Book Project 

My dissertation is a book project titled "Facing the Deluge: Labor and the Politics of Automation." The project examines when and why unions reject compensatory solutions to the problem of worker displacement, focusing on unions' responses to labor-saving technological change in the British and West German engineering industries during the postwar decades. Existing scholarship typically contrasts British and West German unions against one another, alleging that British unions embraced a distinctively uncooperative attitude toward technological change. This  behavior is often thought to explain the decline of British manufacturing relative to West Germany, where generous compensation through the welfare state is believed to have facilitated cooperative adjustment to new technologies. Other scholarship characterizes the postwar period as a time when adjustment to new technologies was uncontroversial across the advanced capitalist world because of tight labor markets and relatively high demand for semi-skilled work.

My dissertation draws on a large body of previously untapped archival evidence covering unions, employer associations, and government ministries in postwar Britain and West Germany to show that the engineering unions in the two countries were similarly focused on the challenge posed by automation in the postwar period and adopted similar strategies in response. In both countries, the largest and most encompassing unions in the engineering industry (the largest industry by output, employment, and exports in Britain and West Germany) rejected compensation through the welfare state as the appropriate response to the problem of technological displacement. Instead, they pushed to reassign rights within the firm to force employers to retain workers rendered redundant by new technologies. These unions recognized that compensation would always be incomplete because democratically elected governments, including those of the left, had no incentive to make displaced workers whole and would instead provide the minimum necessary to undercut union resistance to job loss. Exploiting within-industry variation in both countries, I show that it was only the smaller and weaker unions in the British and West German engineering industries that supported a compensatory response to technological displacement, and only because they were unable to pursue the more ambitious strategy of their larger peers. Even so, they sought to impose the costs of compensation onto technology-adopting firms rather than socializing these costs through the welfare state. This turns the conventional contrast between Britain and West Germany on its head and challenges Mancur Olson's theory of group behavior, which was developed to explain variation in union behavior in the postwar period but falls flat in these two canonical cases, where the most "encompassing" unions were the least 'cooperative' or 'responsible' in the sense of acquiescing to employer-dictated workforce restructuring. These findings also challenge scholarship that sees unions as the principal advocates for compensatory measures through the welfare state: unions in both countries recognized that tax-financed compensation through the welfare state was precisely the wrong answer to the problem of technologically induced economic insecurity.

More generally, my dissertation shows that the inadequacy of a "compensatory" response to the problem of labor-saving technological change was already intensely apparent to at-risk workers in the 1950s. A compensatory solution was imposed by governments in an effort to demobilize union opposition to job loss.  Unions in both countries correctly warned that this approach was a short-sighted one that would lead to the right-wing political radicalization of displaced workers, a trend that was already clear by the late 1960s. Contrary to views advanced in current scholarship, the pursuit of "social investment" through government retraining and job search assistance was not seen by unions as an exciting and innovative alternative to compensatory transfers. It was already known by the mid-1960s that government-sponsored retraining was unable to achieve its intended goals, even in places like Sweden that are typically vaunted in comparative scholarship as success stories.  The leading engineering unions in Britain and West Germany rejected the technocratic vision of flexible labor market adjustment  propounded by policy experts and mainstream politicians in both countries, recognizing that the only way to make technological change consistent with the economic security of at-risk workers was to protect them at their current place of work. This goal could not be meaningfully achieved via legislation alone but had to be won through workers' organized strength. Whether this strategy slowed the adoption of new technologies depended on the extent to which governments responded by assuming responsibility for investment, a response that would amount to a shift toward democratic socialism.

My research has been generously supported by Yale's Macmillan Center, the George W. Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy, the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung, and the Universities of Bonn and Konstanz.

Photo: Members of IG Metall during the 1967 strike in Baden-Württemberg, reproduced from IG Metall's Geschäftsbericht 1965 bis 1967 (Frankfurt am Main: Union-Druckerei, 1968).