.S. liberals believed unions in developing countries would bring workers into harmony with employers and the state for the sake of national prosperity and stability, without surrendering their freedom or sacrificing their wellbeing. The scholarship of industrial relations experts and modernization theorists would lend intellectual credibility to the AFL-CIO’s ever-expanding Cold War interventions in the global South in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, whatever potential this labor-centered vision of modernization might have had to create a more just and prosperous world had been largely undermined by its own contradictions and shortcomings.

“Intergenerational Innovation: Reinterpreting Past Failures in Brazil’s “Infant” Industry”

Beatrice Choi (Northwestern University)

This paper investigates the history of Brazil’s failed computer industry in the late 1980-90s and follows the industry’s discursive “afterlife” in subsequent government initiatives responding to the contemporary climate of global innovation. Brazilian technological actors involved in the domestic production of computers during the dictatorship suffer under the “reserva de mercado” protectionist policy intended to foster the industry through import substitution industrialization (ISI). I argue that following Brazil’s premature flops as an “infant” industry (Luzio 1996), successive endeavors in local computer innovation negotiated its terms in technology transfer that built upon postcolonial concerns of epistemological legitimacy and economic dependency (Medina et. al 2014). Furthermore, contemporary initiatives refracted these Cold War legacies through local innovation to embrace the Brazilian cultural disposition towards experimentation as a means of national identity-building (da Costa Marques 2015). While recent initiatives align more with understandings of digital inclusion, open access, and peer production (da Silveira 2013), I posit that cultural interpretations of Brazil’s failed computer innovation or “informatics” sector gain traction today precisely because they arose under conditions of political, economic, and epistemological constraints. In fact, contemporary technological initiatives such as government-sponsored collaborations, incubators, and makerspaces take on the challenges of global innovation by adhering to the Brazilian cultural expectation to experiment with underappreciated parts and pieces—or as locals say, to build gambiarra (Lagnado 2002). In this paper, I advance an intergenerational view of innovation discourses that evolve in Brazil from a period of forced experimentation during the military dictatorship to one of entrepreneurial play.