AV Geeks @ Hunt Library

okay hello everybody uh virginia would you like to uh do the intros sure yeah i will get us started um welcome everyone to av geeks at the hunt library not at the hunt library currently i am virginia faris and this is our 13th semester of this series partnering nc state university folks with raleigh's av geeks to discuss vintage educational and classroom films so skip alzheimer the founder of av geeks is an nc state alum himself he's been for the last few decades collecting films made throughout the last century mostly 16 millimeter educational training and how-to sorts of movies he does an amazing job sharing them with the world and currently houses over 36 000 such films at the av geeks archive here in raleigh and shares them as stock footage for films and exhibits as research material and during public events like this one today's theme is let's talk about work and we're very excited to welcome our guest professor david zonderman dr zonderman is professor and department head of history here at nc state uh where he teaches uh great classes about american labor history public history and museums all kinds of great things like that dr zonderman has written several books about american labor history and has worked with museums across the country he's currently working on a book project titled fighting on the home front workers in the civil war and we're delighted to have him join us today and just a reminder that over 200 of av geeks compilations are available for checkout from the libraries and you can also visit avgeeks.com or search for av geeks in youtube or at archive.org to find those online so i will hand things back over to you skip to kick us off excellent um as always i am wrangling with uh how zoom is handling us and uh uh dr zondermann would you like to say hello yeah uh it's great to be here and thanks for having me i think this is a wonderful uh uh presentation both on the subject matter because obviously being a labor story and talking about work is what we do um and as skip and virginia and the rest of the crew were talking it just it brings back very fond memories for me i am a child of the 60s and 70s when we we watched these films we also had those film strips with the accompanying recording um i remember there were av geeks in my elementary school in high school and so thanks for having me did you ever run a projector yourself um a couple times although if the film ever like fell off the splice or fell off the reel i was the wrong guy to try to re rethread it i mean looking at that i mentioned to people i'm really bad with schematic drawings diagrams so when the instructions to rethread i would go forget it someone else please help me nice well in talking with you and when you were uh recommended as an expert um and you said well i do labor history uh i was like wow i have a lot of films about work about labor stuff and specifically you were interested you said if you had anything about labor unions i had a lot of stuff about unions as well both pro and con and um so what i did is kind of split the difference here so i pulled two films that are made by the afl cio and they were made to educate the public about different occupations and specifically trying to either say to the public like here's how useful this occupation is to your society or hey this is this might be a job that you're interested in and i believe all these jobs are ones where there are unions behind them so um the first one we're gonna watch is is awesome uh it's one of my favorites it's called barbers and uh you want to talk about uh dr zonderman you you pointed out like that you definitely remember uh well there's there's some weird interesting gender stuff in here about uh barbers versus hair hair salons so let's go ahead and watch uh barbers switch over here americans at work performing a service on which every man woman and child depends barbers and beauticians important people in the lives of well-groomed and attractive women for appearance sake these workers are a necessary part of our lives for more than 6 000 years the art of cutting hair has been practiced as a craft in ancient egypt barbers trimmed the square cut beards of the pharaohs today they care for the square cuts on top of the head the modern mirrored barber shop of today is quite different from the tonsorial parlor of 50 years ago but the barber's work remains the same an ever-changing part of his job is reassuring youngsters who while they may not object violently are still a bit hesitant about a haircut under the striped barber cloth any customer becomes wrapped in some of the tradition that has surrounded barbers and their shops since the time of plato in the days of ancient greece [Music] the first barbering clubs were formed where men would meet to discuss the topics of the day while having their hair trimmed and beards curled today's barber is still an advisor or patient listener to affairs in the lives of his customers to women a beauty salon is more than a feminine barber shop it is a place where they may be transformed from commonplace to outstanding where natural beauty is developed and accentuated often a woman's attractiveness begins in the hands of a hair stylist an artist who can instantly create an individualistic quaffeur and communicate the exact details to an [Music] assistant hairdressers learn by doing following the instructions of the stylist who may be guided by the season the shape of the head or features of the face an entirely different treatment may be dictated to satisfy the mood of his customer from courts of royalty the beautician has become an important part of everyday american life just as a beautician learns the craft on the job a barber begins as an apprentice in an established shop in times past a young man learned how and went to work now in all but a few states he must be schooled and examined before he can be licensed as an apprentice and then as a journeyman barber eventually he may open his own shop where he might begin training licensed apprentices himself the transformation that can take place in a young girl's appearance simply by changing the style of her hair is deftly accomplished in the hands of an experienced beautician that little girl look can be replaced by sophistication with quick strokes of scissors and comb [Music] mother and daughter visits to the beauty shop are becoming as regular as the traditional partnership of father and son at the barber shop this is an exclusive men's world where women do not go even though the first women's haircuts were performed there before beauty shops were opened [Music] many women average two hours a week in a beauty salon the care given their crowning glory depends on how much time they can give it and the skill of the beauty operator since 1945 an increasing number of men have chosen the beautification of womankind as a career their customers have confidence in their judgment because after all who is more appreciative of beautiful women than a man the way to beauty may not be the most attractive but the admiring glances that result are worth it [Music] the union shop sign is a symbol of good barbering today just as many shelves of personalized shaving mugs indicated it in the gay nineties with the passing of the shaving mug and mustache wax went another of barbering's most prized accomplishments the harmony of the barbershop quartet a barber shop is a combination of many things old and new at one time a man visited a barber shop as much to relax as to have his hair attended now modern women go to the beauty shop with the same objective special facial treatments bring to milady's continents a look of health and youth a manicurist shapes and polishes her nails to accentuate the length and gracefulness of long tapering fingers knowledge of skin care and facial structure is something a beautician learns as an apprentice her fingers are the tools with which she always works the direction in which they move the rhythm of the massage perform another kind of beauty magic a woman's hands are as important to her as her face hair and clothing if she is to feel well dressed and at ease men are no more without vanity than women as members of a civilized society we are concerned with our appearance before others in earliest civilizations the barber has been an integral part while we're not too sensitive to changing fashion and style it was not always so men once wore wigs and elaborate haircuts that required more hours to prepare than many women spend before their mirrors today the convenient shortcuts men now wear require less time but father and barber begin early to train a youngster's hair to the shape it will take as he grows because women can wear their hair very long or short or anywhere in between they may present an endless variety of styles for their admirers of course once long hair has been cut short only time can change it back but in the meantime a clever stylist can change its shape to emphasize features to change the entire appearance of a customer cutting hair to fit a specific personality is what makes the difference between a hair cutter and an artist [Music] it is amazing how happy a boy can look after a haircut especially as soon as he steps down from the barber chair to most of us when we are young haircuts seem pretty useless since the hair will always just grow back again for some of us anyway but when you're on your way to meet your best girl it's worth all the trouble [Music] of course one of the things a man almost always forgets is that it takes longer for one woman to finish in a beauty shop than it takes for two men to get their hair cut by one barber [Music] waiting for a woman to leave a beauty salon has probably contributed as much humor and frustration to civilization as any other single human endeavor but there really is a reason for the waiting every part of beauty care must be performed slowly and with attention to detail it is really to the beautician's credit that it takes as little time as it does to cut wash set dry and calm a woman's hair the curls swirls and waves that constitute a hairdo require skill in the hands of the hairdresser and patience on the part of the customer [Music] when the girls finally appear before their men all the time spent is forgotten if attractive people are the leaders of society then barbers and beauticians are the moulders of leaders [Music] to explain all the mysteries surrounding a woman's ability to make herself beautiful would be impossible not even all the secrets of what goes on in a beauty salon are obvious to an outsider a beautician trained in all the aspects of beauty culture from washing to waving including facials manicures and cosmetology knows more than words can tell the proper use of hands and equipment the way to roll a curler is something not always expressible in words [Music] it is enough that we are able to enjoy the work of the beauty salons wherever we turn all over america there are barbers and beauticians whose aim in life is one of service to the appearance of mankind these are people whose craft dates back to the beginnings of civilized society whose union stems from the middle ages when barbers and surgeons were one today they are members of the barbers hairdressers cosmetologists and proprietors union of the afl-cio americans at work for you americans at work presented as a public service by the afl-cio next week another interesting story of americans at work americans whose skill and effort help keep our country great and strong [Music] all right uh so dr zonderman what do you think oh a lot of stuff to talk uh there um i'll just mention a a few things um and and we welcome you know we'll have discussion later on so we can pick up on a whole bunch of these different things if we want um obviously there's a lot of talk about both barbers and beauticians as craft workers they talk about this is a these are crafts where people actually go through formal apprenticeships and journeyman status and then are considered masters um it doesn't always quite work that way now you know these films were made 60 years ago but people need to remember that barbers and beauticians in most states are still licensed in fact um sort of the anti-licensing movement often makes fun of cosmetology licenses but in fact if you go to someone who doesn't know what they're doing with barbering or beautician work they you can end up with at least ugly hair if not like burns and things if people for example you know hair dyes and stuff if you don't know how to deal with them you could end up burning people's skin i mean so this is actually not a joke it's serious stuff um they also of course given that it was made by the nfl cio they reference unions um i didn't look this up and we probably could at some point but i believe that union is no longer an independent union it's been absorbed and into another union but i'll be darned if i can remember which one um a lot of those smaller craft unions kind of died out in in recent decades they also referred to this work as being artists um and that again that's an interesting phrase that we could think about um i'm not sure we want to go down this rabbit hole but it's interesting and there are recent supreme court cases where cake bakers have said that they are artists and therefore shouldn't be subject to things like anti-discrimination laws if they choose not to make cakes for certain people's weddings some people may know that that's actually a source of deep litigation now so the whole idea of calling certain workers artists and what makes them an artist there was some really interesting talk about physical beauty and in effect beautiful people are leaders that sort of jumped out at me like whoa i'm not sure we'd quite say that today 60 years later um that's making some some that's a sort of leap from point a to point b but again this is sort of the assumptions i mean i think people still have some of those assumptions today but we don't necessarily voice them quite the same um and then you know we could that leads to all kinds of questions about about gender both in the work that a barber does versus a beautician and of course the customers and who goes to these workers um one other obvious thing of course is race these are all white people in this film although many peop i'll make two points on that in fact i just talked about this uh the other day in my labor history class african-american men have been barbers way back to the early 18th century if not back even into the 18th century and in many cities by the early 19th century many barbers were black men because it began to be considered a kind of um servant trade you know you you you serve another person's body in a way and that was beneath workers now if you go ahead a dec a century to the early 20th century a number of immigrant men became bar a number of italian men were barbers i mean i went to an italian immigrant barber when i was a kid all the way through like the 1980s um so um but but race and these you know this film sort of assumes everyone's white the customers are white the barbers and beauticians are white but in fact the african-american barbershop is a sort they've been some incredible anthropological and cultural studies um these are still male places very often all kinds of things are talked about including politics and and everything else at black barber shops i mean anyone who anyone who runs for an office in an african-american community if you don't go to the barber shops and the beauty shops you're not you're not meeting your your your voters um so i was struck by that um finally and i know we want to show the next film um skip you ain't it seemed to me is it true that these are part of like an ongoing series was this like a tv series do you have any idea it seems like that it was uh based on what they said join us next week yeah that's definitely a tv show trope and that i don't know whether this was an independent program or whether it was part of a another program or for like every week dave lco produced something for well it they definitely did um they actually was a company that did it for the afl cio and this is back when uh television this is before infomercials so tv stations were sometimes hungry for content so it was easy to send them these these things the the federal government would do this state governments would do this uh but also special interest groups would do this they would put together tv ready programming that they would pass on to the tv affiliates and they're like oh this is free programming we don't have to pay for this and we can still put ads on it and everything and this copy of this film actually had a psa on the end of it for uh it was fda thing about health quackery so i know that this was actually shown on television somewhere um but uh yeah so this was part of the you know back in the i think in the 50s the afl-cio was like we need some public visibility so we're going to take some of our funds and we're going to put together this series and so this next film is a part of that series and i gave you a couple of films to kind of look at and we realized time wise that we weren't going to be able to watch government workers so i'm sorry but there was also others in this series that i didn't pull like there's stage hands there's um uh not it was basically people who put shoes on horses uh so it wasn't it was like blacksmiths but they they it was a very specific uh um farriers uh yeah i'm not sure i can't remember what it was but um so there were other there's other things in this series a lot more things in this series um so um but we wanted to watch book binders so this is what we're going to watch next this is the next film so let me swap over let's see so bookbinders is next [Music] americans at work in an art that is the preservation of all arts the making of books these men are masters of their tools from the most primitive instruments to the latest equipment of the machine age with other craftsmen these are the people who make the pen mightier than the sword history itself began only when men carved their exploits and visions in stone and clay and traced them in crude ink over parchment and papyrus striving to live in eternal memory through the written word as history began with writing it is continued with printed records books were the great treasures of the earliest civilizations today they are the great means of communication between people and nations even in the most modern book binderies americans pursue a craft steeped in the tradition of ancient guilds although the books most of us buy are machine made all qualified journeyman bookbinders must know how to take apart and put together a book by hand books from collections of an earlier day must be restored and this is a loving art regarded almost with reverence by its practitioners the well-worn inheritance must be carefully undone remove the broken cover unstring the worn out threads take the precious publication back to the beginnings of a book this is a work of infinite patience of painstaking attention to detail a fingered skill that is equal to the occasion good books are constantly given rebirth by workers like these put the pages back together again sew them again for another generation of life everything must be redone except for the printing this must be kept as it was for the typography may make the book a collector's item this is a happy marrying of antique values with modern practicality and these workers know that the wearing out of a book from re-reading is a truer estimate of its worth than any review by a critic hammer the book into a shape better than when it was new make it last longer this time no matter how easy it looks there's a knack to this that must be learned handed down applied thoughtfully carefully hand rounded seemingly hopeless specimens can be restored to a usefulness that will outlive their owners a bath is prepared for marbleizing the pages of the ancient book any one of a number of patterns may be created by spattering spots of color deftly placing them just so the design is transferred to the book by dipping its trimmed edges top bottom and side for exactly the right length of time in exactly the right manner it would be impossible to get the same effect by any known printing process if you think it's easy try it but please not on a cherished first edition a new cover is applied in the same style as the original perhaps with certain modern improvements boards the book binder calls them covered with cloth and leather fabricated for prolonged life before being ready for recirculation this assembly of literary material must be pressed into final shape then the most fascinating part to the uninitiated lettering the back with nothing to guide him but his mind's eye and the skill of his fingertips the artisan lays on the gold leaf with quick expert strokes he stamps the title and other pertinent information [Music] a masterpiece of the modern book binders art the restored volume is ready for the reader who would make the most of his literary inheritance today large sheets bearing several pages come off the printing presses traditionally these sheets are just about the size of the skin from one sheep used for printing long before paper was a practical possibility the uncut sheets go to the folding machines which fold them to desired sizes called folio porto and octavo depending on the number of folds these machines can fold from 4 to 72 pages as fast as you can turn a page the folded sheet is called a signature [Music] almost faster than you can follow the action nimble fingers gather the signatures in the proper order and by foot action of the woman operator feed them to a sewing machine it is here almost miraculously that the various sections of the book are fastened together from back to front these seamstresses of the printed word can make no mistakes or the book will be entirely out of kilter since the resulting sewn portions of the book form a spongy collection of pages they are put in a mashing machine to press them more tightly together in uniform thickness a trimming machine shaves the edges of the pages to give the clean smooth look and feel that you know in the finished book this tumble type trimmer somewhat resembles the cold cut slicer of your butcher it is this process that makes it possible to thumb through a book to a wanted page for that elusive fact or quotation that you need so badly at the moment [Music] while the body of the book is in production the cover is being prepared elsewhere in the plant first the boards as they are called are cut to size these will become front and back parts of the covers as they proceed on their way to becoming covers the boards may be imprinted with title and artwork the operators of a stripping machine connect the two boards with a strip of cloth which will later become the back of the cover technically what most of us call a book cover is referred to by the book binder as a case without it the hard-bound book would not last long [Music] several more steps are necessary before the book is ready for its cover a kind of merry-go-round has been devised by the practitioners of this trade to combine these steps and to supplement their manual ability this machine does many of the things we saw earlier being done by hand but while handicraft sets the standard of quality these workers control expertly the machines needed today for modern mass production at this stage the bank is rounded into its familiar shape so you can conveniently turn the pages it is lined and glued in readiness for the covers it is here that the men who feed and tend this machine must feel most the truth of the biblical statement of the making of many books there is no end the greatest act in precision of timing and perfection of performance is reserved for the last under the supervision of experienced hands the casing in machine applies the covers to the books [Music] the watchful eye of the trained craftsman is especially needed at this point each book with its cover must satisfy inspectors that it will not fall apart in your hand now the total job must be given final shape the complete assembly of pages and cover is put into a press where it is kept until thoroughly dry then the book is ready for you not only books but pamphlets as well are an important part of publishing these women are gathering the pages in correct order and placing them on a fast-moving saddle for subsequent stitching or gluing a large publishing house may have as many as 10 000 jobs going through it at any one time [Music] making the ruled pages of notebooks and ledgers is a fascinating aspect of this trade the paper ruler here has an arsenal of implements at his disposal for some forms he uses disks for others he uses pen points to spread the ink that divides the page into countless different patterns a seemingly endless river of paper may be printed on both sides simultaneously when this craftsman makes an ingenious adjustment of either disks or pens above and below it is doubtful that the bookkeeping of our industrial world could be carried on without this activity [Music] did you ever wonder how a spiral notebook was made no more complicated than this if you have deft fingers and the right equipment the wire bindings are attached almost faster than you can watch the action sent on their way and locked into place at the end of a moving belt and there you have another indispensable tool of the business world the stenographer's pad modern accountancy is indeed dependent upon these forms and record books with their single double and triple lines needed to separate the innumerable items that must be entered in the spaces between [Music] the art of bookmaking is older than printing by many centuries yet today's members of the brotherhood of book binders artists of the af of lcio are able to supply the demand for the most important ingredient of the modern world literacy following a craft as ancient as cave drawings these union workers of the book industry are second to none in keeping pace with progress the ingenuity which has been passed on to the folders gatherers sewers trimmers liners and casemakers in a proud profession is constantly at work for you to produce our greatest treasure knowledge americans at work presented as by the afl-cio next week another interesting story of americans at work americans whose skill and effort great and strong [Music] so let me spotlight you dr zonderman what do you think about that um uh many of the same themes you know lots again a lot of stuff about craft and um sort of the learning of the craft they talk a lot more about um sort of skill and practice and knowledge that goes into craft um i also like the way this film sort of combined you know about approximately the first half is on these very skilled book binders and then it turns to a factory tour type film that looks at the mechanization of the process and again that's a as a labor start i can tell you that's just like sort of labor history 101 that's one of the biggest stories particularly in the united states but also of course europe and then sort of slightly later in the chronology asia as well you know the mechanization of what we're once a lot of handicraft industries whether it's weaving shoe making printing book binding i mean we go on and on and on and then of course in the 20th century you get industry you know auto making actually began is sort of out of carriage building by hand but very quickly became a mechanism mechanized process and then the development of the assembly line so um you know that story is conveyed in this film a lot i'll just take one issue with the film right at the beginning they say history begins with a written word and my colleagues who work in oral history and um anyone who studies african history that was always what sort of western white folks said oh there's no african history african people didn't have written languages blah blah blah well that's not entirely true but but in fact even in even in various african societies that did not have written records their oral traditions and cultural traditions and physical artifacts convey enormous historical knowledge so i just had to sort of if i were running the film i would have said stop wait a minute you know um but the rest of it is really interesting and so um again i think that one had some similarities to the first one but then that whole tour of the factory obviously you don't get your hair cut in a factory situation um so um so that's one where sort of barbering has remained much more of a individual physical craft and publishing has become very mechanized and in fact the first steam presses were used i remember correctly back in the 1840s and 50s and kind of revolutionized mass production of newspapers as well as books and pamphlets so um it's really really important um so what what strikes me about these films and re really the reason that i collect and show them is to learn how the films still teach us and allows us to do kind of a comparison contrast to how it used to be and what our factors that we're dealing with now and with uh one with barbers and salons two things come to mind one uh during the pandemic there was a period that barber shops were not open and there was a big push to get them open uh and secondly uh some salons that are dealing with labor situations related to human trafficking yes particularly nail salons yes are infamous for that um and you're right there was you know the week to this day how your hair looks how it the color it has the length the shape very important to people's sense of identity so the fact that people going around with uncut hair cause great consternation a lot of people and it's you know serious stuff and i i had a salon friend who was talking about that because she was a licensed beautician she in north carolina she wasn't allowed to go to people's houses and cut their hair and this was a north carolina thing and so that comes up as well is the idea that well during a pandemic maybe you could just have the salon person come to you but there was there was a problem with licensing in north carolina at least that you could get in trouble um and so that was interesting to me now the book binders thing is interesting to me because almost all those jobs don't exist anymore and how does you know even back then as you were saying you know there was this transition from craftsperson to uh mass production in assembly line and then you know the one the footage of the women who are feeding the pages into the whatever the binder i mean all that line of women not that those jobs do not exist anymore and the monotony of it oh yeah and i have also the in in the second film there is a substantial presence of african-american workers um which is interesting to note and i'm i'm guessing maybe that was filmed in new york but i'm not positive um that those jobs would have been available to both either new york or illinois or you know it was a big northern um enterprise and i actually looked up because they were saying like a large publishing house employs up to 10 000 people and i was like huh i wonder if that's still the case and uh random house does still has ten thousand people as of two years ago um the other one's not so much there's they're kind of in the lower uh thousands um but the fact that books are themselves becoming more and more difficult that there's in parts of the publishing world that are now all electronic um you know especially we think about newspapers the way that news is is delivered um yes i mean and that's the other part that sort of and my guess is maybe there's another film on printers the because you know the story in the film picks up after the pages have been printed so it's only showing you the binding process which is i think fascinating in and of itself but and i thought it was really cool those machines that make ruled and lined paper um and how they have to they used to have to draw you know that's all now done on computer uh systems but are they to draw those little wires by hand to make the designs but also printing itself was just revolutionized amount i was in college in the late 70s and i was a college newspaper geek and we used to publish twice i went to a small college so we published twice a week and we take our stuff to the local printer and it was just when they were going from what's called hot type to coal type and in fact they did some of both so there were still two old timers running the giant liner tab machines with the hot lead slugs and then they had the first of what were called the compugraphic computerized that would just you would type in them in like a typewriter and it would spit out this line sort of print copy that you would then paste onto sheets and then they'd photograph those and make the plates that would actually go in the printing process so and that caused i mean the printers unions at one time were highly skilled and very powerful i mean they could make or break newspapers and by the early mid 1980s they were almost all gone huge fights over technology and trying to save jobs and a number of big newspaper strikes at that period so i know that's not exactly this film it's sort of the film before that film that we watched but it's an important story as well um so we have a question from uh marion who is one of our library staff she has a question that goes back to the first film about barbers can you talk about the product protection of the workers themselves and she's thinking about the uh nail salon workers who are exploited um but also exposed to dangerous chemicals um yeah no it's it's a great point to make and and again we we already mentioned and it is it's an enormous problem in in a number of cities i know in new york and la and probably in other cities as well there have been several investigations about um a number of young asian women are brought to this country to work in these nail salons under indentured servitude really i mean the stories remind me of the so-called chinese labor of like the 1860s and 70s and in fact my the students in my labor history class just recently read a document of a young chinese woman in the 19th century brought here pretty much as an indentured servant to work as a prostitute so some of the stories that are coming out even today as a historian i feel like i'm looking back 150 years ago and not in a good way this is not like nostalgia for the good old times it's like oh my goodness this kind of stuff is still going on and chemical explain the chinese the the coulee labor what were other besides prostitution uh what were some of the other things that well they worked a lot of chinese immigrants worked the men worked on things like mining and the railroads um they were much of them were in the western west coast area although eventually there is a this weird story of a of a shoe factory in the northwest corner of massachusetts a little town called north adams where the owner brought in chinese workers as strike breakers and all hell broke loose in fact they became this giant debate in the massachusetts state legislature about trying to ban you know importation of coulee labor and scab labor and things of that sort so and the exposure to chemicals again is a very real thing um i don't have much expertise on that but yes if you're if you're a beautician more beauticians than barbers although some barbers certainly deal with hair dye products but hair dyes as i say can the fumes can be nasty um sometimes they're caustic you have to be very careful of of you know where you put in the hair and on the scalp and if it you know you don't know what you're doing and it starts running down your face your back it's not only embarrassing as i have to be snarkier for a moment as as we saw with rudy giuliani but it actually can be dangerous if you're dealing with the un the uncut chemicals so that's very legitimate concern so um another aspect to this is is back to the book binders and you know how do unions historically deal with like entire segments of of a specific trade that suddenly disappears and is made obsolete because of some sort of innovation because certainly that's what we're experiencing now is there's a lot of things that people used to do that now suddenly poof some an app has now made that um you know it's obsolete now because you don't you don't need those people anymore because you have this app that does it yeah no it's a great i mean i mentioned printers another uh very powerful example from the 20th century is railroad workers um there are both fewer trains running now and the number of men and women you need on a train crew is a fraction of what you used to need firemen to you know throw the coal into the firebox and you needed brakeman to to go from train car to train car to set the brakes um and that was incredibly dangerous work and that's all you know a typical even a giant freight train today needs a very small crew i mean you know you need a very skilled engineer if you don't know what you're doing you're going to be in a world of hurt trying to run a locomotive engine uh but beyond that you know a couple other people uh do run it so and and for example the railroad unions they were used to be called the brotherhoods uh very skilled and very powerful so they fought um they did several things one is they tried to slow down or fight in some cases the technological change itself or they did the the phrase has come down today it's called feather bedding they would try to sign contracts to where you really only needed a trained crew of six but they would insist you had ten you really need an assistant assistant to the assistant you know and you know what i try to explain to my students is yeah the companies didn't like it and we can look back and say they were you know they really had extra people they didn't need but they were trying to save people's jobs so i i have a bit of sympathy for that i'm not going to be i'm not going to defend feather betting like it's the most sensible efficient thing to do but i i also try to understand when you're talking about real people's jobs and often skilled jobs that paid pretty well people are gonna fight to keep them i mean you know if it were my job i'd sure as heck try to fight same thing went on with the printers they as i say some really big strikes to try to slow down the the um introduction of new technology or again at least say you know in some cases they tried to get contracts that said you know the guys that are over 50 or 60 get another five years or get early retirement buyouts or things of that sort so and as you were saying skip and i agree with you this kind of change goes on in dozens of industries um and often i usually the correlation is the more skilled the work the more the resistance the or at least attempts to resist um often it didn't succeed if an if a new wave of machinery replaces less skilled workers they don't have as much bargaining power because they're not very skilled to begin with and so if they for example go on strike the company just hires a bunch more people to do their job and phases them out eventually um so um and of course that's also a really important thing to think about is why do things become more and more mechanized there are arguments for efficiency there are arguments for saving money in some cases there's also i mean the companies won't admit to this publicly their efforts to break unions if you can displace skilled men and women that are in powerful unions and get them out of the way you in effect weaken or eventually eliminate the union that many companies see that as hey that's a great benefit why would i not want to install this machinery um so and and i think that's what's interesting when you look at new technological advances is is thinking about what is the labor trail that's left behind so for example autonomous vehicles uh and the implications of that you know a lot of people think oh well i can sleep while my car drives me but really it's about truck driving exactly and uh you know oh they came up with a robot that flips burgers and like oh no that's about um you know the people that work in food industry yep now in fact my colleague in our department who's our historian of technology we often talk about that people often think about technology is just like inevitable and it's just it's sometimes called technological determinism it just well it had to happen or you know joe blow invented something of course it was going to turn out this way well an invention could have been done a different way there could have been a competing invention that didn't get money behind it because in fact it didn't displace as many workers so companies looked at and said we don't want that one we want the other one that gets rid of 20 workers not 10. so there's all kinds of social economic political with the small p um decisions that go into techno technological innovation and choices um that i think we as historians need to think about it's not just as inevitable someone so invented something of course it's gonna happen you know and then the concept of the gig economy you know is i guess are we returning back to a time where you know people were just jack of all trades like would work multiple jobs or multiple tasks just to pay the bills you know that's a great point and i think you're right we need to in some ways the gig economy is very new and in some ways it's very old and the people working in it as you say in some ways i mean the specifics of what they're doing were not what we would have done 50 years ago or 100 years ago but as you say this sort of you know cobbling together a living um absolutely um again i keep referring to the the course i'm teaching now is my 19th century labor history class and soon my students are going to be reading the a terrific book it's called scraping by by seth rockman and it looks at baltimore in the early 19th century and you might say you know why baltimore and it's partly because he he he grew up there he knows the city but but what he's done is he's looked at what we would call today probably the urban poor or the underclass so he's not looking at the craftsman he's looking at like day laborers and uh rented slaves and free black people at the so lower end of the labor market and how they literally scrape by and i'll as you say they often are doing almost different jobs every day just literally making a buck or a half a buck just to you know get food on the table for that next day um so yeah and and the parallels are quite strong to today so i have one last little story to tell you that's related to uh unions uh i did a screening at the um museum of the moving image in queens new york yeah and that was a union house meaning that the projectionists were all union members so like i said i start my live shows with a film strip and so i brought my film strip projector and i was told that i was not allowed to operate it so we set it up and they had some young guy who was obviously not one of the he was like a new guy they had him run a film strip projector something that a third grader would operate and i gave him instructions on how to do it i said all right so you turn this little knob and you can adjust the frame with this and just listen for when people read the frame then move on to the next frame he had the worst trouble with it but there again that's protecting their jobs that's their turf i'll give you another example in fact from new york just real quickly um you had mentioned there's a film on stage hands which would be really cool to watch because to this day one of the a very powerful craft union is called iatsi iatsc the international association of theater and stage employees and it's not the stage employees like the actors that's actually the the actors equity which is also a very powerful union but ayatsi are the stagehands um and a few years ago um my younger son's high school band uh the concert band got to play carnegie hall which was really pretty cool i mean i was like i was so jealous because i happen to love music but one of the assistant band directors who works for the percussion was on the stage and he starts moving stuff around and a guy sort of taps him on the shoulder very nicely you know he didn't get mad just said sir you don't touch any of that stuff first of all all this stuff belonged to carnegie hall he's like don't mess with our stuff because if you drop anything you know people are gonna get mad but it was also because that's their job it's the iatsy crew that that you know is in carnegie hall that moves around the timpani and all that stuff and so i i sort of nudged my wife i said i betcha that guy's iatsy and he's telling them don't mess with my stuff but you know i i respect that these are people trying to preserve their jobs so excellent are you handy yeah i am here um and wanted to thank you both thank you professor zonderman and skip for this fascinating conversation this was wonderful um and just to remind everyone to visit aavgeeks.com for more information and check out uh compilations when the library's physical collections are back open so our next show is one month from today friday march 5th at 3 p.m once again and this one will be called let's talk about animals with nicole wilk jerker she's a postdoctoral teaching scholar in agricultural history at nc state and will be featuring vintage educational films about animals so tune in then and in the meantime you can watch previous av geeks events like this one um hosted on the library's website so take a look and have a great weekend everyone