Knowledge as Obstacle

Andrew Ure saw what most industrial theorists have preferred not to see: that skilled workers' knowledge is not just an input to production that the machinery might happen to render redundant, but a source of power that the factory owner has a positive interest in eliminating. The skilled worker possesses knowledge the factory owner does not possess. That knowledge is leverage. It allows the worker to command higher wages, to set terms of employment, to organize collectively, to resist the pace of work, to refuse tasks considered beneath his skill — in short, to exercise the insubordination that Ure identified as the chronic problem of skilled labor. The machine's virtue is not merely that it produces more cheaply. It produces without the worker's knowledge, and therefore without the worker's bargaining power. The efficiency and the disempowerment are not separate features. They are the same feature, viewed from different positions in the social structure.