new labor
In the early industrial era, the popular image of a factory was one of drudgery and darkness. Factories took in hundreds of workers, subjected them to mindless labor, and blasted acrid clouds into the countryside. The factory was a menacing presence in iconography, especially in early socialist propaganda.
Yesterday I saw a commercial (importantly, perhaps, in Detroit) about economic renewal, which flashed sad images of shuttered factories amid references to the lost "good jobs" allegedly sent overseas. The factory appears here as an object of futile veneration.
Strange that we've gone, in a little over a century, from regarding the factory as an instrument of the menacing future to a relic of the fading glorious past. I know that part of the explanation for this change, of course, is the labor movement, which did so much to improve the working conditions and wages of factory employees. (And, in the auto industry at least, consequently did so much to ensure the eventual unsustainability of those same factories.)
But I do think something else is at work here. We are drawn irresistibly to lament the loss of traditional forms of labor and to fear their replacement. A century ago, the mass movement of the children of farmers and piecemeal craftsman into centralized factories triggered resentment. Now, the disappearance of manufacturing jobs - and its attendant dispersal of workers from centralized factories into much less certain careers - breeds fear and anger.
What will future generations grasp desperately, that we now see only looming darkly on the horizon?
Yesterday I saw a commercial (importantly, perhaps, in Detroit) about economic renewal, which flashed sad images of shuttered factories amid references to the lost "good jobs" allegedly sent overseas. The factory appears here as an object of futile veneration.
Strange that we've gone, in a little over a century, from regarding the factory as an instrument of the menacing future to a relic of the fading glorious past. I know that part of the explanation for this change, of course, is the labor movement, which did so much to improve the working conditions and wages of factory employees. (And, in the auto industry at least, consequently did so much to ensure the eventual unsustainability of those same factories.)
But I do think something else is at work here. We are drawn irresistibly to lament the loss of traditional forms of labor and to fear their replacement. A century ago, the mass movement of the children of farmers and piecemeal craftsman into centralized factories triggered resentment. Now, the disappearance of manufacturing jobs - and its attendant dispersal of workers from centralized factories into much less certain careers - breeds fear and anger.
What will future generations grasp desperately, that we now see only looming darkly on the horizon?