Automation is coming at us hot and heavy. There is little doubt about that in my mind.
Over the past few weeks, I pointed out some different aspects of the workforce that is at risk. It is starting to get very clear where things are heading in terms of employment. The fact that many in "leadership" roles are not even discussing this is very telling. Nothing will be done until it is too late.
In this article, we will cover another aspect of the employment pool that is in jeopardy: warehouse workers.
Amazon made a lot of news with their hiring of warehouse staff. Over the last couple years, this was the leading company in terms of new hires. They add hundreds of thousands of workers to their facilities all over the country.
There is just one problem: Amazon seeks to be an autonomous organization when it comes to their retail system. Their goal is to have the entire process, from order to delivery, completely sans humans. Instead, machines and AI will handle it all.
It is a scenario that is likely being repeated around the country among all the different firms.
Meet the PalletTransport1500 by Fetch, a San Jose robotics company. This is designed to replace forklifts in warehouses. The machine will lift up to 2,500 pounds.
Companies have a lot of incentive to automate the forklift process. In addition to saving on salary there is the safety issue.
This product category was no doubt one of its most highly demanded, given the fairly common occurrance of forklift-related accidents. Per numbers from OSHA, “forklifts cause about 85 fatal accidents per year; 34,900 accidents result in serious injury; and 61,800 are classified as non-serious.” That’s a pretty big source of workplace accidents. The agency adds if you assign one accident per machine, that means somewhere in the neighborhood of 11% of U.S. forklifts are involved in an accident.
This amounts to a large expense for companies. Their insurance rates go up significantly as does their medical. Of course, those injured also miss time away from work, putting strain on the rest of the crew. Leaving the human impact aside, there is a large financial cost.
Make no mistake, warehouse automation is big business and there are some heavyweights in the field. The best known is Amazon's own Kava which are probably the best known warehouse robots. However, in addition to start ups, there are some large entities such as Honeywell working on fully automated warehouses.
We are looking at a process that will take place over years. This will not be an overnight transformation. However, we will consistently see people replaced as more options become available. Amazon is already doing this with part of their crew. As a new piece of equipment enters, it takes out a dozen or so employees per facility. When you have more than 100 warehouses, this amounts to a fair number of people.
Also consider that the goal is to have over 1,000 warehouses/locations before they are done. This means that they have a lot of incentive to reduce the number per warehouse. Add it all up and it is a lot of people who will not be employed in jobs that use to have people handling those tasks.
This is how automation affects the workforce. Rarely are people "replaced by a robot". Instead, the effects of automation are less noticeable. For example, one might be reassigned as that position is eliminated. Or perhaps when a person leaves, the position is not filled. Most commonly, people simply do not realize that it is technology that drives a company out of business or into merger with another company. This leads people to believe they were let go because of redundancy when, in fact, it was technology that drove it.
Ultimately, we are looking at hundreds of thousands of jobs that are in jeopardy of being replaced. This only adds to the totals that will be seen in other industries.
If we are going to create replacement jobs, we better get busy because things are not going to slow down on the automation end of things.
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