Lessons From Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

As organizations like Amazon, PwC, and Microsoft have announced AI-fueled layoffs, it’s no surprise that half of Americans have expressed concern about AI’s larger potential impact on their jobs. Of course, companies can attribute layoffs to AI efficiencies while trimming workforces for various reasons. Yet there is no question that artificial intelligence is causing disruption in the job market, making both entry-level jobs and roles in functions like HR and project management, for example, harder to find. Workers and leaders are currently faced with an overwhelming amount of advice for navigating this period of uncertainty. As we move through a historic period of AI-driven labor disruption, why not turn to a place of comfort and simplicity in the pages of a well-known children’s book?

Our ongoing research, focused on the future of work, recently took us to the Virginia Lee Burton archives at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Burton is well known for her children’s stories, including The Little House, Life Story, Katy and the Big Snowو Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. Through archival research, we learned that the story of Mike Mulligan offers powerful historic lessons on labor disruption and job adaptation that may provide comfort and guidance for workers and leaders in today’s AI age.

The Story of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

One of Burton’s most enduring stories is Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, published in 1939, about steam shovel operator Mike and his steam shovel, named Mary Anne. (Befitting a children’s book, Mary Anne is an anthropomorphized earth-moving machine.) The story is set against a future of work that unfolded a hundred years ago. After the Great Depression, the U.S. economy experienced wide-scale mechanization, standardization, and mass production designed to lift the economic situation. As a team, Mike and Mary Anne play a significant role in the boom; they lay the foundations for buildings, open waterways for ships, level the ground for highways, cut tunnels for railroads, and smooth the earth for airfields.

However, their success is somewhat short-lived, as technological advancement brings superior machinery into play. At its core, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is a story of disruption, change, and adaptation.