Big brains - 21 January 1962

Perhaps the oldest cliché about New York is that it will be a great town when they get it finished.

But ever since I have been here, years before the war, New York – Manhattan in particular – has been pulled down and put up. Since 1946 this movement has become a landslide. I always notice, if I am away for a week or two, that I come back and walk or drive past a very familiar corner, bang in the middle of the city, and it's familiar no more.

I suppose it’s not odd that a wrecking crew by definition works faster than a construction crew. The ability of New York’s wreckers to tear down a 10- or 20-storey building over the weekend has to be heard to be believed. Then for a month or two there is a vast bomb crater, fenced off by some decorative wooden fences, containing peep holes at strategic differences from the ground – that is to say, adult peepholes about five feet up, and peepholes for the small fry, about two feet from the ground – sometimes they are indicated by arrows and sometimes they are festooned by decorations. They usually contain a sign saying, "Sidewalks superintendents club", and are put there to cater to the universal human curiosity to see what is going on behind the fence.

This is an immemorial American custom and I must say to me, it's one of the most agreeable. Well, if any time in the past dozen years you had stopped to peep through all the peepholes contrived by the construction people you would have done no work at all. If, however, you’d have had the leisure to go around town this week, and peep through all the holes, for the first time since 1945 you would have seen nothing at all going on.

The builders ceased from building, the dust from the blasting settled on the silent skeletons of buildings halfway up, the bulldozers dozed. For a couple of days, there was no construction going on, anywhere in New York. This was all on account of the electricians union which went on strike just before the weekend.

Strikes these days, are always for very complicated causes and even more complicated concessions. And I never envy a labour reporter who writes his piece and next day has to meet a labour union official; you always got it wrong. I mentioned this strike, though, with a rare burst of confidence, because the electricians grievance was very simple.

They were not complaining about fringe benefits. They don’t want a company contribution of three and two-eighths percent, to all sickness insurance dues that fall beyond the thirty percent carrying charge of the state subsidy less nine and a quarter percent, carry over from an amortisation fund. They don’t even want hospitalisation benefits for all workers wounded in tennis matches or swimming races, on the company recreation grounds. They want higher wages and fewer hours. They wanted the current pittance raised to three guineas an hour.

I said an hour. And they want to bring in now what a labour philosopher maintains is going to be a bedrock necessity of the nuclear age: they want a 20-hour week, a four-hour day. It's what we are all aiming at, of course, but most of us have been taught that the key to prosperity is productivity. This turns out to be a capitalist racket. In no time flat, computers are going to be doing the overtime, and when that happens it will be criminal repetition to have human beings build buildings, drive buses, and, so they say, write poetry. When the machines take over, we will only get in the way by doing anything so old-fashioned and incompetent as living by the sweat of our brow. Four hours a day will be plenty.

The electricians are the first to see this and by the end of this past week they had almost made the electrical industries see it too. At any rate, on Friday the builders started banging away at their work again, the strike was over. The electricians won, a five-hour day, a 25-hour week. Actually, my favourite weasel word – since it usually means that everything that is done before is a lie – actually, the electricians now undertake to work six hours a day, but on the strict understanding that the extra hour is goodwill and shall be paid for at overtime rates.

I don’t know how this is going to work out for reporters, for instance; the news has a distressing habit of dribbling out all through the day and night, quite aside from the inconvenient geophysical fact, that a New Yorker's day is a Londoner's night. About 20 years ago, when there was agitation for a fixed eight-hour day, I remember HL Mencken saying an eight-hour day for a newspaper man is no more possible than an eight-hour day for an archbishop.

Perhaps by the time IBM takes over our physical world, the United Nations will cooperate and, through the world court, make it illegal to pull an invasion or a South American coup or the death of a famous man, except between certain prescribed hours of the day. It certainly all sounds like doomsday for the businessman, the big businessman especially, who is coming to depend more than ever on the computer and the mechanical brain.

However, let me locate and hail a silver lining. Down in Port Arthur, Texas, there is a big oil and chemical refinery which employs 3,700 men. They walked out in the autumn and this week they walked back again, sadder if not wiser. During the ten weeks of their strike, not a single worker crossed the picket line, an example of union discipline and loyalty which, the union was sure, would teach management a thing or two.

Well it seems it was the union that learnt the lessons. The company was able to keep 600 supervisors and technicians on the job. They went around pressing buttons and checking gauges and seeing that the automated machines were well fed with oil and current. The machines did the rest. With the full workforce of 3,700 men the refinery used to turn out 200,000 barrels a day, of petrol fuel oil and other bi products. With just 600 supervisors it turned out, throughout the strike, 130,000 barrels a day – 65% of total production.

After the turn of the year, the supervisors had discovered new tricks with the machines to guarantee more efficiency and production was on the way up towards 140,000 barrels; 150,000 was in sight, when the union threw in the sponge, a gesture that's a hangover from the days of handicraft. This nasty incident has given pause to the union on two counts.

First, it saw the company win nine points out of ten on the new contract. Secondly, it discovered that it's getting harder all the time to recruit new members to the union. Ironically enough, the big issue of this strike was job security, something the workers saw vanishing in the act of trying to enforce it. The company promised it would give them 60 days' notice of layoffs caused by technical improvements. In a word, by automation. It would give them no warning at all of layoffs caused by poor business.

The electricians may not be quite so cavalier after all. They are getting job security and higher wages guaranteed now, before the machines move in and guarantee their insecurity. In a dim and sinister way, I suspect that in this there is a lesson for us all.

By the way this week I heard about a man, a man of faith, who began to wobble when he heard of all the marvels that the computers can perform these days. He asked permission of a computer firm to use their big brain to help him solve a crucial problem of belief. He wanted to know if there was a God. He soon learned how you feed facts, and even opinions, into these winking monsters, and he fed it slices of Genesis and reams of Bertram Russell and gobs of Darwin, and selected cuts of Cardinal Newman, and pressed the necessary buttons and pulled the levers and leaned back and waited.

At the end of a night and a day, the machine ground to a slow chug and, eventually, flickered and stuttered and punched out a card with the answer on it. It said, "There is now". This terrifying story sends me back in a hurry to our human, messy, unscientific world while we still have it with us. And no place could be more encouraged, less likely to suggest that automation is just around the corner, than the United Nations General Assembly. It's resumed again this week, and what is left over from its unfinished agenda of the winter, has to do almost entirely with colonialism, whatever that is.

I throw in that disclaimer not from cynicism but from honest bewilderment, having watched this General Assembly probe and exploit and mangle the world colonialism since the autumn. It is, in fact, being called the Colonialist Assembly, and all the signs seem to show that the former colonial powers, no matter how reformed or enlightened or compassionate they may be, are going to get the worst of it. The mere fact of having once held colonies suggests a lingering guilt by association which the Communists, for obvious reasons, and the Asian, Africans, for more complicated and sometimes sincere reasons, are rubbing in as hard as they can.

As somebody once said about Lawrence Stern, who would build up a highly suggestive incident and just before it ended leave it on paper in a trail of dots, he puts upon the reader the odium of the obvious interpretation. It’s the same with France, Britain, Portugal Belgium and the rest. If you ask a delegate at the UN if he is against colonialism, he doesn't ask you to define it, he looks at you as if you’d asked him if he was against sin.

Well, this week the assembly was arguing through to a conclusion so Gilbertian that I don’t think that WS Gilbert would have touched it if he’d been offered the plot free. Let’s take merely the two most tantalising cases.

One of these is southern Rhodesia. The assembly has, by now, a 17-man committee on colonialism (it is, of course, against it), but it looks into the present state of old and existing colonists to see how their lot may be bettered. Britain cannot think why the committee – and afterwards, the assembly – should be looking into southern Rhodesia, which Britain says is free and self-governing, already. The committee says ah... but how free? How short does it fall of the full measure of self-government? That, of course, is unanswerable. We all, nations and individuals alike, fall handsomely short of the full measure of self-government.

The other case, is that of the Belgium trust territory, Ruanda-Urundi. Urundi is one territory that has voted for independence, to start next year. Urundi is a monarchy. Ruanda is a republican and wants no part of Urundi and its independence; it would like to be independent of Urundi. The Belgian’s are anxious to get rid of both of them. So the problem here is that the UN this time, through its trustee committee, has been patiently trying to create an African state that doesn’t want to be an African state, it wants to be two. And, just to ease the whole situation, there have now appeared some Africans, the Ghanaians and Guineans for example, who begin to wonder, if the creation of so many small states won’t lead to the Balkanising of Africa.

This misgiving, which some high-minded people held around 1900, surely comes under the New Yorker's famous heading "About Time" department.

BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.