Adapt or Resist?
Unions and the Political Economy of Automation

A growing literature argues that automation, freer trade, and more open immigration are economic substitutes for firms seeking lower labor costs. However, I argue that the politics of automation differ from those of trade and immigration and that standard political economy theories cannot explain the divergent responses of different unions to automation. I argue that the diversity of occupations represented by a union determines whether it accommodates automation or opposes it. To test this theory, I compare two cases drawn from the United States between 1950 and 1975 analyzed through deep process tracing. In this neglected episode in economic history, I show that occupationally diverse, industrial unions cautiously embraced automation, while homogeneous craft unions were more militantly opposed. These findings demonstrate that, far from being powerless or reflexively oppositional when faced with new technologies, unions shape the adoption of automation in different ways depending upon their structures and internal dynamics.