The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author

by Marc Levinson

For organized labor, automation was a front-burner issue. Two-thirds of the labor leaders responding to a survey identified it as unions’ most serious concern. Automation is “rapidly becoming a curse to this society,” AFL-CIO president George Meany told the labor federation’s annual convention in 1963. The substitution of machinery for manpower was threatening to unions, blurring long-established jurisdictional lines and raising bargaining costs by reducing the number of workers in a plant, and displacement could be devastating to workers. Many workers in the 1960s lacked basic reading and mathematical skills, and education levels were low enough to make retraining problematic: half of U.S. factory production workers had no more than a tenth-grade education.