Specter of automation in the ’60s
To understand today’s automation debates, we must go back to the 1960s. Even as California was in the midst of unprecedented employment growth, officials were anxious about the state’s employment future. High among their anxieties, which paralleled national fears, was that automation would replace human labor and produce permanent unemployment in California above 10 percent.
February 1961: Time magazine publishes “The Automation Jobless,” warning that “throughout industry, the trend has been to bigger production with a smaller workforce,” and noting that “many of the losses in factory jobs have been countered by an increase in the service industries or in office jobs; but automation is beginning to move in and eliminate office jobs too.”
August 1964: As automation worries continue to build, President Lyndon Johnson creates a National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress. The president calls on the commission to propose government actions to respond to the job losses already mounting through automation.
Fall 1965: The inaugural issue of the Public Interest, an influential conservative policy journal, features an essay by economist Robert Heilbroneron “The Great Automation Question.” Heilbroner wonders whether machines are making human labor redundant in white-collar tasks as well as manufacturing and agriculture.
February 1966: The national commission issues its report, warning that while technology is not the primary cause of overall job loss, it is a main cause of job loss for workers in certain regions and industries. The commission recommends a range of retraining and replacement strategies, especially to assist workers with the least education and skills.
June 1967: The Los Angeles Times publishes a rare full-page editorial, “Technology: Hero or Villain?,” worrying that while the computer is bringing unprecedented efficiencies into industrial production and management, it also is eliminating routinized assembly-line jobs “which might otherwise have provided the escalator out of poverty for many poor Negroes and whites.” The Times adds that there is growing conviction that technology is changing faster than man’s ability to adjust to it.