Labor and Technology

Long before taxi drivers shut down city center streets to protest ride-sharing apps, rewards were being offered to catch those textile workers who, in the Luddite protests, "wantonly and feloniously" smashed the knitting frames they held responsible for their impoverishment. In our roundtable, we consider these and other ways in which people have collectively organized against—or for—the roll-out of new (and not so new) technologies in the workplace. We also reflect upon some of the numerous historical moments in which labor and technology were not pitted against each other in such a zero-sum, antagonistic way.

Likewise, dreaming and worrying about what technology might do to your job is nothing new. From early modern Central Europe to twentieth-century Japan, we discuss how the relationship between labor and technology was understood to be in flux—by policymakers, business and technocratic elites, academics, and laborers themselves. Beyond triumphalist/ alarmist narratives of "disruption," we reflect upon the labor practices that particular technologies have been designed to reinforce, as well as the forms of labor that technological roll-out has rendered invisible. Ultimately, we ask how technology has historically reworked class, race, and gender relations within the workplace, and indeed our very conceptions of what constitutes "work."