Special Issue on Workers and Obsolescence

Abstract

In recent years, the question of what labor—and which laborers—will be deemed obsolete in the near future has hung over our heads and even manifested in the motions and routines of our daily lives. When we use the self-checkout lanes in stores, engage with ATM or banking kiosks, and silently order food on touch-screen machines or smartphones, we might wonder what happened to the people who used to work those jobs. Customer service call center workers are being noticeably replaced by chat-bots. Taxi and truck drivers are frequently warned about the advent of selfdriving vehicles. In fields, orchards, and vineyards, experiments to replace farmworkers with drones or robot pickers and planters are tentative but ongoing. Alex Rivera’s 2008 sci-fi film Sleep Dealer, in which growers use robots in the US while workers in Mexico manipulate the robots’ motions, plays on the fantasy of employing migrant labor while making migration itself obsolete. While it might feel particularly pronounced now, worker obsolescence is not a contemporary phenomenon; history reveals many episodes of workers losing their jobs to technological and economic “modernization” from the early 19th century onwards. In fact, the intensity of job churn, or of new occupations coming into existence as older occupations disappear, was likely faster in past eras of technological change as compared to the present. Agricultural work evaporated with the coming of threshers and harvesters; typesetters and newspaper printers were automated out of existence; elevator and switchboard operators faded away; and longshoremen’s working rhythms changed dramatically with global containerization. The pieces in this special issue cover different geographical areas and time periods and bring together many different research fields. These articles feature histories of technology, of labor and workplace struggles, of the global economy, of neoliberalism, of unions and their adaptation to changing conditions, of immigration, and of racism both in work and among workers. The articles feature a mixture of methods, too: archival, interview-based, literary analysis, and so on.