Creating jobs by replacing jobs?
TO LISTEN TO THE POLITICIANS, IT’S ALL ABOUT JOBS. IN FACT,
if there’s anything that politicians of all stripes can agree on, it’s that
it’s “time to put Americans back to work.”
So the following statement will likely strike many as heresy: It’s not
just about jobs. It’s about productivity.
Renowned economist Barry Asmus, a regular speaker on the conference circuit, has more than once declared that the politicians have
got it all wrong when it comes to the economy in general, and
employment in particular. “They all talk about creating jobs,” he says.
But job creation, he argues, is not what drives economic growth.
“If we want to simply create jobs,” Asmus quips,
“the federal government should just shut down all
heavy equipment manufacturers, take their existing
equipment out of the market, and ... give everyone
a shovel.” Instead of having three people operating
heavy equipment, we’d have 3,000 people doing the
same work by hand, he says. “So we created jobs,
but we put productivity in the tank. The politicians
have got to learn—and quickly—that it’s not about
jobs; it’s about productivity.”
Asmus is right … to a point. With unemploy-
ment rates at their highest levels in decades, we do
need jobs. We need them badly. But if we hope to
drive economic growth, we also have to kickstart
manufacturing productivity. That is, we have to
find better, faster, and cheaper ways to make products.
Problem is, history has shown that it’s tough to achieve both objectives at once. While countless companies have realized double-digit
productivity gains through automation and robotics, the gains have
often come at the price of jobs. But it doesn’t have to be that way. A
number of companies right here in the logistics and supply chain
world have made that clear.
Take Crown Equipment Corp., for example. Crown recently
brought 50 welding robots on line in its lift truck manufacturing
operations, but the move didn’t result in a round of layoffs. Instead,
the New Bremen, Ohio-based company will retrain the affected
employees and shift them to new jobs.
It’s the same story over at MCFA (Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift
America) and Toyota Material Handling USA. MCFA has automated
its painting process and brought in robotic welders and metal-cutters,
while Toyota has introduced automated guided vehicles into its manufacturing process. But neither move resulted in a blizzard of pink
slips. These companies, too, simply reassigned
workers to other positions.
While Crown, MCFA, and Toyota have amply
demonstrated that it’s possible to preserve jobs
when automating operations, another company
takes the argument a step further. Pittsburgh-
based Seegrid Corp., a maker of robotic technol-
ogy, contends that bringing in robotic devices
can actually create jobs in the long term. David
Seegrid isn’t alone in its view.
The National Institute of
Standards and Technology
(NIST), a federal agency that
promotes U.S. manufacturing
competitiveness, has reached
the same conclusion. On a section of its website
devoted to next-generation robotics and automa-
tion, NIST cites a report by the Computing
Community Consortium that concludes in part
that “[robotics] clearly represents one of the few
technologies capable in the near term of building
new companies and creating new jobs.”
Will all this lead to putting Americans back to
work? Only time will tell. But how great would it
be if robots succeeded where politicians could
not?
