Table Of ContentAutomation Anxiety
Automation Anxiety
Why and How to Save Work
CYNTHIA ESTLUND
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© Cynthia Estlund 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Names: Estlund, Cynthia, author.
Title: Automation anxiety : why and how to save work / Cynthia Estlund.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021011887 (print) | LCCN 2021011888 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197566107 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780197566121 (epub) | ISBN 9780197566114 (updf) | ISBN 9780197566138 (online)
Subjects: LCSH: Labor laws and legislation—United States. | Labor supply—Effect of technological
innovations on—United States. | Employees—Effect of automation on—United States.
Classification: LCC KF3321.E 88 2021 (print) | LCC KF3321 (ebook) | DDC 344.7301—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011887
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011888
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197566107.001.0001
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For Sam
Table of Contents
Preface ix
1. Is This Time Different? 1
2. Forecasting the Impact of Automation on Jobs 21
3. What’s Law Got to Do with It? How the Law of
Work Affects Automation (and Fissuring) 41
4. Three Goals for a Future of Less Work 63
5. Three Big Ideas (and Some Big Concerns) 85
6. Creating and Conserving Work 105
7. Spreading Work and Supporting Incomes 125
8. Footing the Bill 149
9. The Politics of Hope and Fear in a Future of Less Work 157
Notes 169
Index 223
Preface
By 2015, when I was looking for a new big project, the gig economy and the
larger phenomenon of “fissured work” had taken scholars of work law by
storm. A particular obsession was Uber and its treatment of drivers as in-
dependent contractors. All this attention was well warranted. The growing
ability of firms to extract value from human workers without hiring them
as employees was in the process of undermining the whole edifice of laws,
norms, and institutions built through more than a century of political agi-
tation and organizing by workers and their allies. Perhaps this would be my
next project.
As I started to immerse myself in the gig economy, however, I was struck
by two thoughts. First, these issues had already attracted an outpouring of
scholarly talent and energy among labor and employment law scholars.
Second, by contrast, there was almost no work being done on another po-
tentially existential challenge that appeared to be right around the corner
from fissuring and the gig economy: automation. On Uber’s own telling, the
transformation of jobs into gigs is only an intermediate step toward a more
complete escape from the hassles and burdens of employing human labor
through self-d riving vehicles. The end game in many cases— and ever more
cases as machines grow more capable— is not the shift from employment to
gig work but from humans to machines.
We have all seen the steady stream of stories about how robots, algorithms,
autonomous vehicles, and the like are poised to displace human workers in
droves. That is a profoundly unsettling prospect, and not only for those of
us who have devoted our professional lives to the study, regulation, or im-
provement of work and working lives. I found it especially eye- opening when
Andy Stern, who had spent much of his life organizing workers and agitating
for better wages and working conditions, emerged from a years- long deep
dive into the future of work as a convert to the automation-a s- job- killer nar-
rative and a proponent of universal basic income (UBI).1
Some of my particular anxieties about a future of much less work are
suggested by the title of my first book, Working Together: How Workplace
Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy (OUP, 2003). If the seemingly
