The ghost of Jack Ludd is telling me what to write. About 1810, Jack Ludd and some associates, all unemployed weavers, largely a cottage industry in those days, would burst into factories which used weaving machines powered by water or steam, and lay about them with sledge hammers.
Ludd performed acts of sabotage, but I have seen subtle acts of suppression of automation. I was a trainee financial planner for a while in 2003, employed by a large Australian bank, and attended a class on the bank’s financial planning software. I came to realise that the computer program automated the boring part of the job, such as recording the client’s name and address, and added up his assets and liabilities. But at the more advanced level, somehow automation petered out. I have been a computer programmer, and I realised that someone in Head Office has said to the bank’s computer programmers: thus far and no further.
One of my classmates had seen the same thing, and he was visibly dismayed by what had happened. He had done some Fortran programming at university, so he too knew what was possible. We did not say anything to our instructor, but the instructor said to the class; ‘Some of you may think that more automation is possible, but do not bother raising the matter because nothing will happen’. So the instructor also knew there was something fishy going on.
A few years later, I was working in a huge and largely automated winery. Boxes of wine passed down the conveyor, and an ingenious machine used small suction caps to drop cardboard spacers between the bottles in the cardboard box. The process should have been automatic, but the suction caps were not working properly, and the machine just dropped the spacers into the box, and workers were employed to pat the spacers down in the right place. Light work. I felt the suction caps and they were hard, and not flexible enough to cling to the cardboard spacers, and I assumed that maintenance staff had deliberately not replaced the suction caps, so that workers would be employed.
The three Italian brothers who owned the winery presumably knew what was going on, as they walked past. They were the largest employers in the area, and I assumed that they turned a blind eye.
What impressed me was that nobody said a word, and there seemed a conspiracy of silence. The rule seems to be that machinery which does heavy or dangerous work is allowed to do its job. Machinery which does boring clerical work is allowed to do its job. But for more interesting work, or for light work such as patting cardboard spacers between wine bottle, somehow things just did not work as they were supposed to.
I assume that these subtle acts of suppression – I will not use the word sabotage – pervades advanced economies, and in the future there will be a political push to suppress certain jobs as policy, to employ people.
