64 DC VELOCITY JANUARY 2020 www.dcvelocity.com
IN AN OLD FOLK SONG, JOHN HENRY, AN AFRICAN-American laborer of extraordinary strength (and apparently,
work ethic), pits his skills against a machine. Henry, who was
known as a “steel driving” man—meaning a worker who hammered a steel drill into rock to bore holes for explosives—was
convinced he could do the job faster and better than the newly
introduced steam drill, and he accepted a challenge to prove it.
Legend has it that he won the contest only to die at the moment
of victory when his heart gave out from exertion.
It’s a classic American man-versus-machine tale that resonated
with the era’s working people, who feared that the coming of
machines would cost them their jobs.
Fast-forward to the modern day, and we still hear echoes of the
old John Henry story—only now, the new-fan-gled machines aren’t steam drills, but robotics
and automated equipment. The fears are the
same: Companies will bring in machines to
replace humans, sending people to the unemployment line.
As often noted before in this space, that’s
not entirely true. Robotics and automation
may indeed replace some of the more repetitive jobs now done by people. But that doesn’t
mean those people will be out on the street.
Most of them will learn new skills, find new
jobs, and be relieved of the mundane, sometimes backbreaking, tasks that give manual
labor a bad name.
At least that’s what we think. But what do
American workers think? Are they haunted by the specter of
losing their job to a bot? Are they dead-set against the idea of
working with a robotic “colleague”?
It seems not.
A new research report by Sykes, a company that provides
customer-engagement services and solutions, concludes that
American workers are far less concerned about the impact of
workplace automation than we’ve been led to believe. In October
2019, the company surveyed 1,500 employed adult Americans for
its 2019 “Future of Work” survey. The participants were asked 17
questions, ranging from which industries they think will be most
impacted by automation in five years’ time to whether they’d be
willing to take directions from a software program instead of a
human boss.
The results made it clear that reports of widespread “robo-pho-
bia” in the workplace are greatly exaggerated. In fact, the study
showed that for most of the respondents, the words
“automation technologies” and “robots” had pos-
itive connotations. When asked what they thought
of when those terms came up in workplace conver-
sations, less than a third of respondents said they
thought of equipment or technologies that could
take their jobs. A far larger share—67.1%—indicat-
ed that they simply thought of tools, machines, or
software that could help them do their jobs better.
It was much the same story when it came to respondents’ actual experience with job loss. When asked if
they had ever lost a job to automated technologies,
just 4.9% answered in the affirmative, while 95.1%
said they had not. Furthermore,
of that 95.1%, almost two-thirds
indicated it was not something
they were concerned about.
Not only are they not con-
it would—largely because they
felt they could be more effective
in their jobs if some tasks were
automated for them.
