Labour’s End demystifies automation; the promise of release from toil through time-saving automatic systems and processes of work. Resnikoff does this in a number of ways. He defines what we mean by automation, a task that can be difficult when a term becomes usefully amorphous for historians and takes on a life of its own. Resnikoff also discusses automation ideologically and linguistically, charting how it was used and co-opted. The thrust of Resnikoff’s work that will likely be most significant to readers, however, is the examination of the ways in which automation degraded and concentrated work, rather than relieving it. All of this is given an air of unstoppable power as the autonomous freight train crashes through the post-war period. Along the way we pass through much familiar territory that is still feeling the aftershocks of degraded work, such as the decrepit collapsed automobile industry.
The book, in places, reads like a manifesto, but its foundation of research is so clear, and the case so well made, that one doesn’t feel Resnikoff’s professional standards are compromised. The weakness of organised labour, the outsourcing of labour to other parts of the world, and the crowding out of automation from much of the contemporary political landscape all come in for criticism. Indeed, whilst many of the hopes for automation have faded from view, we do not always know from whence this historical fog has rolled. Resnikoff provides many answers to this question. Ultimately, in demonstrating the hand of the employer and the politician in the exploitation of labour through automation, historians can no longer abstract the term into the mechanical at the expense of flesh and blood.