The Great Robot Takeover: Fact or Fiction?
Date Posted: June 18, 2019
Posted In: Ideas, Workforce,
From IndustryWeek: “If you were 22 and had a job where you were treated like a machine and knew you had about 30 years to go, how would you feel?”
This line is so timeless and universal that it could be from any era in any country, but it’s a quote from a UAW official made in 1972 in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley about the infamous unrest at General Motors’ Lordstown plant.
In 1970, the plant had the most advanced manufacturing automation in the world. Its 26 robots performed 520 welds per car, churning out 100 Chevrolet Vegas per hour. At the time, the plant was the fastest in the world and represented the impact automation could have on production.
Automation cut the standard 60-second takt time down to just 36 seconds. The problem was, the humans on the assembly line could not reasonably match the robots’ speed.
Quality often suffered as a result—kind of like that “I Love Lucy” bit with the chocolates and conveyor belt, only hilarity did not ensue. A control box was set on fire, seats and wiring were slashed, management cried sabotage. The overall discontent led to a 22-day worker strike in 1972 that cost GM $150 million.
It’s a valuable lesson on why humans don’t like being treated like machines.
Nearly 50 years later, the manufacturing industry is facing a similar battle. With a new breed of robots on the market and more sophisticated automation solutions arriving every day, many workers once again feel they’re on the front lines of a full-scale robot takeover.
The fact is, robots will take some jobs and create others. And the tech is not that advanced…yet. Amazon, at the forefront of automation, says it’s at least a decade from fully automating a single order.
But the takeover isn’t all fiction. Or all bad. But it is becoming clearer, and how the tech will affect everything from plant culture to quality to safety and viability. The goal is to help you sort out what’s real and what isn’t so you can make the right decisions in what we can all agree is an unprecedented era of change.