The perennial challenge of the luddites

From John Baker, Australian telecoms leader, quoted in Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine pg 109:

The developing consciousness of the Australian trade unionist illustrates the old challenge of the Luddites to the factory-owners: “you haven’t any right to take over my tools and skills and build them into a machine [that] you, alone, own and whose products you, alone, sell in the marketplace.” This old objection is being resurrected again as owners of technology and capital build the skills, experience, and knowledge of millions of office and factory workers into the micro-machine processes that make them unemployed.

My emphasis