Labor's End

“The history recounted in Labor’s End helps arm us to counter fallacious reasoning about automation and advocate for shifting the workplace toward greater worker power, dignity, and prosperity. Resnikoff’s probing analysis directs our gaze away from the “shiny objects” of new technology and redirects it to where it belongs — on workers.” –Catalyst “Resnikoff’s forceful and coherent argument reveals that automation was not a technological process but an ideology which equated freedom with freedom from work and downplayed the workplace as a site of politics. As he convincingly shows, automation largely did not lead to a reduction in labor but rather to speedup, work intensification, and the degradation of labor, creating a huge chasm between the grandiose claims made about an automated future and the lived reality of workers.”–Joshua Freeman, author of Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World “Labor’s End not only shows how the automation discourse was and is mystifying but also demonstrates the political consequences of its adoption on the Right and the Left. There is no technological fix for the political problems of work, Resnikoff reminds us… . Labor’s End will be seen by future historians as a book that freshly reinterpreted the past to inform the politics of the present.” –H-Sci-Med-Tech

Jason Resnikoff is a lecturer in the Department of History at Columbia University.