AUTOMATION - THE NEXT REVOLUTION

[Music] we are witnessing the next revolution its name is automation its agent is the machine which can think for man and act for man the servant that is so versatile and so powerful as to become master [Music] now suddenly we hear of people disadvantaged and displaced i had one job out of seven days only one job now how do you think i can live i got a wife and four kids i can't live like that you work from now can you get disgusted last week i work on these three days two days sometimes sometimes four days a lot of breaks because of my age many times they say you are overqualified where they won't it won't give me a humble job and i'm perfectly willing to accept one i want to hope i want to live on hope but i can't live on hope if you keep on downing me so i'm in an obsolete a job that doesn't exist anymore because now they've got new um new things i think called monitor boards i know i just came from pittsburgh and it's worse there than it is here and i've been looking for a job here for the past two months i can't find anything i've been here for some years and it's not normal i don't know where what the problem is well i was working here during the depression i found it easier then to go to get a job than it is now well uh i don't feel the future because i jump off a bridge if i had to do this every day this is the last the last store in my opinion anyway this is the end of the road after this there is no place else there is always a place for the man who can earn his pay this is basic to our thinking the trouble is that in many places the machine is moving up alongside the man to compete with him instead of serving him there are more and more places where you can't beat the machine for efficiency and earning power as more and more men are learning to their sorrow [Applause] [Music] production is growing but during the past five years the number of production jobs in manufacturing has actually declined by two and a half percent how can production grow while jobs go down the answer lies in the machine in automation in greater efficiency per man hour 1953 was a year of peak prosperity then there were 2.9 percent of our workforce out of a job today is a time of even greater prosperity but there are 5.9 of the workforce unemployed it is hard to translate percentages into people think of four million worried faces the image like the figures themselves disturbs our leaders more and more people are saying that something should be done prominent among the warriors are the very men who make the automated machines men like john i snider jr president of u.s industries uh a new kind of revolution is beginning to occur around the world not here alone and as is usual with this kind of a social revolution uh in the past the events have always overtaken us and my only purpose now is to call enough attention to what's going on so perhaps for once in a very complicated world where the events overtaking us would be hardly beneficial to anybody they could be anticipated now how would you describe the problems that we're we've got the problems are in a business sense first uh are those which attend any major business decision policy decision uh should i as a businessman or should a million businessmen automate or should they not the answer is almost always yes if you can afford it and it's just because uh with worldwide competition for almost everything we produce including our agricultural products we're caught in a cross-priced squeeze in this country the decision to automate therefore is forced upon us by events again the events have already begun to occur and we're beginning to react to them of course this can happen uh while whole communities can be laid off in effect a plant can close because it's no longer economic to operate it doesn't pay to automate it because plant b has been automated and can produce enough and these uh pockets of unemployment permanent unemployment are beginning to appear around the country [Music] this interesting and complex machine is over 50 years old it is the linotype machine which at the turn of the century revolutionized the printing industry [Music] that industry is on the brink of vast changes again what does bertram powers head of the new york typographical union see as the main problem well for us here in new york city the problem is automation especially the introduction of the computer or setting type uh we now set uh all of the type for a newspaper in the new york times for instance we have 800 compositors theory news we have 700. and in all of the newspapers in new york city we have some 3 500 people employed we think that with the computer that it can be possible to reduce the number to something like 17 or 1500 people other than half or even more than half now uh this has to be we recognize that we can't stand in the way of the machine but we are concerned that the rate of introduction permission would be such and other compensations to protect the jobs of existing members we accept the principle that there may be less jobs but we do not accept the idea that that this so-called progress should be at the expense of our members entirely this doesn't make the employment picture look very good for the country lives does it oh it does it's principle you know they solve our problem our immediate problem for ourselves but it doesn't solve the problem for our society and we're part of our society and our children and our brothers our community our neighbors are all part of the problem but we think that we should do what we can do with our own machinery and that then as part of our society we should work towards statutory shorter hours or other programs longer times in school whatever else can be done to offset this sudden decrease in number of jobs far out on long island near the town of southampton there is an estate which belongs to local three of the international brotherhood of electrical workers members come here to spend a week in lectures and discussion groups about matters of concern and interest to them the head of local three harry van arsdale jr who also heads the central labor council of new york is himself a strong man in an argument now 25 hour week is uh is a very short week as uh weeks are judged and uh well there are two ways to look at it we think an eight hour day is an exceptionally long day because the average worker travels an hour to work travels an hour to get home and if they have an hour for lunch that's 11 hours out of a 17 or 18 hour day depending on how much they sleep and we think that's a very long one and we know that our biggest problem is that we're all victims of habits and because someone has been accustomed to working eight hours or because the executive occasionally puts in some extra time he can't understand why his workers should still continue to work eight hours at a time when it's no longer necessary the fact that we have so many millions unemployed and on the increase and the fact that we have so many millions only able to work part-time because there isn't sufficient employment for them in spite of that it's hard to understand that it's no longer necessary to have everybody working eight hours or more but we're sure they'll come around to recognize it now what we've all been trained and we've all been trained in our courts are geared to it and our thinking is geared to property values how long is it going to take until we get around to human value we gave a serious thought to human values as we do the property value give you an illustration that if on third avenue tonight some fellow breaks a window he'll get arrested and he'll either be uh he'll be brought to court and he'll either be fined or he'll be sent away for breaking that window but some company can sit down and shut down a plant which will destroy a whole town now we must ask ourselves who's done the most damage in the community the fellow who broke the window or the people who have shut down a plant which destroyed the whole town now when we get a ranking we'll only get to it when we have a better understanding of human value [Music] in the waterfront commission hiring halls for a long shoremen competition for work in its barest form takes place early in the morning men come in and wait and hope and grab for jobs the waterfront is a tough place on the waterfront the men speak with fear and hatred of containerization other hands mechanical hands put cargo in easily moved containers somewhere else and when this happens there is less and less for the longshoremen to do [Music] as the men do their hard heavy old-fashioned work they look over their shoulder at the mechanized movement of cargo they all know is across the hudson from new york on the jersey shore the c train shipping line offers a good example of what containerization can do to the job of loading and unloading [Music] ships not many men are needed for this not many pairs of hands the massive crane drops its hooks into the hold and pulls out a railway freight car as if it were a toy hikes it across over the side and down onto the rails this type of all-out containerization has not yet been applied to international shipping because of such difficulties as narrower roads in europe and variations in railway gauge but overseas lines have their eye on methods and costs and they remember the history of coastal shipping in 1940 there were 19 coast wise shipping lines operating out of new york harbor now there are two the survivors both use containerized techniques like these have they had to automate in order to stay in business we asked john l weller president of c train he said we're not a mechanized operation there wouldn't be any operation what about the country at large do you feel that uh what's happening here what we see on this pier will happen in other ways in other industries of course and what will the end result be well the end result will be that uh there will be less and less place in our life for uh completely untrained people that people will have to be trained either to operate mechanized operations or to do the planning the thinking the scheming and services that go with that do you think that the government might play a role in this certainly it should in what in what way in helping with the retraining and the planning i mean going beyond financing it but it's actually taking a big part in this they have to take a good part in it i think because they're the source of the education all education that today has backed up other governments and it's education that's the key to the thing in washington secretary of labor w willard works offered some hard facts about the role that education and the lack of education may play in the future of millions of americans two figures i think point out the basic need on this side of the problem that we face for the future one is this that there are in the workforce today three million people with less than a fifth grade level of education now as long as they hang on to their present job they won't be too serious but if they have to move to another job there aren't many job offers today for people who don't have the basic literacy skills and then the other figure is this in the next year and a half there will be about five and a half million new boys and girls coming into the work market two million of them are going to have less than a high school education and most employers are not employing people with less than a high school education today so the other part of this problem is that we have got to do what is now so clearly imminently required to train everybody for the kind of job that you've got in the workforce where machines have taken over the unskilled job you get a little the point if you assume that we're at the at that stage now where machines have on the average about a high school education and they're a lot cheaper than people high school diploma don't mean nothing now you got to continue school go further get any kind of result you can't just go out and get a job with a high school diploma you must have a little bit more background i mean jones diploma is like no diploma at all it wouldn't be for this course that was available i'd be on the street now bouncing around from place to place looking for a job years ago you could go out and get your uh the job didn't matter but now they're looking for people with a better education the future is what i'm looking for which i think everybody should look for young americans reach the age of 18 at 4 million a year through this decade as wave after wave of our new population bulge puts a mounting strain on our labor market right now 15 of the teenagers who are out of school are also out of work right now employers who a generation ago asked only in elementary school education for entry jobs demand at least a high school diploma [Music] it is the height of bitter irony that the negro people of our country should begin their strongest most united demand for job rights among other rights at the very time that the door to employment appears to be closing in so many places the pressure mounts more jobs better jobs now what will happen if negroes hide with their white counterparts in competition for dwindling work we asked bayard rustin the first thing that i see that is going to happen is that we have to wait perhaps a year or so longer but i think it's inevitable that a part of the collision will be that negroes and whites will be fighting each other for what some jobs are left we have already begun this process unhappily then i think white unemployed largely out of the example that negroes have given in the interest of civil rights such groups as the miners in hazard and miners in tennessee they will then adopt the methodology and the spirit of the negro revolt this is already happening now no one is going to pay any attention to the job problem quite frankly mainly because negro is over that job this is not because people are devilish but because of negroes have been without things for so many hundreds of years who was really moved by negroes being relaxing when however the white unemployed joined the negroes in creating social dislocation in the insistent job something will happen we now know that you cannot get freedom for negro by marching in the streets period you cannot possibly get jobs for negroes in the society where millions of white people are unemployed by asking for your share of that cake white people do not get their share of it what we have to do is to say that cake no longer is a good cake to eat let's get a new cake in which the first fundamental objective would be we must separate pay from work the combination of the power of the machine and the skills of the machine creates a situation where we now know no matter what we do we will never again put all americans who are capable of work back to work teenagers the ages and the minority groups and therefore the first principle for which i stand and negroes will have to increasingly stand for it as will the white miners in tennessee and elsewhere the question is no longer how much does a man get for work because there is not enough work and cannot be we have to establish the social principle make it a part of our constitutional way of life that a man has paid a decent wage whether or not this society can put it to work and this is a profound and radical idea but it is an idea which will emerge the negroes will understand it first [Applause] [Music] this is the 7-up bottling plant in new rochelle new york 192 000 bottles march through here every day they come in empty and the machine takes over [Music] [Applause] it's almost as if the machine gives them life [Music] turns them into symbols of ourselves queuing up for the future moved by forces beyond our control getting on board for a destination that remains vague the men who watch the machine tell us something about modern work well that's mostly what they do watch and yet they are highly skilled men each one understands the operation from start to finish knows where to look for signs of trouble what to do when the machine goes wrong mostly they watch the machine with what might be called an engaged detachment some unions in heavy industry demand what is called loneliness pay an extra percentage like flight pay to be given workers who spend their whole working life removed from human contact relating to a machine the machine is not only eliminating jobs it is creating jobs and it is changing jobs will it in time eliminate what we now think of as work we asked the president of the packing house workers ralph helstein about this well uh i think work is pretty much what society says it is at any given point in time and i think essentially a matter of how society wants to define it and i would i accept the freudian notion that man's tie with reality is through work and that work is essential if you're going to have a stable society uh so that i would not want to eliminate it but i do think we're going to have to redefine it i think we're going to have to come to uh tiltions about his work we may have to call things work that in the past have been thought of as pleasure or luxury or fun or played perhaps we might even create a happier generation in this way i'm not sure few of the jobs of the age of automation require much muscle even the traditionally sedentary white collar field is becoming more a spectator matter in 1957 there were 450 electronic computers in use today there are over 11 000 available models are multiplying costs going down the bureau of labor statistics says it's hoping that a jump in white collar employment will help absorb the growing labor force six out of every 10 people working today are at jobs that didn't exist 40 years ago most of the new jobs that are being created are in the white collar area [Music] our dilemma looms plain and immediate [Music] the new technology is here to stay and grow trying to stop it would be futile and would war with other more pressing needs yet it may split our society wide open separating the displaced the dislocated the needful from the blander calmer world of the machine pushing the people who are on the fringe of our prosperity further out raising the standard of life of the fortunate many while lowering or more deeply isolating the unfortunate few secretary of labor willard wurtz hit the extremes of worry and of hope as he spoke of the prospects before us there are some 30 million people in this country today who are in families with incomes for the year of less than three thousand dollars we need to do a great many things to build up their purchasing power and to satisfy their unmet needs there are slums that have got to be torn down there are schools that have got to be built there are recreational facilities there are highways let me just make this point if we decided that in the next two years we were going to clean out the slums in our cities and build the schools we need we'd have a manpower shortage in this country we're not so far away from this goal that we can't reach it and with respect to this training business if we would declare a war on ignorance the way we declare war on a foreign enemy when one comes along there isn't any question in the world but that you could bring the educational accomplishments the training competence of almost every individual in this country up to where it needs to be there's nothing basically in our way we could ask ourselves questions about the future if our situation were the same as it is in some of the lesser developed countries in the world where we're where they're short on know-how they're short on ideas even their ideals are still only new they're short on raw materials we're not short of any [Music] where do we go next the revolution is upon us automation is here to stay along with all of its effects some of them visible others yet to be discovered many of them producing grave social difficulties can we master what we have created the solution calls for inventiveness and courage perhaps kindness too these qualities are not contained in the machine [Music] you