Deep in an Amazon warehouse somewhere in the Nevada desert, workers pick and pack orders, paid by the hour to make sure your iPads and yoga pads arrive a day or two after you order them. These workers aren’t Amazon employees. They’re contractors. Hired and managed by a temp agency, they clock in and out at the fulfillment center for shifts that can run for 12 hours. But after going off the clock, the temps can’t go home. They have to pass through a security checkpoint to make sure they haven’t pilfered any merchandise. They stand in line, sometimes for 20 minutes or more, before removing their belts, emptying their pockets, and passing through a metal detector. Only then are they allowed to leave the facility. The US supreme court is hearing arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit filed by two of these contractors. The temps claim that, because the security checks are compulsory and done for the employer’s benefit, they and their colleagues are owed back pay for all the time they’ve spent in line. The temp agency disagrees and is asking the justices to dismiss the suit. The workers face long odds. The Roberts court has a pro-business record, and the Obama justice department has filed a brief in support of the temp agency. But even if the temps prevail in this case, their good fortune will likely be short-lived. A fleet of robots stands ready to take their jobs. Workers today face an onslaught of job-gobbling technologies. Nimble automatons can perform ever more precise manual tasks, and analytical software is taking over knowledge work that was once the preserve of white-collar professionals. Even as the US economy expands and the unemployment rate falls, large swathes of the workforce find their prospects shrinking. Today’s companies would rather automate than hire. While Amazon has been stingy with its human workers, it has been generous with its robotic ones. The company is in the midst of a vast automation program that promises to winnow the work of warehouse hands and may end up eliminating their jobs. Two years ago, Amazon paid $775m to buy the Massachusetts robot-maker Kiva Systems. This past March, CEO Jeff Bezos announced that by year’s end Amazon would expand its robot force tenfold, from 1,000 to 10,000 machines. In Amazon’s new, highly automated warehouses, the robots get the plum jobs. They scoot through the aisles, find the needed products and carry the goods to the human workers. The humans, who remain stationary at their assigned posts, have but one dreary chore: boxing up the stuff. Machines don’t have the sense to arrange a variety of products in a box – at least not yet. Bezos is far from the only executive who seems more sympathetic to robots than to people. Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber, the fast-growing ride-sharing company that aims to put cabbies out of business, recently said that he can’t wait to replace Uber’s own drivers with autonomous cars. Asked what he’ll say to the drivers, Kalanick replied, “I’d say, ‘Look, this is the way of the world, and the world isn’t always great.’” Businesses have been shifting work from people to machines for a couple of centuries. The resulting job losses have always been more than offset by the creation of new realms of work. With computers, though, the range of jobs that can be automated has widened greatly. In law firms, junior lawyers who once scoured documents for evidence are being replaced by text-scanning software. In corporate HR departments, computers are making hiring and firing decisions. In hospitals, pharmacists are being replaced by robotic medication-dispensing systems. But what the computer revolution hasn’t done is open up big new categories of jobs to take up the slack. Labor-market experts have for years been documenting a “hollowing” of the middle class, as jobs gravitate to high-wage and low-wage extremes. But the latest statistics point to an an even more worrying trend – what one prominent economist dubs a “downward ramp”. As highly skilled work gets automated, the displaced professionals have to settle for more rudimentary posts. And that, in turn, pushes less-skilled workers further down the job chain – or onto the unemployment rolls. The American hero used to be the worker. Now, society tends to venerate the machine. Government subsidies help companies buy software. Tax laws and monetary policies encourage capital investments in automation. The court system gives workers’ rights short shrift. And the public seems more interested in what computers can do than in what people can. Earlier this year, Toyota Motor Company let it be known that in its Japanese plants, it has begun replacing some of its robots with human beings. The workers are fashioning crankshafts and other parts by hand. Having had to recall millions of cars in recent years, the automaker has come to realize that there’s no substitute for craftsmanship, experience and knowledge. Computers and robots may be immaculately efficient, but they’re still no smarter than jackhammers. They can’t replicate the ingenuity and insight of the artisan and the expert. That’s a lesson that Jeff Bezos, Travis Kalanick and all the rest of us should take to heart.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 03:30:08 +0000
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