What if nobody wants the job?

Rise of the machines

Within an hour, the workers of the first shift had filled a shipping box with finished containers — the first batch made by both humans and robots. Then came a second box, and then a third, and then a buzzer sounded for a break. The work paused, and a manager, Ed Moryn, grabbed the Hirebotics engineers and asked them to follow.

He took them through a passageway and into another building, stopping at two more workstations where he said the company needed help. A press brake job. An assembly job. “Can we do these?” Moryn asked. The engineers studied the work areas for 15 minutes, took some measurements, and two days later offered Tenere one version of a solution for a company trying to fill 132 openings. Tenere looked at the offer and signed the paperwork. In September, the engineers would be coming back, arriving this time with the boxes holding Robot 3 and Robot 4.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rise-of-the-machines/2017/08/05/631e20ba-76df-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html?utm_term=.12babe8f16e8

Amazon wants to hire 50,000 people. So far it has 20,000 applicants.

Whether the company meets its recruiting goal will be an interesting litmus test—not only for Amazon but the US itself. The country is supposedly so hard up for low-wage jobs that the Trump administration, claiming an interest in protecting opportunities for the poorest American workers, has drawn up a plan to seriously scale back legal immigration by low-wage foreigners.

But warehouses in the US are frequently beset by job vacancies, even as more tasks get turned over to robot labor. “Most businesses in the system have a deficit of workers,” Bruce Welty, the founder of both an e-commerce logistics company and a startup that makes robots for warehouses, told Quartz in a February interview. “These are not great jobs, and they’re not easy to fill.”

https://qz.com/1045650/amazon-jobs-day-how-many-people-did-amazon-hire-amzn/

Shortage of farm workers leaving entire fields in California, other states to rot

Farmers tell NBC News the labor shortage is so severe, they’ve had to leave entire fields of vegetables unharvested. In just two counties in California, that’s led to a loss of more than $13 million.

http://nbc4i.com/2017/07/24/shortage-of-farm-workers-leaving-entire-fields-in-california-other-states-to-rot/

But as one factory in Wisconsin is showing, the forces driving automation can evolve — for reasons having to do with the condition of the American workforce. The robots were coming in not to replace humans, and not just as a way to modernize, but also because reliable humans had become so hard to find. It was part of a labor shortage spreading across America, one that economists said is stemming from so many things at once. A low unemployment rate. The retirement of baby boomers. A younger generation that doesn’t want factory jobs. And, more and more, a workforce in declining health: because of alcohol, because of despair and depression, because of a spike in the use of opioids and other drugs.