On March 15, 2019, Timothy Aeppel writes on We Forum:
U.S. companies installed more robots last year than ever before, as cheaper and more flexible machines put them within reach of businesses of all sizes and in more corners of the economy beyond their traditional foothold in car plants.
Shipments hit 28,478, nearly 16 percent more than in 2017, according to data seen by Reuters that was set for release on Thursday by the Association for Advancing Automation, an industry group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Shipments increased in every sector the group tracks, except automotive, where carmakers cut back after finishing a major round of tooling up for new truck models.
Other sectors boomed. Shipments to food and consumer goods companies surged 60 percent compared to the year before. Shipments to semiconductor and electronics plants were up over 50 percent, while shipments to metal producers rose 13 percent.
Pressure to automate is growing as companies seek to cut labor costs in a tight job market. Many companies that are considering bringing work back from overseas in response to the Trump administration’s trade wars may find automation the best way to stay competitive, even with higher-cost U.S. workers.
Bob Doyle, vice president of the Association for Advancing Automation, said automation is moving far beyond its traditional foothold in auto assembly plants and other large manufacturers into warehouses and smaller factories.
One of those is Metro Plastics Technologies Inc, a family-owned business in Noblesville, Indiana, which has only 125 employees and got its start in the 1970s making, among other things, mood rings. Last March, the company bought its first robot, an autonomous machine that carries finished parts from the production area to quality inspectors. In the past, that work was done by workers driving forklifts.
“We had three propane, 5,000-pound forklifts,” said Ken Hahn, the company’s president. “We’ve eliminated those.” Hahn’s robot cost $40,000, about twice that of the cheapest option he considered, but far below the $125,000 machines also on offer.
Last year marked the first time since 2010 that auto and auto part companies failed to account for more than half of shipments, coming at just under 49 percent instead, according to the report. In 2017, over 60 percent of shipments went to automakers.
“The food industry is really starting to take off” as a market for automation, said Dan Hasley, director of sales and marketing for Kawasaki Robotics (USA) Inc, part of Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries . He added that “food and beverage is one of the segments that really responds to tight labor markets.”
Gary Reber Comments:
The question that should be asked and understood is Who Owns The Machines?
Technological change makes tools, machines, structures, and processes ever more productive while leaving human productiveness largely unchanged (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power — and relatively constant). Industries are always changing, evolving and innovating. The result is that primary distribution through the free-market economy, whose distributive principle is “to each according to his production,” delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contribution through labor.
Unfortunately, ever since the 1946 passage of the Full Employment Act, economists and politicians formulating national economic policy have beguiled us into believing that economic power is democratically distributed if we have full employment –– thus the political focus on job creation and redistribution of wealth rather than on equal opportunity to produce under conditions of full production and broader capital ownership accumulation.This is manifested in the myth that labor work is the ONLY way to participate in production and earn income, and that individual talent and effort are what distinguish the wealthy from the non-wealthy. Long ago that was once true because labor provided 95 percent of the input into the production of products and services. But today that is not true. Physical capital provides not less than 90 to 95 percent of the input. Full employment as the means to distribute income is not achievable, except while building a future economy that can support financial health and general affluence for EVERY citizen. And then, that eventually will cease to result in full employment, as the vast majority of those eligible and willing to work will not be needed once general affluence is achieved. When the “tools” of capital owners replace labor workers (non-capital owners) as the principal suppliers of products and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate. Thus, under the present unjust system, we are left with government policies that redistribute income in one form or another.
Binary economist, corporate lawyer, investment banker and author Louis O. Kelso once wrote: “It doesn’t make any difference what’s going on in the scientific world or the business world or the industrial world, we still believe full employment will solve our income distribution problems. This is what major political figures have always maintained.” One can substitute for “full employment” with boosts in the minimum wage and a “guaranteed” universal basic income and other “safety net” entitlements as solutions to our income distribution problems, without ever addressing how to democratize wealth and prevent the further accumulation of concentrated capital wealth among those people who already OWN America.
Kelso also was quoted as saying, “Conventional wisdom says there is only one way to earn a living, and that’s to work. Conventional wisdom effectively treats capital as though it were a kind of holy water that, sprinkled on or about labor, makes it more productive. Thus, if you have a thousand people working in a factory and you increase the design and power of the machinery so that one hundred men can now do what a thousand did before, conventional wisdom says, ‘Voila! The productivity of the labor has gone up 900 percent!’ I say ‘hogwash.’ All you’ve done is wipe out 90 percent of the jobs, and even the remaining ten percent are probably sitting around pushing buttons. What the economy needs is a way of legitimately getting capital ownership into the hands of the people who now don’t have it.”
