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Comment by BJBBB | Hacker News Reader

For the low-skill stuff, treading dangerous ground. We had four part-time warehouse workers, each approx $11USD/hr.Did the mundane/grunt stuff. They were not poor employees, but they had no skills not easily replaceable, so managers gave little consideration to their joint demands for increased pay and benefits (not unreasonable requests). But the incremental difference of their demands did make it worthwhile for the boss man to block out several weeks of engineering time to automate. My employer now has ONE par-time warehouse worker.

And the result of this was essentially zero stocking error, and I learned pyQT.

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So you're saying that the programmers like you and me, but who are cheering this decision on HN, are just coincidentally championing a trend that gets us more highly paid work and puts more of these people out of work?

You can't say we suffer from false consciousness WRT to that working class!

I'm not exactly sure what the moral of this story is.

I read it as, "There is some value created by the work someone does. When the value created is capped, and there are on-going demands from the workers to increase pay/benefits/other in excess of the value created, the employer has an incentive to seek a replacement good [in this case automation; in other cases, other employees]"

So you're saying your employer is a giant douche bag.

Not certain if this employer is worse than any other small or mid-sized American business. The CEO pays competitively for STEM stuff, and probably at the low end of the scale of less skilled workers. The benefits are much better than similar for the industry sector - so much that we have asked to reduce perks some due to new tax and ACA regulations.

Perspective. Company size was approx 125 in 2007, but under 50 today. And the annual volume has returned to 90% of what it was for 2007. Unlike some of our big competitors, the boss has re-invested the increased margin after the recovery in next-gen product dev and an annual bonus system. My employer, to my knowledge, does nothing illegal or immoral, and struggles with 'doing the right thing' vs ensuring company survival.

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