Operators or Experts? Skill, Automation, and Resistance Welding at Ford

This article reexamines resistance welding at the Ford Motor Company to challenge both the history of technology's emphasis on engineering expertise and dominant narratives of de-skilling in twentieth-century mass production. While scholarship on industrial mechanization has focused on managerial control and the erosion of craft, this study argues that welders developed forms of embodied, sensory, and machine-mediated expertise essential to automated production. Drawing on company records, technical literature, and visual sources, it reconstructs how welders used sight, touch, and sound to monitor electrodes, interpret sparks, maintain equipment, and adjust welding processes in real time. These practices remained largely invisible within Ford's own narratives of technological progress, which recast welders as unskilled "operators" subordinate to machines and managers. By foregrounding tacit and sensory labor, the article argues that mechanization reorganized rather than eliminated skill in the modern factory.