Robots unduly maligned

Press, 10 February 1988, Page 21

Robots unduly maligned

From

THOMAS LAND

in Geneva

Contrary to popular belief, the labour-saving impact of advanced electronics cannot be blamed for unemployment in industrialised countries. That concludes a pioneering analysis to be published in Britain for a United Nations agency. Its findings are confirmed by an authoritative study of Canadian industrial experience. Their verdict: robots are not as guilty as charged.

Consider the case of the car industry, which has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and acquired the largest single army of robots during recent years. Many economists have associated the two developments, blaming the steel-collar workers for displacing their blue-collar colleagues. They have been wrong. In the United States and Canada,. an estimated 7000 robots replaced up to 15,000 auto workers between 1979 and 1984, but then the car industry shed well over 300,000 jobs during that time.

At the same tims, 800 robots supplanted 1000 car factory

workers in France while total employment fell by 50,000. Fiat in Italy shrunk its work force by 55,000, but only five per cent of the labour savings were attributed to advanced technology. In Canada, companies which introduce computer-based changes consistently outperform their less inventive rivals in terms of sales, wages and productivity. The technologically advanced companies normally expand their work forces just as fast as the rest of industry, but they have a better chance of keeping on growing. The global study, compiled for the U.N.’s International Labour Organisation in Geneva, suggests that recent huge job losses of the automobile industry have resulted from the general economic climate rather than the introduction of specific microelectronic equipment. Its author assumes that the same is true for

most other sectors of industrial activity. The Canadian study analyses in some depth the performance of a thousand companies over a five-year period during the 1980 s. Late in the 19705, the depressed world economy combined with a dramatic emergence of modern industries in the Far East awoke Western nations to the urgency of keeping abreast with the times. Industrial structures, work organisation, product design, materials and manufacturing techniques began to change at once. These developments coincided with a sharp increase in the use of robots and numerically-con-trolled machines. New robots, numerically-con-trolled machine tools and com-puter-aided design and manufacturing techniques have improved productivity, enabling the automobile industry to increase its

investment in each vehicle in terms of product development, research and work organisation. The trend may result in an eventual net jobs gain everywhere. The work-amplifying effects of high technology seem to be particularly significant in Japan, says the study, because production flexibility is valued there more than in the West. Between 1979 and 1984, the Japanese car industry installed about 10,000 robots, replacing perhaps 7000 workers. At the same time, 60,000 new jobs were created. While many of the changes implemented by the thousand Canadian companies under review were essentially laboursaving, innovating companies were able to increase their sales sufficiently to justify hiring new employees. Productivity also rose more rapidly in these technologicallyadvanced companies; wages climbed by 40 per cent, on average, compared to 32 per cent elsewhere in industry.