In the early 1970s a receptionist called Sharon Atkins gazed into the future and hoped it would contain fewer people like her. “We’re going to have to find machines which can do that sort of thing,” she told the social historian Studs Terkel. “You’re wasting an awful lot of human power.” She felt shackled to the incessantly ringing phone. In snatches of time between calls, she wrote rambling letters, never posted, about how depressed she was. Her job was so routine she felt as she had been turned into “just a little machine”. “It’s really unfair to ask someone to do that.”
In his 1974 book Working
— a set of interviews with ordinary workers across America — Terkel met plenty of people who felt this way. “I’m caged,” a bank teller told him. “I’m a machine,” said a spot welder. A steelworker called himself a mule. “You’re doing this manual labour and you know that technology can do it.”