Related Papers
The shows and the flows: materials, markets, and innovation in the US machine tool industry, 1945–1965
Philip Scranton
Machine tools may be fundamental to metalworking industrial economies, but their Cold War era history in the US has rarely been assessed over the last generation. A quarter century after David Noble's crucial and critical Forces of Production, perhaps a broad-gauged assessment may be timely. This essay aims to offer two theses for discussion. First, it seems that a sector whose enterprises once specialized in one or more tool types reconfigured itself into clusters of firms servicing automotive-based automation demands, aeronautical/aerospace precision and flexibility needs, or providing specialized auxiliary components, especially instrumentation and controls. Second, cascades of new industrial materials and processes generated both opportunities for and constraints on tool firms, as innovations facilitated users' substituting, for example, plastics for metals or material-forming for metal-cutting, quietly shifting the technical and market foundations. Such dynamics set the stage for US machine tool enterprises' decline as the Cold War ebbed, but they did not chiefly derive from technological deflections deriving from military contracting.
International Review of Social History
2002 •
Robert Forrant
Riding down Main Street in East Hartford, Connecticut toward the six smokestacks dominating the front of Pratt & Whitney's mammoth aircraft engine factory, one cannot help noticing numerous artifacts associated with rapid industrial decline: empty and trash-strewn lots, boarded-up storefronts, and vacated triple-deckers, once homes for Pratt & Whitney workers. A short drive away on the other side of the Connecticut River one can observe the dichotomies between East Hartford and downtown Hartford with its glittering insurance companies, banks, and the headquarters – known around Hartford as the “Gold Building” – of Pratt's parent, the United Technologies Corporation (UTC). The various social clubs, bars, and purveyors of fast food, ice cream, and fresh baked pies, that have served thousands of lunches and early suppers to members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) are at risk.
International Labor and Working-Class History
Sixth Annual North American Labor History Conference, October 18–20, 1984—Wayne State University
1985 •
Christopher Johnson
The Journal of Economic History
And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry. By John P. ho*rr. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988. Pp. xiv, 689. $39.95, cloth; $14.95, paper
1989 •
Harland Prechel
Journal of the Early Republic
Ingenious Machinists: Two Inventive Lives from the American Industrial Revolution by Anthony J. Connors
IFAC Proceedings Volumes
Skill Formation under Adversarial Industrial Relations and Weak Unions: The Cases of the American and French Machine Tool Industries during the 1980's
1992 •
Bassirou Tidjani
Technovation
The post-1990 rebirth of the US machine tool industry: a temporary recovery?
2006 •
Ronald Kalafsky
Machinery, Manumission, and Economic Machinations
Erika Parn, David Edwards, Hatem El-Gohary
This research note reports upon advancements in computerization and big data creation within the off-highway plant and machinery sector. A thematic literature review synthesizes a disparate range of research initiatives and industrial developments and highlights specific examples of technological developments. A discussion regarding impact upon future employment concludes that rather than creating mass unemployment, computerization will change the employment horizon and continue to shape the global economic community. Education is quintessentially important to humanity which must master the machine and not become a slave to technology. Future proofing of educational provisions will therefore feature heavily in tomorrow's employment market. This provocative research note advances new ideas and theoretical perspectives that are specifically designed to stimulate academic debate in this novel and rapidly developing area of scientific endeavor.
International Labor and Working-class History
James D. Rose,Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. xi + 284 pp. $42.50
2005 •
Cecelia Bucki
Why American Engineers Aren\u27t Unionized - A Comparative Perspective
1993 •
Peter Meiksins
This article presents a comparative perspective on why U.S. engineers are not unionized. The decline of organized labor in the U.S. has stimulated a new interest in comparative research. Explanations of the prolonged stagnation and contraction of the U.S. labor movement that focus on the U.S. alone run the risk of assuming that the U.S. case is normal, and that the decline of organized labor is a structural inevitability of advanced capitalism. By broadening their scope to include other industrialized countries with similar political economies and different labor histories, students of the labor movement will be better able to identify what is truly distinctive in the U.S. case, and whether it is its distinctiveness or its typicality that accounts for the apparent demise of the U.S. labor movement. One phenomena comparative labor studies reveal is that labor unions in Canada and Western Europe have been more successful than their U.S. counterparts in organizing employees outside of ...
