Research Seminar: Kevin Dwyre

Virtual Event
February 4 2026
Time 12:00-1:30
Registration via Eventbrite.

In the post-World War II United States, unions and management waged an ideological struggle for control of automation. This paper will chart this struggle, outlining both management’s market-oriented position as well as how sections of the labor movement advanced their own vision of the automated future. Ranging from early retirement and worker retraining programs financed through automation funds to a Technological Clearing House for national planning, proposed by unions was a social democratic politics of expanded collective bargaining prerogatives and federal policy intervention. Harnessing automation’s development towards conscious social ends, this institutional framework aimed to shrink necessary working hours, mitigate labor market dislocation, and guarantee an equitable distribution of resources. Against labor’s expansive political vision, management asserted it was only through “economic natural selection”—i.e., the private investment decisions of firms and preferences of citizen consumers—that automation would serve the general interest. Any so-called artificial interference would only distort technology’s inherent logic to the detriment of both productivity and people. Management’s ultimate success instituting automation’s development under market guidance has today obscured those alternatives pressed by labor in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on these union initiatives, this paper seeks to recover such proposals and suggest their relevance for contemporary labor struggles and ongoing debates over automation.

Kevin Dwyre is a PhD student at the University of Delaware.

Rick Halpern of the University of Toronto will provide an introductory comment.