Labour Pains and Potential Robotic Gains?
Every now and then, you see a piece of news that seems to be about one thing, but is really about something else entirely. To me, the recent union victory at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee feels like one of those moments. On the surface, it is a landmark win for workers in the American South. But I suspect the loudest cheers were not in Chattanooga, but in the boardrooms of robotics and automation companies.
Why? Because nothing makes a chief financial officer fall in love with a shiny new robot quite like a sharp, sustained increase in the cost of human labour. For decades, manufacturers have played a delicate balancing act. As long as human workers were relatively cheap and plentiful, the colossal expense of a fully automated assembly line was a tough sell. That calculation may be about to change, and rather dramatically at that.