Scarce Skills, Not Scarce Jobs
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-27-2015
ISSN
2151-9463
Publisher
Alice McKown
Language
en-US
Abstract
At a large distribution center located north of Boston, a robot lifts a shelf holding merchandise and navigates it through the warehouse to the workstation of an employee who then picks the item needed for an order and places it in a shipping box. Incoming orders are processed by a computer that sends picking requests to sixty-nine robots. Then, the robots deliver storage units to roughly a hundred workers, saving the workers the task of walking through the warehouse to find the items. In other distribution centers, this is work that warehouse workers do.
The distribution center, run by Quiet Logistics—a company that fills orders for sellers of premium-branded apparel, is featured in the 60 Minutes episode “Are Robots Hurting Job Growth?” In the segment, Steve Kroft poses the following question to Bruce Welty, the CEO of Quiet Logistics: "If you had to replace the robots with people, how many people would you have to hire?" Welty estimates that he would have to hire one and a half people for every robot, and that the robots are saving him a lot of money.
Recommended Citation
James Bessen,
Scarce Skills, Not Scarce Jobs
,
in
The Atlantic
(2015).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/shorter_works/187
Publisher URL
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/scarce-skills-not-scarce-jobs/390789/
