3 Quotes by Mary L. Gray

It took organized labor and the collective action of workers to make full-time employment in the semi-automated world of industrial manufacturing inhabitable. Unfortunately, the valorization and validation of full-time employment also made it easier for corporate interests to position piecework and, later, other forms of temporary or contract labor as expendable, that is, work that did not warrant protections.

When industries fixate on automating jobs away, they paradoxically spoke demand for ghost work, shredding the social contract between employer and worker in their wake.

The great paradox of automation is that the desire to eliminate human labor always generates new tasks for humans.