Chris Dillow: The Technology Trap: a review

Chris Dillow writes about The Technology Trap: a review.

Instead, [Dillow] suspect[s] Diane Coyle is right to argue that Frey treats technical change as exogenous when in fact it isn’t. For example, the distinction between labour-replacing and labour-enabling technical change, whilst insightful, distracts us from another type – the sort that enables capitalist exploitation such as the power-biased technical change discussed by Skott and Guy. We should ask: if we have greater worker ownership, what sort of technical change would we see? Mightn’t it be more labour-enabling?

Emphasis Mine

Michael Lebowitz, in The Contradictions of "Real Socialism": The Conductor and the Conducted, writes

In 1975, David Granick argued that the right to a job in the Soviet Union involved far more than full employment at the macro level—it also functioned at the micro level. “It is considered impermissible, except in very rare circumstances,” he indicated, “to dismiss workers on any grounds other than those of gross incompetence or continued violation of factory discipline.” In short, “workers have had virtually complete job security. More than anything else, it is this feature which has given content in the mind of the ordinary worker to the slogan of a workers’ state.”

The “political unacceptability of dismissals” thus gave workers real security; they were “protected, not only against the reality of unemployment, but also against the need to change either occupation or place of work under the threat of unemployment.” This characteristic, which Granick called the “micro-economic full employment” constraint (but which he would later call “job rights”), meant that workers were “virtually immune from pressure to undergo job changes which they personally regard, for whatever reason, as reducing their individual welfare.”

Emphasis Mine

The Contradictions of "Real Socialism": The Conductor and the Conducted
Michael Lebowitz
Kindle Location: 929

To reconcile Dillow's and Lebowitz's points, I would see workers having advanced their conciousness from work as being a source of income to being contribution to society. Under Capitalism, an ordinary person needs to work in order to get money for sustenance. Under Communism, an ordinary person contributes to society through their work.

Would seeing work as contribution enable workers to embrace productivity improvements through technical change? I would hope so.