Technical Alliance
= the birth of the Technical Alliance in the 1920s, the forerunner of Technocracy:
Description
“The Technical Alliance is simply an attempt to organize the technical workers on their jobs instead of organizing them as an academic group outside. In one sense of the word, this may be called the first genuine labor organization in America, for every technician is engaged in strategically important labor and is concerned primarily with the organization, that is, the coordination of industry.”
(https://www.technocracyinc.org/the-birth-of-the-technical-alliance/)
Interview
.. with the founder, Howard Scott:
"“The whole problem may be stated,” he said, “as the problem of elimination of waste, but waste to an engineer has a different meaning than it does to the general public. People generally think of waste only in terms of potato peelings or of spending money for what they hanker for, instead of for what they think they ought to buy. If the elimination of that kind of waste could solve the problem, China should be the richest country on earth today; but the engineer recognizes exhaustion of any natural resource is a waste.” “If we could eliminate idleness and duplication of effort,“ he said, “we may have immediate prosperity −such prosperity as the world has never known. If we could find a way then to husband our natural resources, we may make that prosperity permanent.”
“Can the engineers and technical men do this?” I asked.
“If they can’t,“ he answered, “nobody can. Inasmuch, however, as that is only one thing they are trained to do, the problem doesn’t seem difficult. The simple fact is that they have not tackled the problem up-todate. They have been trying, with gratifying success, to eliminate idleness and duplication of effort within the various industries in which they have been employed, but so far they have not thought of American industry, which means, practically, that they haven’t thought as engineers.”
“The time has come, however, when the engineer must do exactly that. We are reaching a crisis, and the technicians are the only people who can find out what to do. They must survey the country, tabulate its resources, discover its possibilities in natural and human power, uncover the present wastes and leakages, and work out a tentative design of coordinated production and distribution.”
“And suppose you draw up a seemingly workable plan,” I asked. “What are you going to do with public opinion?”
“It is all a technical matter,” he said. “It makes not the slightest difference whether the public knows about it or not. The steam engine didn’t need a press agent. The Einstein Theory doesn’t require any special legislative enactment. If the only people who can bring order to our present industrial chaos find out exactly how to do the job, we needn’t worry about the next step.”
(https://www.technocracyinc.org/the-birth-of-the-technical-alliance/)