Italian skilled workers embraced automation while American workers opposed it

Evidence

In reality skilled workers in Italy have never, as individuals or through union organisations, actively or passively opposed innovations leading towards lowering of costs, rationalisation of work or the introduction of more perfect forms of automation and more perfect technical organisation of the complex of the enterprise. On the contrary. However, this has happened in America and has resulted in the semi-liquidation of the free trade unions and their replacement by a system of mutually isolated factory-based workers’ organisations. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1089

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to labor-history debates about union structure and the Fordist settlement; relevant to how hegemony operates through consent rather than simple coercion. — connects to: US businesses chose machines over worker skills decades ago — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 571