I can recall back in the 60’s, longshoremen discharging ships with wooden pallets that they loaded up with cargo in the ships’ holds.
Then along came 20ft cargo containers followed by 40 ft containers and so on. Mobile shore cranes followed by gantry cranes on rails.
Toprack lifters loading containers on shunters. Gang sizes were reduced.
The fully automated ports seem to have eliminated the labor for the most part. How did they accomplish that in union ports?
I guess it depends on the mill. The union at my plant in Baltimore was willing to go along with some new technology like a continuous slab caster but wouldn’t consider altering the work rules. They insisted on having electricians, plumbers, mechanics, oilers, etc instead of having repairmen that would fix the machine doing all the jobs. Having an electrician ship power off, a plumber to turn off the hydraulics, a mechanic to remove the covers, and repeating the dance as they removed components to get to the problem probably doubled the time for the repair and doubled the number of employees needed at least. All the trades needed for the repair stood around until it was their turn again. IMO the hourly staff had so many years in that they preferred shutting the mill down and taking severance and retirement to streamlining the staff and saving some real money.
You can’t stop time. Unions that fight to keep jobs that are being replaced by automation are just stalling the inevitable. It would be better to embrace the change and educate or retrain the workforce to do something else that is value added. We recently implemented a robot to do a mundane task that used to consume several FTEs. We took the people doing that job and sent them to learn a new skill and they are being paid more and happier doing something more challenging. Funny part was, it was initially a hard sell to corp executive leadership team. An $8k robot that can work 24/7, doesn’t get sick or hurt and has no benefits (medical, dental, 401k etc). Seriously, you have to think about it??
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I’m sure some did. But many didn’t. Look at Pittsburg PA. Took them decades to recover. City is considerably smaller then it once was. Only 3 mills are left - all specialty mills. Where I grew up (Syracuse) there’s still one mill left - Crucible Steel. It’s also a specialty steel mill. That whole region from Syracuse to Buffalo and into Cleveland and down to Pittsburg was once dotted with steel mills.
Works ok for those experienced employees, but there’s probably a downside for an inexperienced person trying to get a job in the future.
Newbies aren’t hired for skilled jobs unless they bring that skill with them. There are always unskilled jobs to fill and then the more adept of those employees can be trained for more advanced jobs.
Unfortunately, there will be unskilled workers who are very trainable, but there are no jobs for them to be trained for. the VAST majority of jobs in this country are for unskilled laborers.
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Ah, but they weren’t experienced to begin with- we had to educate and train them to do a more advanced job than what they were doing.
But you’re right, the opportunity for unskilled labor is dwindling in the states. People can accept that evolution and begin the transition, or keep their head in the sand and accept a worse fate the longer we cling to the old ways.
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In my experience most of the important new technologies are not the result of the (supposed) super-duper smart CEO’s, but are actually invented and developed by their employees, usually holding Ph D’s in Engineering and Science. I wonder if there’s any shortage of those folk entering the colleges , given they have to risk spending 8+ years in a arduous college science & engineering program, while they see newspaper articles daily saying the scientific jobs are being replaced by robots, AI, outsourced, or insourced. Were I in that situation today, I’d be more inclined toward pursuing business, law, or medicine professsional fields, or a specialty trade…
Scientific jobs replaced by robots? Hardly. Robots do great at repetitive, mundane tasks. They can’t reason which I would suggest is required in order to do science.
AI is capable of a lot but again, technology is very far from an android with an AI brain. Can AI and expert systems be useful in scientific discovery? Absolutely. But humans must still do the empirical studies. When AI actually invents something novel- I’m sure that will be in the newspapers…
Insourcing- well, that’s needing people in your company to do the science isn’t it? Creating jobs? I fail to see how insourcing is anything but creating more opportunities.
By the same token, outsourcing has to go somewhere. The reason for outsourcing is a lack of incumbent resources- exactly why we need to educate and train more scientific and engineering people to do these more complex jobs and stop them from leaving here.
Science and math are not for everybody. Any of the other careers you mentioned are better paying than foundry work for example and likely have more career prospects for future demand.