The croppers suggested taxing cloth to make a fund for those unemployed by machines. They weren’t opposed to machinery, they said, if the profits from increased productivity were shared. It produced stockings of such low quality that they were “pregnant with the seeds of its own destruction,” as one hosier put it: Pretty soon people wouldn’t buy any stockings if they were this shoddy. Factory work was miserable, with brutal 14-hour days that left workers-as one doctor noted-“stunted, enfeebled, and depraved.” Stocking-weavers were particularly incensed at the move toward cut-ups. “They were obsessed with keeping their factories going, so they were introducing machines wherever they might help,” says Jenny Uglow, a historian and author of In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815.
They also began to build huge factories where coal-burning engines would propel dozens of automated cotton-weaving machines. “Cut-ups” were shoddy and fell apart quickly, and could be made by untrained workers who hadn’t done apprenticeships, but the merchants didn’t care. An innovative, “wide” stocking frame allowed weavers to produce stockings six times faster than before: Instead of weaving the entire stocking around, they’d produce a big sheet of hosiery and cut it up into several stockings. A new form of shearer and “gig mill” let one person crop wool much more quickly. That meant reducing wages-and bringing in more technology to improve efficiency. The merchant class-the overlords who paid hosiers and croppers and weavers for the work-began looking for ways to shrink their costs. Fashions changed, too: Men began wearing “trowsers,” so the demand for stockings plummeted. A decade of war with Napoleon had halted trade and driven up the cost of food and everyday goods. In the textile world, the croppers were, as one observer noted at the time, “notoriously the least manageable of any persons employed.”īut in the first decade of the 1800s, the textile economy went into a tailspin. They were well-off-their pay was three times that of stocking-makers-and their work required them to pass heavy cropping tools across the wool, making them muscular, brawny men who were fiercely independent. Monday.”Ĭroppers in particular were a force to be reckoned with. Indeed, some “seldom worked more than three days a week.” Not only was the weekend a holiday, but they took Monday off too, celebrating it as a drunken “St. “The year was chequered with holidays, wakes, and fairs it was not one dull round of labor,” as the stocking-maker William Gardiner noted gaily at the time.
These workers had great control over when and how they worked-and plenty of leisure. “Croppers” would take large sheets of woven wool fabric and trim the rough surface off, making it smooth to the touch. Working from home, weavers produced stockings using frames, while cotton-spinners created yarn. But rather than accept it, they fought back-calling themselves the “Luddites,” and staging an audacious attack against the machines.Īt the turn of 1800, the textile industry in the United Kingdom was an economic juggernaut that employed the vast majority of workers in the North. That’s when the first generation of workers had the experience of being suddenly thrown out of their jobs by automation. One clue might lie in the early 19th century. How will Americans react to robots and computers taking even more? As the last election amply illustrated, a big chunk of Americans already hotly blame foreigners and immigrants for taking their jobs. What happens then? If this vision is even halfway correct, it’ll be a vertiginous pace of change, upending work as we know it. Those jobless truckers will be joined by millions more telemarketers, insurance underwriters, tax preparers and library technicians-all jobs that Frey and Osborne predicted have a 99 percent chance of vanishing in a decade or two. Meanwhile, Uber’s “Otto” program is installing AI in 16-wheeler trucks-a trend that could eventually replace most or all 1.7 million drivers, an enormous employment category.
Last year in Pittsburgh, Uber put its first-ever self-driving cars into its fleet: Order an Uber and the one that rolls up might have no human hands on the wheel at all. Robots and AI are already whisking products around Amazon’s huge shipping centers, diagnosing lung cancer more accurately than humans and writing sports stories for newspapers. That’s because artificial intelligence and robotics are becoming so good that nearly any routine task could soon be automated.
jobs will be automated “in a decade or two,” as the tech-employment scholars Carl Frey and Michael Osborne have predicted. The odds are high, according to recent economic analyses.
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