You know, I wouldn't really be suprised if it was pretty much the exact same process used today and there were still roughly the same number of jobs in the factories. It could very well be cheaper to just keep things the same for years on end rather then upgrade an entire interconection series of industrial machines set up in such a specialised way. I'd imagine you'd possibly have to scrap a lot of working machinery to do so, and by that point most of the jobs that could be easily replaced by machines probably would have been. And unions...damn. But you mentioning that actually has me curious now.
