'You Got to Move When the Robots Move'
Automation forces some workers to behave like robots. But this hardship isn't evenly distributed across the workforce.
Robots aren’t going to act like people for a long time (if ever), but in workplaces people are being forced to act like robots right now. I thought this was an important point when I wrote about it last September, here. Now, a few months later, it’s becoming a truism. Sarah O’Connor, a columnist for the Financial Times, made a similar observation here, in a piece last month renouncing her previous pro-robot stance. Ditto Axios’ Bryan Walsh, in this riff last month on how people suffer when work is done by human-robot teams.
But, mea culpa, I was guilty of fuzzy phrasing. And so are other reports that tell you that robots in general force workers in general to act in a more robot-like way. Dig below the headlines and first few paragraphs of O’Connor and Walsh (and me!) and other stories, and you’ll find all the specific examples of “robotization” come from one industry: Warehouses and shipping.
One reason I’ve started this newsletter is because I wanted to foster better-informed, more precise conversations about robots and their effects. In that spirit I suggest us media folk stop generalizing. Robot effects on workers are varied. Some industries are at least exploring how robots could make workers’ lives safer and healthier. On the other hand, the million people who work in the nation’s warehouses appear unusually vulnerable to bad robotics — robotics that, contrary to robot-makers’ vision of machines making life better for humans, instead make it worse.
Among the reasons, as described in this report by Beth Gutelius and Nik Theodore, published by the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education and the community-organizing group Working Partnerships, USA, are these:
@ Lots of low-skill jobs. Warehouse workers move stuff around, drive trucks or tractors, pick things up so they can be shipped — jobs that don’t require a lot of specialized skills. This is unlike, say, construction, where skilled workers are in great demand, or agriculture, where workers are aging out and younger people aren’t moving in to take over the work. Miserable workers in those sectors are more likely to be able to vote with their feet for better conditions.
It’s also easier, when a warehouse worker does leave, to find someone else to do the job. If it only takes a morning to train a new worker, it is easy to replace an unhappy, burned-out or injured employee with someone new. So why slow down the robots for the employees’ sake? Many warehouse workers are already in the place that skilled workers fear they’ll be in the near future, after robots make their jobs “easier.” If “easier” means “requiring less skill and experience” then robots could turn a job that now commands respect and good wages into an “anyone can do it” gig.
This de-skilling (or, as the writer Kas Thomas calls it, “job crapification”) has contributed to the pressure on warehouse workers today, according to Gutelius and Theodore. In fact, they predict that robotics and other automation will not cause the sheer number of jobs in the industry to drop much in the next ten years. But those jobs may well be thoroughly crapified: Requiring less skill, allowing less control, paying less money.
@ Lots of only-game-in-town employment situations. Many warehouse jobs are in areas where, again, there aren’t a lot of other employers to go to.
@ Low profit margins. In some industries robots have been sold as a way to keep experienced workers on the job longer (make the work less taxing, and an experienced 57-year-old auto worker can keep clocking in for a few more years). A fulfillment center (be it a small business with tight profit margins or an Amazon or Walmart warring ruthlessly on price) is more likely to want a robot to squeeze every last second of efficiency out of the process. If the “improvements” wear some people out, they can be replaced (see bullet 1).
@ Robot limitations. Robots are still not as adept at humans at handling objects or dealing with slight changes in work. (For instance, I’ve seen a factory robot stop and signal for human help just because something it was supposed to screw landed slightly ajar). So the option to simply eliminate human workers isn’t there. Warehouses and fulfillment centers still need human eyes and especially human hands.
@ No unions. Workers who are forced to work like robots in fulfillment centers have not been able to organize against such treatment. (But see below.)
All this adds up to an industry that needs humans to work with robots, but has less incentive than others to keep the humans happy or healthy. Hence, robotized workers.
Which bring us to an upcoming event with potentially significant consequences for warehouse robotics. At the end of this month voting will conclude on a bid to organize workers at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Bessemer, Ala.
Robots have been a factor in the union drive.
“There really ain’t no way to stay comfortable because you’ve got to move when the robots move,” Darryl Richardson, a “picker’’ in an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, told the writer Sarah Jones. (A picker takes the items that the robot brings and puts them in a tote for packaging.) Richardson helped get the union drive going, and he has explained to several different journalists that he wants to stop Amazon from treating him as if he were a machine.
Having to collaborate with a robot at the robot’s pace is one aspect of that grievance. Another is employer technology that tracks him and his actions as if he were a piece of equipment. During his 11-hour shifts, for example, every minute not picking is tracked as “time off task,” too much of which can lead to firing.
March 30 is the day that vote-counting concludes.
This and That
Microscopic robot swarms cross the blood-brain barrier in mice. Mind-blowing (pun intended) paper in Science Robotics today. Good account of it at Gizmodo here.
“Prosthetic arm technology is still so limited that I become more disabled when I wear one.” At the new magazine Input, Britt H. Young explains why she hates her prosthetic arm, why many other upper-limb amputees also find these robotic prostheses to be more trouble than they are worth, and why she finds media narratives about them to be mostly about making able-bodied people feel good.
Walmart announces it’s building more “automated fulfillment facilities” where robots (from Alphabot) will quickly procure orders for customers or delivery people. Which sounds cool and all, but let’s all recall that Walmart sometimes has abrupt changes of heart about robot deployment.
Nice piece. Hoping the robots don't get to vote in the Amazon plant union election.