November 7, 2021
THANKS, COVID:
Rise of the Robots Speeds Up in Pandemic With U.S. Labor Scarce: They're everywhere. Soon security bots that look a bit like Star Wars' R2-D2 will be patrolling some parking lots at the Los Angeles airport. (Alexandre Tanzi, November 6, 2021, Bloomberg)
American workers are hoping that the tight pandemic labor market will translate into better pay. It might just mean robots take their jobs instead.Labor shortages and rising wages are pushing U.S. business to invest in automation. A recent Federal Reserve survey of chief financial officers found that at firms with difficulty hiring, one-third are implementing or exploring automation to replace workers. In earnings calls over the past month, executives from a range of businesses confirmed the trend.Domino's Pizza Inc. is "putting in place equipment and technology that reduce the amount of labor that is required to produce our dough balls," said Chief Executive Officer Ritch Allison.Mark Coffey, a group vice president at Hormel Foods Corp., said the maker of Spam spread and Skippy peanut butter is "ramping up our investments in automation" because of the "tight labor supply."The mechanizing of mundane tasks has been underway for generations. It's made remarkable progress in the past decade: The number of industrial robots installed in the world's factories more than doubled in that time, to about 3 million. Automation has been spreading into service businesses too.
Ending recessions has taken away one of our most useful drivers of innovation. Lockdown helped.
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 7, 2021 12:00 AM