Labor Augmenting or Job-Replacing? Railroad Firemen and the Automatic Stoker

Benjamin Schneider, Oslo Metropolitan University

Economists frequently group innovations into two categories: labor-augmenting and labor-replacing technologies. This article challenges that distinction by analyzing the adoption of the automatic (or mechanical) locomotive stoker on US railroads during the early 20th century. Railroad business correspondence, technical reports, union publications, and investigations by the national railroad regulator, the Interstate Commerce Commission, provide evidence about firms’ decision-making and the effect of automation on workers. Increasing locomotive sizes in the late 19th century produced rising demand for fuel, and the automatic stoker allowed railroads to continue operating with a single fireman per locomotive. Despite the prima facie labor-replacing impact, the firemen’s union advocated for railroads to adopt this automation technology. In practice, technological unemployment was hypothetical and firemen who worked with automatic stokers enjoyed superior working conditions to those on locomotives that required hand shoveling. The article uses this example to suggest that analysis of the impacts of technology requires greater understanding of the features of innovations and firms’ implementation practices, and it proposes a matrix to categorize the effects of technological changes on employees and production.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 211. Work, Technology, and Wellbeing