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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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So I work in industrial automation, and live in a high cost of living part of Canada.
Back around 2017 or so, companies said we were in a labor shortage. I sold a few robots to factories that couldn't keep people in a few of their jobs (I'm thinking of two different small factories). These are tasks that are so boring that people lose their minds. The factories would hire someone and they'd quit after a week.
When the cost of continuously hiring new people became apparent, they bought robots.
I guarantee that there was some wage that would've kept those employees on the job. It might have been unpalatably high for the people in charge, but it certainly existed.
Personally I'd rather see those jobs done by robots. No one wants that job, let the robot do it.
I'm not sure it's that simple. I think if you offered someone 150k to do the job, they'd do it for long enough to build some savings then quit and live off of that while they found something more fulfilling to do.
I think that really the only way to keep people in that job is for them to have terrible alternatives.
The job was to put a small piece of metal into a machine (brake press), push a button, and take the now slightly bent piece of metal out of the machine.
The metal is part of a hinge for something like a knee brace. The factory makes a bunch of metal components for different things but didn't make the whole knee brace.
I guess the company could try to get a higher price for the part, or just say they don't want that contract... but people need knee braces. So yeah, I don't feel bad about selling them a robot. Some jobs are just better done by machines. The issue is wealth concentration.
Maybe a worker's council could have found a way to make the job less bad.
Wanting to automate something because it's better/cheaper is very different from falsely claiming that there's a "labor shortage" because they allegedly can't find anybody to do the job, though. There's no need for them to be fucking self-servingly dishonest about it.
Interesting but anecdotal and not necessarily representative of the bigger picture.
Totally.
while just looking at the scenario itself, that's all pretty fair. but the company's efforts to commoditize its labor directly brought that boring job into existence.
cheaper to pay for maintenance than living wages or god forbid, pensions.