Where Have All the Robots Gone?

Abstract

In the early 1970s, workers called for the “humanization” of work rather than its abolition. The chapter considers the several causes of the decline of “automation” in the late 1960s and 1970s--labor unrest, economic instability, the rise of the environmentalist movement, and the politics of the counterculture—as background for the 1972 strike at the General Motors assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio, which was supposedly the most “automated” assembly plant in the world. Although workers faced many of the same conditions as had their forbears on the shop floor, political and economic changes in the nation encouraged the national media to credit their claims that “automation” meant speedup.