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From: rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Subject: Re: Does Automation Take Jobs Away?
Organization: The Armory
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 1994 21:20:52 GMT
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In article <310m0a$k3o@tribune.usask.ca>, Henry Choy <choy@cs.usask.ca> wrote:
>Richard Steven Walz (rstevew@armory.com) wrote:
>: In article <30q73p$s0l@unix1.cc.uop.edu>,  <rkyker@vms1.cc.uop.edu> wrote:
>: >OK here's my $.02. Question is doesn't the refusal to automate when automation
>: >increases productivity decrease the job market? If jobs go abroad due to the
>: >lack of automation then automation is a positive thing. 
>: >
>: >I think about a 100 years ago a group of workers got mad and destroyed
>: >some new looms. They are called Luddites. You might find some interesting 
>: >history on this concerning industrial automation. Luddites is now used 
>: >as a term for the fear of technology. 
>: >
>: >Ron
>: ----------------------------------------
>: And a mistaken one. Yes, this happened, but only after the owners wouldn't
>: hire and keep the weavers on as automated loom repair folk or share the
>: wealth!
>
>This is the same with overpopulation...displaced workers aren't
>rehired as doctors and nurses for the displacing workers.
--------------------------------
Actually, they ARE. Not doctors perhaps, but service jobs which pay a lot
less, like cleaning up your puke in the hospital and washing your butt,
actually do expand when people are displaced. But what you so conveninetly
left out of this repost is that the Luddites were the ones who had built the
new looms and knew how to run or wreck them, and that the fight was over
improved conditions, and not the superficial definition of the Luddite
written in dictionaries by capitalist historians!!! They didn't exactly
want the first real unions of the industrial revolution to get much air
time!
-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com

>        Henry Choy                       "Math class is hard" - Barbie
>e-mail: choy@cs.usask.ca                  I AGREE!
------------------------------
Everything you know is wrong...
-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com

