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Essay Prompt
As reliance on technology becomes more engrained in society and culture, manufacturing must keep up with demands. Companies are looking for cheaper and faster production methods without losing quality. Some companies outsource the work to facilities in other countries where labor is less expensive. Other companies invest in robotics to replace paying for human labor. Each method has advantages and disadvantages.
How will manufacturing change and improve over the next several years? Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of your idea?
Joseph Lee
Southern Utah University
There is an undeniable sense of uneasiness surrounding the topic of manufacturing technology. While manufacturers are constantly striving to streamline processes to create “leaner” companies, society so consistently demands compliance with the ethical responsibility to create jobs. In the next few years, technological advances will undoubtedly be implemented to improving the efficiency of modern manufacturers. This could very well leave us asking, “Where does that leave the men and women whose function said technology would replace?” It is a valid question, but I believe that in asking it, we are misunderstanding the role that new, effective technology will have in the workplace. New technology in coming years will be able to optimize the manufacturing industry while creating more jobs for the available work force.
At Lifetime Products, there is a robot worth over $50,000 which--while originally designed to assemble 100% the folding chairs for the company--is now rarely even powered on. Instead, the folding chairs are assembled and packaged by a team of 25 completely unskilled workers being paid $11 and hour. Meanwhile, in another section of the warehouse, equally unskilled workers constantly operate two large (and equally expensive) robots which execute the final complex welds on each basket ball hoop rim. Before the arrival of the robots, workers in the rims area had to be highly skilled welders who could manually perform each precision weld with consistency.
So why are the Rims robots constantly in use while the Chairs robot is, at best, a $50,000 eye-sore? Human ingenuity has always been a force to be reckoned with, but it’s lasting achievements have been to fulfill clear and present needs. The clear and present need for manufactures is skilled and highly skilled labor. This is demonstrated in the fact that over 80 percent of American manufacturers report a medium to severe shortage of skilled workers (National Association of Manufacturers).
While working on the chairs assembly line, I remember racing the robot once or twice to see if it was any faster than four or five workers using basic riveting machines. The workers were always the unchallenged winners of such races, and that was why we reasoned that the company refrained from using the robot. However, the fact that the company has yet to further research into accelerating the robot’s performance speaks volumes. Society does not need to worry about technology that may replace unskilled labor, because unskilled labor is not a resource for which we stand in need.
The Rims robot filled a need perfectly. It allows unskilled workers to produce the same product that was previously only possible to the scarce group of highly trained, highly skilled workmen. These are the kind of technological improvements we can expect in the coming year in manufacturing. With these changes we will have to redefine the types of highly skilled workers that are needed in the workplace. In the case of the robots, maintenance workers are needed to keep them running. However, such technology fills the skill gap by replacing the need for 10-20 skilled workers with a need far more proportional to the actual “skilled vs. unskilled” composition of the available workforce--1-2 skilled workers and 10-18 unskilled workers.
I believe we have reason to be very hopeful for the future of the manufacturing industry. As technology enters the equation, it will undoubtedly change fundamental aspects of our manufacturing processes. We will continue to prove that the only thing constant is change, but that within that change we can fulfill many of the needs of our growing population.