As COVID-19 wanes, employers are accelerating the use of robots. Where does that leave workers?
At the Grand Food Depot in Los Angeles, a robot moves a restaurant order to the next station before it reaches the customer. As the U.S. economy rebounds from the COVID-19 pandemic, employers are turning to greater use of automation, including robots, rather than calling back workers or hiring new ones in many cases. “We have additional engineering staff on our payroll, well-compensated folks, that are directly correlated with automation, that didn’t exist in our building 15 years ago,” he said. In the U.S., said Susanne Bieller, general secretary of the Germany-based International Federation of Robotics, there’s more of “a hire-and-fire way of doing things.” That means less-skilled workers in this country “may suffer significant hardship as they seek new work, potentially in occupations where they have no experience or training,” MIT scholars David Autor and Elisabeth Reynolds said in a Brookings Institution paper. “Paradoxically, having too few low-wage, economically insecure jobs is actually worse than having too many,” they said, because reducing demand for less-skilled people in low-paid jobs won’t “ultimately raise demand for these same workers in middle-paid jobs.” Contributing to the problem for less-skilled workers is that the pandemic has wiped out countless small businesses.
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