In the race between humans and robots, humans often win
In the race between humans and robots, humans often win
JACKSON CENTER, OHIO: The Airstream factory here is competing to complete a delay in ordering its retro and high-end travel trailers that will last until next year. The company is hiring, adding distributors and spending $ 50 million to build a larger plant.
I counted eight workers climbing through an Airstream to screw a large aluminum casing to a steel chassis, and winding lines and wires through the walls. To finish the shiny silver capsule, workers must install 3,000 rivets by hand.
There is no robot in sight. They can speed up production, but machines require a substantial investment that runs the risk of being wasted if the economy collapses.
"You do not want to have a robot sitting there," Bob Martin, executive director of Thor Industries, father of Airstream, told me this week.
That's one of the main reasons why many American companies have not yet welcomed our new robot masters, despite the fact that Friday's job report is expected to show that the historically narrow labor market is narrowing. Unemployment below 4% is raising wages and making finding qualified workers at a competitive salary harder to do.
Bruce Watkins, left, and John Davisson, right, rivet side panels at the Airstream production facility.
Photo:
Andrew Spear for The Wall Street Journal
"We see in the United States the making of a race between technology and human capital," said the economist at Stanford University. Nicholas bloom He said. While some companies such as electric car manufacturer
Tesla
Inc.
are competing to automate almost all processes in the factory said many executives They are reluctant to sink investments in equipment that "will be difficult to reverse".
We will continue to see innovation in fields that traditionally depend on people. For example, grocery stores, who often struggle to find people to work for lower wages, are experimenting with robots. However, analysts say it could take decades, however, that these initiatives significantly alter the labor landscape.
According to the researcher International Data Corp., robotic spending is expected to be equal to $ 90 billion in 2018, with a large part of that investment destined to industrial or manufacturing uses. That's a considerable increase compared to previous years, but it's only part of the nearly $ 3 billion committed to capital investment.
John Van Reenen, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a research partner with Mr. Bloom, said executives in many industries, including health care and retail, are not sold in the technical revolution. "There is a great debate about whether robots are really delivering the productivity benefits they could promise."
Sliding the hull down the line at the Airstream production facility.
Photo:
Andrew Spear for The Wall Street Journal
At an event to commemorate the renovation of a factory west of Detroit last month, the president of global operations at Ford Motor Co. Joe HinrichsHe said that a lot of industrial automation happened several decades ago. Now companies are trying to "optimize the way they use people" instead of installing more machines.
Ford spent almost a billion dollars to convert the factory and move from making small cars to producing vans. A lot of that went into new tools to remove parts of the body, but relatively little went into adding automation, Hinrichs said. Artificial intelligence is now integrated into the final inspection lines to improve quality. But skilled workers are needed to interact with artificial intelligence tools.
Mr. Bloom said that incremental efforts like this one are helping to increase worker productivity, even at a lower rate than that experienced during the decades-long boom that began in the mid-1990s. He said that economists may need to feel comfortable with an annual productivity increase of 1%, particularly because a lot of investment is needed to maintain that modest rate.
Hundreds of millions of jobs affected. Billions of wealth dollars created. These are the potential impacts of a next wave of automation. In this episode of Moving Upstream, we travel to Asia to see the next generation of industrial robots, what they are capable of, and whether they are friends or enemies of low-skilled workers.
"After the [financial] The crisis hit, sectors such as financial services went from boom to bankrupt, and companies reacted to weak demand and uncertainty by slowing investment, which led to the growth of capital intensity at the lowest rates since the Second World War. World ", report published this year by McKinsey & Co. said.
Earlier this year, the tide was changing. The Economic Analysis Office reported that fixed non-residential investments had increased at an annual rate of 11.5% in the first quarter and 8.5% in the second quarter.
However, commercial investments slowed to 0.8% in the most recent period. Analysts blame the lower optimism of a volatile political environment, including the threats of a trade war.
The Business Roundtable, which regularly examines CEOs, found its quarterly CEO Economic Outlook Index It fell in recent months due to the increase in uncertainty. This is leading directly to plans for lower capital spending, the organization said.
The economic uncertainty is always present in companies such as the RV industry, which is highly cyclical. RV wholesale deliveries It cooled significantly in September, adding more concern.
The Airstream order bank remains solid, but Martin said that the company's investors are still expecting a measured approach, one that does not take long to amortize capital spending. "One of the most attractive things in our industry is the reimbursement in our factories is really fast," said Martin.
The parent company of Airstream has increased capital spending in recent years to keep up with demand, but most of that money went towards the purchase of land or the construction of walls to make space for employees to build more trailers and motor homes.
Martin said that cargo trailer manufacturers in the past have used robots to try to accelerate the assembly. But those investments are difficult to justify. Instead, on the floor of the factory in Jackson Center, the workers are still full of hand tools.
"It's a lot like building a house on wheels," said Airstream CEO Bob Wheeler. Instead, the company focuses on incrementally refining the manufacturing process, using the "continuous improvement" principles that originated at Toyota decades ago.
As we spoke, two employees, separated by an aluminum wall, used a rivet gun and a "bucking bar" to work together to hold one of those 3,000 rivets in a stream of air.
The company had considered buying machines that could install all those rivets without the help of human hands?
"We have a dedicated workforce and low staff turnover here," said Wheeler. "We will continue investing in them."
The Airstream production facility in Jackson Center, Ohio.
Photo:
Andrew Spear for The Wall Street Journal
Write to John D. Stoll in john.stoll@wsj.com
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