L abor's response to the first Industrial Revolution set a pattern that was
repeated in the wake of the second. Once again it was the workers
immediately affected by the changes who first sounded the alarm, described
the dangers, and undertook direct means to try to slow the assault on their
jobs and lives. And once again the issue of technological change was expropriated
from the workers by those who spoke for them. The issue was removed
from the point of production to executive offices and research centers, where
it was fitted into ideological and political agendas of future progress.t~he
result was a loss not just of an understanding of the reality confronting ~ikers
but of a strategy for dealing with it-in the present.