The Automation Crisis
By 
Whether you think automation is a serious issue for the future of work may depend on your prior perspective about the history of this issue. Many economists, Dean Baker among them, note that previous waves of automation did not lead to massive job losses. I would argue this is short-sighted because those previous waves of automation did not intend on simply eliminating jobs entirely. The Industrial Revolution created job growth and continued to expand employment capacity even as automation did deliver some jobs. My view is that the goals of the current wave of automation are quite different, with automation moving toward eliminating entire categories of jobs. The somewhat predictable failure of self-driving vehicles have held off the apocalypse of blue-collar unemployment for the time being. But the goals remain the same and my concern is primarily what happens to working class people who lose their jobs, as it usually is. So, fundamentally, we should ask ourselves whether the rise of automation in fast food, propelled at greater speed by the pandemic, matters much.
When Kroger customers in Cincinnati shop online these days, their groceries may be picked out not by a worker in their local supermarket but by a robot in a nearby warehouse.
Gamers at Dave & Buster’s in Dallas who want pretzel dogs can order and pay from their phones — no need to flag down a waiter.
And in the drive-through lane at Checkers near Atlanta, requests for Big Buford burgers and Mother Cruncher chicken sandwiches may be fielded not by a cashier in a headset, but by a voice-recognition algorithm.
An increase in automation, especially in service industries, may prove to be an economic legacy of the pandemic. Businesses from factories to fast-food outlets to hotels turned to technology last year to keep operations running amid social distancing requirements and contagion fears. Now the outbreak is ebbing in the United States, but the difficulty in hiring workers — at least at the wages that employers are used to paying — is providing new momentum for automation.
Technological investments that were made in response to the crisis may contribute to a post-pandemic productivity boom, allowing for higher wages and faster growth. But some economists say the latest wave of automation could eliminate jobs and erode bargaining power, particularly for the lowest-paid workers, in a lasting way.
“Once a job is automated, it’s pretty hard to turn back,” said Casey Warman, an economist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied automation in the pandemic.
The trend toward automation predates the pandemic, but it has accelerated at what is proving to be a critical moment. The rapid reopening of the economy has led to a surge in demand for waiters, hotel maids, retail sales clerks and other workers in service industries that had cut their staffs. At the same time, government benefits have allowed many people to be selective in the jobs they take. Together, those forces have given low-wage workers a rare moment of leverage, leading to higher pay, more generous benefits and other perks.
Automation threatens to tip the advantage back toward employers, potentially eroding those gains. A working paper published by the International Monetary Fund this year predicted that pandemic-induced automation would increase inequality in coming years, not just in the United States but around the world.
“Six months ago, all these workers were essential,” said Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, a union representing grocery workers. “Everyone was calling them heroes. Now, they’re trying to figure out how to get rid of them.”
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Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could significantly change workers’ prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.
“If a whole sector of labor is hit, then where do those workers go?” Professor Warman said. Women, and to a lesser degree people of color, are likely to be disproportionately affected, he added.
The grocery business has long been a source of steady, often unionized jobs for people without a college degree. But technology is changing the sector. Self-checkout lanes have reduced the number of cashiers; many stores have simple robots to patrol aisles for spills and check inventory; and warehouses have become increasingly automated. Kroger in April opened a 375,000-square-foot warehouse with more than 1,000 robots that bag groceries for delivery customers. The company is even experimenting with delivering groceries by drone.
The first thing we have to do in a discussion about this issue is to eliminate a common talking point which has no value. That is that these conversations inevitably revolve around people arguing that whatever jobs they find “socially valuable” should remain and those they find worthless should be eliminated. This is a completely pointless and counterproductive discussion. I hate to say this, but you are not the arbiter of what a socially valuable job is and neither am I. I am far more concerned with whether mandating employees pump gas in Oregon employs working class people than I am with what you think about so-called “make work,” another term that simply reflects the personal value of a given member of the intellectual class than it does anything about the work itself.
We are indeed in a time when a lot of food service workers are rethinking their position in the economy. If workers have other options, then by all means, go ahead and eliminate the most boring or least pleasant jobs. That’s fine. My concern is the idea that it’s OK to leave workers behind to worship the sacred cow of “productivity.” This is why I continue to push the idea of a government job guarantee, which had a good run in the world of ideas in 2018, but has faded from view in the last couple of years. Such a law would not per se mean the government has to employ everyone in so-called “make work” schemes, whatever that even means. What it does mean is that the government is the employer of last resort. So if fast food places automate and then there is a lack of jobs for blue-collar workers, the government is required to provide them one. But the idea here is to create private markets where people can actually find jobs they want to do. That to me should be the standard of work–what do people want to do and how can we help them do that? In other words, it’s up to them, not to some intellecutals or just random people creating arbitrary standards of appropriate work based upon their own personal value system. That’s a long way from being a “Luddite,” speaking of constantly misapplied terms. It simply puts the needs of the everyday worker ahead of the needs of employers or the intellectual missions of economists. By all means automate if you want to, so long as the interests of workers are protected first. That step alone would be a radical transformative change in the economy.