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Homework answers / question archive / Step 1 Watch and take notes during this video and read the case study
Step 1 Watch and take notes during this video and read the case study.
1) Watch and take notes during the following video - Tedx - Will Automation Take Away All Our Jobs?
2) Read the Case Study in Chapter 5 of your textbook on page 206 "Automation: Effects on the Quality and Quantity of Jobs".
Step 2 Post the following.
Respond to ALL of the following, and if appropriate, include personal experience as part of your answers. Cite your resources and put quotation marks around direct quotes to support your opinions.
at least 200 words
below is the case study
Automation: Effects on the Quantity and Quality of Jobs
A trip around the world can show how automation both dras-tically decreases the number of employees to produce a given product, and at the same time, increases the quality of the jobs for the employees that remain in terms of the nature of work, the security of work, and the safety of work. For example, in the 1960s a traditional mill would require 1,000 employees to pro-duce 500,000 tons of steel. However in 2018, a steel mill in Donawitz, Austria, produces the same output with just 14 employ-ees. Blue-collar jobs in a tradi-tional steel mill required a great deal of hard, physical, manual labor next to blazing hot blast furnaces, but at the Donawitz facility, all that work has been automated. The work that re-mains looks more like a video game, where workers sit in clean, quiet control rooms perched above all the fray, moni-toring the movement and pro-cessing of molten iron ore via a bank of computer screens. When asked what steel produc-tion is going to look like in the future, plant manager Wolfgang Eder notes that “it is impossible to predict, but the positive thing is, the jobs surviving in the long run will be really attractive.”In addition to enhancing the nature of the work, automation has also radically improved job security. Traditionally, jobs in the manufacturing industry were subject to the whims of supply and demand, and workers were accustomed to being laid off and then reinstated over and over again. In 2018, however, layoffs in the United States hit a 50-year low, and most of this could be traced to enhanced stability in the manufacturing sector of the economy. In Detroit, Michigan, for example, PVS Chemical Com-pany has stabilized employment at roughly 800 employees, and has not laid anyone off despite ebbs of demand for its products. CEO David Nicholson notes that, “we have become much more careful about letting people go. Most manufacturing jobs today are technology jobs, and it takes a long time to train someone for the role—and thus—you’re reluc-tant to let them go for short-term slowdowns.”Finally, in terms of enhanced safety, an examination of the Rotterdam shipyards reveals how automation is increasing safety and reducing injuries. In the past, the work of the “steve-dores,” the local name given to dockworkers, was back-breaking labor that often resulted in a whole host of injuries. Whether due to accidents or just declining physical capacity, most steve-dores struggled to work past the age of 45, when they were then either dismissed or placed on permanent disability. Today, the ports are automated and cargo is loaded and unloaded remotely, moved from place to place via driverless vehicles. The threat of injuries is greatly reduced be-cause where in the past, you had a large number of men physically moving heavy containers, you now find one 22-year-old woman with perfect eye-hand coordina-tion orchestrating workflow. Although this type of automa-tion is great when it comes to creating jobs that are more attractive, secure, and safe, the downside is that it obviously displaces a lot of workers such as the “stevedores.” Still, as we noted in the opener to Chapter 4, unemployment in Western societies was hitting record lows in 2018 and, as we noted in the opener of this chapter, many displaced people were simply adapting and moving on to other jobs. People that, due to lack of ability or lack of motivation, were not able to adapt, probably just dropped out of the workforce, which means they are no longer counted as unemployed.