Book Project 

My book project examines unions' responses to the employment risks generated by labor-saving technological change, focusing on the British and West German engineering industries between the 1950s and the 1970s. Existing scholarship typically contrasts British and West German unions against one another, alleging that British unions adopted a distinctively uncooperative attitude toward technological change. This  behavior is often thought to have contributed to 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. Britain's relative decline was especially apparent in engineering, an industry that comprises the production of cars, machinery, and electrical equipment and was the largest part of manufacturing in both countries.

The project draws on a large body of previously untapped archival evidence covering unions, employer associations, and government ministries in Britain and West Germany to show that engineering unions in the two countries actually had similar goals when it came to the employment risks posed by automation. In both countries, engineering unions sought to compel employers to retain workers whose existing roles within the firm were rendered redundant by the introduction of new technologies. In neither country did engineering unions see compensation through the welfare state as the appropriate response to the problem of technological displacement: they believed that such compensation would inevitably fall short of what was necessary to make up for the costs of job loss. Despite this similarity in goals, unions in the two countries adopted different strategies to try to protect their members against job loss. The leading union in British engineering tried to deter employers from initiating dismissals through the threat of strike action, whereas its counterpart in West Germany sought a collective agreement with employers regulating the conditions under which dismissals were acceptable. I show that this difference in strategy was a consequence of West German unions' relative weakness, not a reflection of special enlightenment or a tradition of "social partnership." Exploiting the fact that there were multiple unions in the British engineering industry, I show that weaker unions in British engineering favored a strategy similar to that of their West German counterpart. 

More generally, my book project shows that the inadequacy of a "compensatory" response to the problem of automation-induced displacement was already intensely apparent to unions representing at-risk workers in the 1950s. A compensatory response to technological displacement was, however, the favored response of most policy experts and governments of all partisan stripes in both countries.  The unions I study 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 apparent by the late 1960s. They believed 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.  Whether this protection slowed the adoption of new technologies depended on the extent to which governments responded by assuming responsibility for investment.

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 a 1967 rally in Baden-Württemberg, reproduced from IG Metall's Geschäftsbericht 1965 bis 1967 (Frankfurt am Main: Union-Druckerei, 1968). Note the Thomas Piketty doppelgänger on the left.