Meeting Automation

Over half a century and more, labor has profited, along with industry, by continuous solutions of the problem of competition with the machine. The electronic age makes the problem all the more complicated. Last week in a night class in Los Angeles, a dozen members of the United Steelworkers of America (C.I.O.) took a step toward preparing themselves for the day of the automated factory. Wedged behind desks built to suit the proportions of their teen-age children, the men (average age: 36) listened intently to 31-year-old Stanley Hauer, instructor and planner of their pilot course, who sat in his shirtsleeves atop his desk as he lectured.

Chiefly responsible for the educational project is Cass D. Alvin, the Steelworkers' western regional educational director. Alvin likes to cite a page of labor history as the wrong way to cope with the problem: England's igth century "Luddites" tried to stem the infant Industrial Revolution by smashing up the new machinery. Says Alvin: "We could kick these new electronic machines like the Luddites did, but they wouldn't give a damn."

Last summer, instead of kicking the machines, Alvin and Joseph E. Doherty, one of the union's business representatives, asked Industrial Engineer Hauer to draft an experimental course that would make electronic technicians out of the union's semiskilled machine-tenders, the most vulnerable targets of automation. With the help of Donald B. Levinson, a Hughes Aircraft electrical engineer, and RCA Electronic Technician Joseph Schoen, Hauer settled on a night curriculum. The class will meet twice a week for four years, start with the simplest math problems but eventually lead the students through basic courses in radar, physics and electronics. The course outline has been accepted by the state-supported adult education program. The classes are open to nonunion registrants, and the only tuition for the course is a 25-c- token fee required by the high school where the classes are held. Hauer set the pace at a slow academic rate; he gives no tests, receives class papers unsigned ("Each one of these men came convinced he's the only dumb one in the class").

More than 50 steelworkers have already signed up, and Alvin knows that watchful eyes at the 1,200,000-member union's headquarters are on the project. Says he: "Automation's a scare word, but if we're going to scare our men, let's scare them intelligently. There's no point in telling them a second flood is coming and nobody knows where the ark is. Our four-year course is our ark."

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