References
This is a strong argument, and perhaps even mandate, for all IATF 16949 users in North America to look for ways to remove the longshoremen from their supply chains. Everybody else would be well advised to do so as well. Reshoring production is one way to do this, and reliable offshore suppliers should be encouraged to move some capacity to the United States so they can continue to deliver and get paid for their work.
Luddites argue that a machine that does the job of 20 workers will put 19 out of work. But this is true only if the employer proves them correct, as happened at Ford Motor Co. during the 1930s. In 1937, Upton Sinclair reported, “Twenty men who had been making a certain part would see a new machine brought in and set up, and one of them would be taught to operate it and do the work of the twenty. The other nineteen wouldn’t be fired right away—there appeared to be a rule against that.”1
1. Sinclair, Upton. The Flivver King (1937). Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1987.
2. Emerson, Harrington. “The Twelve Principles of Efficiency.” The Engineering Magazine, 1913.
3. Constantz, Jo; Tang, Alicia. “US Dockworkers Strike to Stop Automation Already Seen at Other Ports.” BNN Bloomberg, Oct. 1, 2024.
منبع: https://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/lean-article/dockworkers-strike-resisting-automation-101524.html
The same thing happened in the textile industry, where the original Luddites smashed weaving machines for fear they would put them out of work. What actually happened was that the machines made textiles so cheap that most people today have closets full of clothing. There was a time when working people went barefoot in summer because they could only afford to buy shoes every few years. When shoemaking was automated, working people could afford to own several pairs. Lower prices resulted in higher sales volumes, and greater productivity enabled higher wages for the workers.
We may expand on this statement to point out that a true labor leader leads workers to high-wage jobs that are enabled by automation, and not to low-wage jobs or unemployment that come from lack of automation. If our competitor automates and we don’t, we’re not going to pay any wages because we’ll soon be out of business.
Aristotle told us more than 2,300 years ago, “For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, ‘of their own accord entered the assembly of the gods;’ if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.”
I recommend that ISO 9001 users buy a copy of the corresponding automotive standard, because IATF 16949:2016 has some very useful guidance that isn’t present in ISO 9001. Among these is clause 6.1.2.3, “Contingency plans,” which requires “… contingency plans for continuity of supply in the event of any of the following,” the following including labor shortages or, by implication, labor walking off the job.
In 1913, Harrington Emerson wrote (emphasis is mine):
In arguing against automation, the ILA was arguing against lower prices for shippers and customers, and against higher wages for its own workers.
However, when Ford was running the company himself, automation never resulted in layoffs. When a new machine or a better way to do the job reduced the need for labor, Ford distributed the benefits as lower prices for his customers, higher wages for the workers, and higher profits for himself. The lower prices increased the sales volume necessary to keep the workers busy.
“This young man had been hired out by his master to work in a bagging factory, where his adroitness and ingenuity caused him to be considered the first hand in the place. He had invented a machine for the cleaning of the hemp, which, considering the education and circumstances of the inventor, displayed quite as much mechanical genius as Whitney’s cotton-gin.”
Stowe added a note that “A machine of this description was really the invention of a young colored man in Kentucky.”
Although Aristotle also predicted that automatons would put low-wage workers (servants) out of work (the same argument made by Luddites), it’s easy to look further to realize it would instead promote them to the “chief workmen” needed to supervise and maintain the automatons. Had the Greeks been able to build robots like those created by their god Hephaestus, slavery would have been obsolete more than 2,000 years before it was abolished in the United States.
Limiting productivity improvements would be to the detriment of entire supply chains and, in the end, the workers. The sooner that supply chain partners, and workers themselves, realize this, the sooner we’ll have a win-win solution for everybody involved.
This is nonetheless what the ILA openly sought in demanding limits on automation. The union preferred that longshore workers perform tasks suitable for “mechanical slaves” that never tire or suffer boredom rather than delegate those tasks to the machines in question. For example: “The union said an Alabama port operator’s use of new gate technology that scans and processes containers without worker involvement violated their existing contract.” This report adds, “The contract that the ILA agreed to in 2018 prohibits fully automated equipment at the ports and requires sign-off from the union for any new semi-automated equipment.”3
His owner, however, was outraged that his “property” was inventing labor-saving machines, and soon took him back from the manufacturer to whom he had rented the slave’s services. The master said of the slave’s inventions, “O yes! a machine for saving work, is it? He’d invent that, I’ll be bound; let a (Black person) alone for that, any time. They are all labor-saving machines themselves, every one of ’em. No, he shall tramp!”
Although Luddism—the proposition that automation destroys jobs—was largely debunked long ago, Luddites still walk among us. The usual effect of Luddism is to increase prices and thus aggravate inflation, reduce profits, and hold down wages, the very opposite of what organized labor wants.
The Associated Press, reporting on the strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association, noted: “Local ILA president Boise Butler said workers want a fair contract that doesn’t allow automation of their jobs.” The report added, “The union had message boards on the side of a truck reading: ‘Automation Hurts Families: ILA Stands For Job Protection.’” Elsewhere, picket signs proclaimed that machines don’t feed families.
More than 300,000 copies of Stowe’s book were sold in the United States in the first year after it was published. This means more than 300,000 literate people should have recognized the implications of automation vs. slavery. Perhaps some did, but nobody in a position of authority acted on it.
“We are like a young man until recently on scant allowance who has suddenly inherited an immense fortune. In the United States the uncarnate (the opposite of incarnate, i.e., not made of flesh) energy used is thirty times as great as was the incarnate energy sixty years ago; it is as if each head of a family had inherited thirty slaves forced to labor for him without pay beyond the obligation to maintain. It is increasingly less the hard muscular labor of the hands and body that counts, it is more and more the intelligence to direct mechanical slaves that counts. The man who smashes a machine because he fears it will take his job, the man who refuses the promotion due him for efficient control, misses the richest gift that any generation has ever been offered.”2
What the Luddite who called slaves “labor-saving machines” didn’t recognize is that it’s cheaper to pay a few people good wages than it is to feed and house dozens of slaves.
The Civil War killed more than half a million Americans, more than we lost in World War II, and laid waste to a good part of the country. Slavery could have been abolished had people paid close attention to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wasn’t an engineer or industrialist like Frederick Winslow Taylor, Frank Gilbreth, or Henry Ford. Nonetheless, she showed how slavery could have been easily abolished, and to the benefit of former slave owners into the bargain (emphasis is mine):
Frederick Winslow Taylor (Principles of Scientific Management, 1911; Dover Publications, 1997) explains further (the italicized emphasis is mine):
This, along with Henry Ford’s own writings, shows that the company had the no-layoff policy that’s mandatory for lean manufacturing programs. If you discharge workers when productivity improvements make them unnecessary, further improvements won’t be forthcoming from the workforce in question. Sinclair added, however, that the foremen circumvented this policy by “riding” the unnecessary workers to get them to quit, or finding excuses to fire them. It came as no surprise that the United Auto Workers were able to organize the workforce, which had previously resisted unionization, very quickly.
As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes said, “You see, but you do not observe.” Among the biggest tragedies of history is the failure of thousands or even millions of people to notice solutions that are hiding in plain view; many see, but few observe. There was a time when the children of the upper classes learned Greek and Latin in schools, and studied the works of writers such as Aristotle. These were often the same families that owned slaves, and not just in the United States. An off-the-shelf solution to the peaceful abolition of slavery was within reach, but we got the American Civil War instead.
“The 30% to 100% increase in wages which the workmen are able to earn beyond what they receive under the old type of management, coupled with the daily intimate shoulder-to-shoulder contact with the management, entirely removes all cause for soldiering (i.e., marking time, like soldiers marching in place without going anywhere). And in a few years, under this system, the workmen have before them the object lesson of seeing that a great increase in the output per man results in giving employment to more men, instead of throwing men out of work, thus completely eradicating the fallacy that a larger output for each man will throw other men out of work.”
The ILA risked continuity of operations
The master in question wasn’t the infamous Simon Legree, but rather a Luddite who didn’t understand how labor-saving machinery would make it cheaper to do a job with paid labor rather than slaves.
An automated cotton-picking machine, as invented by John Rust in the 1930s, would have allowed a few paid workers to harvest more cotton than dozens (and later hundreds) of slaves. Animal power and steam power were available prior to the Civil War, and all that was needed was to figure out, as Rust did, that cotton could be doffed from a wet spindle. A John Deere or International Harvester machine is the difference between a slave or a low-wage worker picking cotton and a high-wage “chief workman” driving a machine that can do the work of 1,000 people.
The ILA subsequently called off the strike on Oct. 3, 2024, in exchange for major concessions from the United States Maritime Alliance, representing ocean carriers and port operators. But many of the fundamental labor questions still remain unresolved.
Although ISO 9001:2015 doesn’t have explicit requirements for contingency plans to ensure continuity of operations, clause 6.1, “Actions to address risks and opportunities,” implies that they should exist. Common sense does so as well; Henry Ford had contingency plans for his railroad system to ensure that he could reorganize shipments if a flood washed out a bridge.
Unions should recognize that, if the employer must hire two people to do a job that can be done by one, it can pay the two workers only half as much. Henry Ford wrote in My Life and Work (Doubleday, 1922; independent reprint, 2020), “The only true labour leader is the one who leads labour to work and to wages, and not the leader who leads labour to strikes, sabotage, and starvation.”
The threat by ILA president Harold Daggett, “I will cripple you,” backed up by his explicit description of what he can do to our entire economy, should have been “one strike and you’re out.” The same goes for multiple threats by China to cut off supplies of raw materials and finished goods; the United States has plenty of raw materials and a history of figuring out how to make rather than buy what we need.
The strike defied common sense