There’s noth­ing new under the sun.  Whether you first heard it from the bible, Shake­speare or from your grand­mother, it has power. I remem­ber try­ing to refute it in my head when my mom would say it, off-hand, sort of like “Ka sera sera.”

We tend to think of work as some­thing for­ever changed and made “new” by tech­nol­ogy. And we’ve been pro­grammed in our metric-dependent cul­ture to hitch our tech­no­log­i­cal advances to the upward slope-star of productivity.

I’ve been read­ing David Mont­gomery lately. He’s not on the Times best-seller list, but his books about US labor his­tory, Cit­i­zen Worker,  Work­ers’ Con­trol in Amer­ica, and The Fall of the House of Labor, remind me that with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of the tools we use to do today’s work — the what work looks like and to some extent how it’s done — maybe not that much has changed for the Amer­i­can worker.

Did you know that skilled and to some extent unskilled labor in the 19^th cen­tury were moti­vated to union­ize, to give up their indi­vid­ual voices for a col­lec­tive one, in order to direct them­selves? Work rules, the autonomous way that crafts­men did their thing and their very work ethic, was leg­is­lated by union mem­bers within their own unions. Super­vi­sors didn’t know how to do highly skilled jobs and both crafts­men and their super­vi­sors knew it.

With the advent of sci­en­tific man­age­ment — even before Fred­er­ick Taylor’s hol­low “one best way”  – employ­ers enforced stan­dard­iza­tion and con­trol of work and worker alike. It’s not hard to imag­ine resis­tance from men who’d appren­ticed, jour­neyed and mas­tered their crafts, men who were now being told what to do, where to stand, when, how and how often their bod­ies would move, accord­ing to schedule.

Today, we tend to think of labor unions as the antithe­sis of progress, block­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity, hurt­ing free mar­kets and help­ing slack­ers. We grit our teeth when we read that a mere fac­tory worker makes $60 grand plus over­time. We can’t believe that many teach­ers still have a tenure sys­tem that restricts employ­ment at will. And Hoffa’s bloody Team­sters, those com­mie Indus­trial Work­ers of the World… there’s enough “evi­dence” out there to fuel out­rage for another indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion and then some.

But here’s the inter­est­ing thing: so many unions (for­merly called guilds) were eagerly founded, vol­un­tar­ily joined and more active than churches in the nine­teenth cen­tury, despite throngs of immi­grants ready to replace any worker on the spot (unions had not been given legal sta­tus until 1935).  Doesn’t this say some­thing about our human nature? Unless that’s com­pletely changed.

For me it says, “Hey, I get that you (com­pany) want to make the most money you can. But my health and the work I do are not going to suf­fer for it. I won’t kill myself for you. And in return I’ll give you a good product/service, espe­cially if you give me credit: let me use my brain to help decide what, where, when, how and why, then pay me a decent wage to do it.”

Today, auton­omy to estab­lish work rules might include estab­lish­ing your own work week (if Tues­days are not good for you, work on Sat­ur­day; or work 11 hours on Mon­day, 4 hours Tues­day, 12 hours Wednes­day, 13 hours Thurs­day).  Or, auton­omy to pro­tect your mar­riage or your health. Another 6-month project in Los Ange­les? Mmm, no, not now. (No offense LA.) Or, the right to rest: expec­ta­tions to answer calls, text or email at any hour?

Could Labor Move­ment 2.0 be on its way?