The Complexities of Technology and the Labour Market

"If you keep me six feet away from the other worker and you have a robot in between, it's now safe."

"And the robot companies are selling that as a solution and the unions aren't going to say, 'No, you should have the workers standing next to each other so they get sick'."

Richard Freeman, professor of economics, Harvard University

"When we come out of this crisis and labour is cheap again, firms will not necessarily roll back these inventions."

"These are kind of one-way transitions."

David Autor, economist, Massachusetts, Institute of Technology

"After this pandemic, the next pandemic will show up."

"We have to put more effort in automation in general assembly."

Peter Hochholdinger, vice-president, manufacturing, Lucid Motors

"Politicians are still not paying attention."

"We're going to be paying the cost for decades if we don't act now."

Ethan Pollack policy director, The Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative

 

Unions have for decades fought the concept of increasing robot automation, logically anticipating every time a machine is placed into workflow, yet another labourer becomes unemployed. The introduction of the global pandemic has been responsible for a calculation shift, since robots cannot be infected with COVID, but their human counterparts can, and will be. Now, the workplace challenge has also become the workplace answer to social distancing the workforce.

With the emphasis on protecting human labour from contracting the coronavirus, there has been an acceleration of robotic labour to help prevent contagion among workers. Once that shift has taken place and is humming along, no change in the virus status will herald a reversal of the situation; robots once in place will remain in place and the labour dynamic has changed for good. The workplace looks a lot different, with the spread of windshield-mounted toll detectors, automated factory floor cleaners, salad-chopping machines in grocery stores, mechanical butlers at hotels, and so forth.

A querulous lament is raised: what happens with the men and women who once laboured where robots now reign? It has been many years in the making beyond the anxiety and study behind the impact of technology in the workforce. Anxieties such as personal vehicles not after all, destroying the passenger train and bus transit systems, nor did ATMs, as feared put bank clerks out of employment; rather more were hired as banks offered a wider range of services.

So have robotics put people out of jobs? They have in the past and they will now in the latest configuration of mechanization as opposed to human labour. And union leaders scratch their heads in frustration. "In the auto industry, we see COVID accelerating transformation toward digitization" stated Georg Leutert, head of the automotive and aerospace industries at Geneva-based IndustriALL Global Union. It was all but inevitable and the appearance of SARS-CoV-2 sped up the revolution.

"If automation is unbridled it's going to be a threat", warned Mark Lauritsen of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union in North America, even while acknowledging that in an effort to avoid disruption in the meat industry caused by the virus, automation is set to continue. And then there is the fallout of office workers now working remotely from home, no longer supporting the in-office entrepreneurs from sandwich stall operators and janitors to bus drivers. Another facet of automation destroying jobs.

Administration support employment usually working in office towers has been reduced since last year by approximately 700,000 lost jobs according to data supplied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The stock market biased toward technology companies, drives investors away from labour-intensive industries in the aura of the pandemic. Retail work is not immune to the effect of automation with 500,000 fewer such jobs than last year.

 

One of the largest online retailers in China, JD.com successfully utilized autonomous robot vehicles to deliver food, medicine and other supplies in Wuhan. By rapidly addressing previous last mile issues with autonomous vehicles in the wild, JD.com delivered over 100 million masks over a 3 day period. Getty Images

 

According to the BLS, transportation and warehousing are now 100,000 jobs under the levels seen a year earlier. Sales, however, have reached their highest level on record, driven for the most part by e-commerce itself employing more automation than brick-and-mortar stores. In October the World Economic Forum reported 43 percent of businesses surveyed see their future in reducing the workforce as a result of technology innovation even as 34 percent intend to expand their workforce for the very same reason.

As an example,t he Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission installed an electronic tolling system and consequently cut 500 jobs. Electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors built a 999,000-square-foot electric vehicle factory in Casa Grande, Arizona planning to begin production on a $160,000 EV in 2021. It has planned its production around the belief that one pandemic will follow another, preparing for that eventuality with total production mechanization.

Interest in greater mechanization has leaped to the fore in mining with Caterpillar Inc. chief executive Jim Umpleby stating that older equipment will likely be replaced by digital trucks, while autonomous technologies will reduce proximity among workers. According to Juan Cariamo, chairman of CNP, a public-private group that helps test mining technologies in Chile, the virus has advanced long-term changes through forcing companies to relocate employees off-site.

"The pandemic has imposed a sense of urgency. Projects that were already in the pipeline are being sped up", he explained. The world's largest miner, BHP Group, established a $800 million program adding 500 autonomous trucks in iron ore and coal mines in Australia while considering adopting driverless trucks at copper mines in Chile. In Chile, the mining industry employed 201,000 workers in September, reduced 15 percent from the year before; the lowest in a decade according to Chile's Mining Council.

And Marcus Casey an economist at University of Illinois points out the obvious: the more people who cannot find work, the greater the risk of social unrest.

 

"[While some high-skilled workers will be retrained, many low-skilled ones such as toll collectors won't, exacerbating inequality]."
"Many of these people are prime-age males who have virtually nothing to do and our social policy directs money away from that cohort by and large."

"[Policy makers are] underestimating the political problem and the social problem that's going to emerge when we go into a world in which there's just not enough work to go around."

Marcus Casey economist, University of Illinois at Chicago