The machine tool industry occupies a place of rare significance in the literature of economics. This is partly because of what that industry makes: from the workshops of a nation come the tools that stamp or process nearly every element of mass production, from doorstops to soft-drink bottles, as well as the precisely manufactured goods of both the old and new industrial epochs, from armor plate and turbine blades to hard drives for computers. But there is another reason that work by economists, especially those on the left, has focused on machine tools: the sector embodies the labor theory of value more strongly than any other. Unionized workers in auto- and steel-producing industries are still first among equals of labor when output is the only measure, but their power derives from strength in numbers, not great competence. Their ultimate threat is to impede the flow of bodies through the factory gates. Skilled machinists, however, through the abilities they have gained from years of experience with lathes and cutting tables, possess power independent of their number. Employers cannot credibly threaten to replace them with fresh labor; new hands could not do the job. As other sectors have become more routine and automated, machinists remain the closest approximation to self-reliant craftsmen of the industrial age. Though they have never been numerous—there were roughly half a million machinists, broadly defined, in 1980—their fate is disproportionately important for those studying the relationship between technological progress and the welfare of the working class.
Before David Noble's book, only one other I know underscored the drama and significance of the machine-tool industry. In *Player Piano*, published in 1952 by Kurt Vonnegut, the advent of automation comes to a factory closely resembling General Electric’s plant in Schenectady, where Vonnegut briefly worked as a publicist. The bright young managers and engineers in Vonnegut's story, trained in college and with clean hands, set out to capture the skills of the machinists on magnetic tape, so as to usher in a new era of plant efficiency.
They sought out Rudy Hertz, the most skilled machinist, and recorded all his instruments while he worked. The movements he had refined over years, and from which he earned his livelihood, were thus transferred onto the loop of tape. Henceforth, this tape could operate other lathes much as a recording of music might play a piano. Long after the transformation was complete and men like Rudy Hertz had become economically and spiritually redundant, one of the engineers, Paul Proteus, stares at the loop of tape reduced to insignificance and remembers the time it was made. Vonnegut includes the passage as an appendix to his book:
"Rudy hadn't quite understood what all the fuss about the recording of his instruments was about, but what he did understand, he liked: that he, out of thousands of machinists, had been chosen to have his motions immortalized on tape..."
About: A murder in South Africa / A kind of coup / A cosmic and practical matter.