The future of automation had clearly arrived twenty years after the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement. Continuous technological change seemed a given, outside the reach of a labor movement playing defense. Like the ILWU, the UAW boasted militant origins; but the Autoworkers union hadn’t sustained the deep traditions of rank and file democracy that the ILWU had. And unlike longshoremen, who occupied a key doorway in the distribution networks of the global economy, autoworkers labored in manufacturing, increasingly vulnerable to shifts in production from one place in the world to another.

Close to 11.5 million American workers were laid off due to plant closings and outsourcing between 1979 and 1984. In the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, America’s largest corporations saw the opportunity to retool how they did business. At GM, an internal management document leaked to the press in 1984 laid out a plan to further downsize its hourly workforce by 80,000 jobs within six years through a combination of outsourcing and automation.