LABOR: Farewell to Loom-Wrecking

A mob of Lancashire weavers rioted in 1791 and burned to the ground a cotton mill newly set up by Edmund Cartwright, inventor of the power loom. Time and again as the Industrial Revolution spread, workmen fearful of losing their livelihood attacked new labor-saving machines with hammers and torches. Even today, some labor unions (e.g., building trades, printers, stagehands, locomotive engineers) combat technological progress with featherbedding practices; their leaders regard automation with a milder and more law-abiding version of the 18th century loom-wrecker’s wild fear.

But U.S. labor has come far since Edmund Cartwright’s day. How very far was plain last week when delegates at the Amalgamated Lithographers of America convention in Chicago adopted a proposal to put $1 million in A.L.A. money into a fund to promote technological advances in lithography, provided that employers put up a matching sum. The fund will bring “better working conditions and real wage increases,” argued Edward Swayduck, the man behind the plan.

President of the A.L.A.’s biggest local (New York City), Swayduck, 46,has been urging technological progress in lithography ever since boyhood, when he chided his father, owner of a small lithography shop in Indianapolis, for sticking with old-fashioned techniques. After he became a lithographer himself, the younger Swayduck saw technological changes—rotary instead of flatbed presses, metal instead of stone plates, new color-printing techniques—lead to more and more jobs for lithographers at higher and higher pay (now $125 to $200 for a 35-hour week). Convinced that unions ought to promote higher productivity, not resist it, Swayduck has fought the featherbedding that made many a printshop worker resemble, in Swayduck’s words, “the guy in the orchestra who waits for two hours, then bangs the cymbals together once, then leans back again.” Automation, Swayduck believes, is a boon to workers, not a menace. “If it helps get products to the consumer more cheaply,” he says, “it’s going to broaden activity in the industry and provide more jobs.”