"Automation provides us with wondrous
increases of production and information, but does it tell us what to do with
the men the machines displace? Modern industry gives us the capacity for unparalleled
wealth - but where is our capacity to make that wealth meaningful to the poor
of every nation?" --Robert
F. Kennedy
Thank you Stop and Shop for letting me scan and bag my
own groceries.
I admit I’d rather have stood in the line of a real, live
human cashier at your store the other day. Rather have practiced my time
honored ritual of waiting for the person in front of me to finish, giving me
the time to indulge my secret grocery store treat: reading the National
Enquirer. It’s not that I found the act of scanning and bagging and paying and
listening to the lifeless voice of your self-checkout machine onerous.
It was actually pretty easy and yet: I have a
question.
Who lost their job or who won’t get a job, because of
this machine? Who wasn’t able to secure a good union job as a cashier, with
health care, and dental care, and a 401K and life insurance too? I get that
being the only unionized grocery store in New England makes it very hard for
you to make a profit and compete against non-union supermarkets. Profit margins
are slim. I applaud the fact you try and pay your workers a living wage.
But still: it felt weird for me to go through that do
it yourself check-out line and then look around and realize that the number of
human staffed lines has greatly diminished as of late. Not just there but at all
of my local grocery stores and department stores too. Makes me wonder if one
day I’ll walk into the local Shaw’s or Roche Brothers and there will be no
sentient being to greet me or to steer me to the spice section for my latest
recipe or to roll the cart out to the car for my senior Mom or to smile and
make sure my groceries are double bagged just so.
Here’s the thing about automation, about the
systematic replacement of human beings with machines in the workplace or any
other disruptive idea or system that comes along and causes people, real people
to lose their jobs, lose their businesses, lose their livelihoods. No one seems to ever talk about that human
toll and cost. All we seem to care about is return on investment for the
stockholders and maximizing productivity and making things and services cost as
little as possible for the consumer.
It’s not just happening where we buy our food. It’s
happening in the factory too and in the warehouse and on the farm. Anywhere,
really, where ever costs can be cut so consumers like me can go cheap, cheap,
cheap and companies can go profits, profits, profits.
In a recent article by
CNBC reporter Chloe Taylor, she cites a statistic from a 2019 Oxford Economics
analysis that is breathtaking. In the next ten years, 20 million manufacturing
jobs worldwide will be lost to automation. 20,000,000.
What will happen to all those line workers and
assemblers and packers and machine operators?
How will they support their families and pay for housing and survive? Can’t
we at least ask such questions, as we think about the behemoth that is our
national and world economy? Ever wonder why angry political populist movements
are sweeping around the globe, like Brexit in Great Britain, like the rise of
thousands of frustrated ex-factory workers in places like Ohio and Michigan and
Pennsylvania, our fellow citizens, who just want someone, anyone to pay
attention to their plight, to talk about the real costs of globalization and
hyper productivity, all this human wreckage mostly ignored?
The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. once
preached, “…all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one
directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you
are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am
what I ought to be...”
Faith, morality and ethics always teach that we are
all interconnected, interdependent, woven into one fabric, one world, one
destiny. If I demand the cheapest prices possible for my food or the fastest
delivery possible for my goods and services; when I demand a better return on
my stocks and 401K, I am participating in a larger system and my choices have
an impact on others. When I demand that things be more efficient and less
expensive and when that causes millions of people to lose work: I need to own
that.
I think we all do.
There are no easy answers to this question, these tensions—between
productivity and people, good jobs and good profits, paying more or paying
less. But in the least, let us as a society ask this one question: when the
robots come, when the machines replace people, what happens to the ones who no
longer stand in the check-out line and serve us?
Who will care about them?
No comments:
Post a Comment