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Comment by kevan | Hacker News Reader

>Representing 260,000 UPS drivers, sorters and other workers, the union wants UPS to hire more full-time workers to help handle the surge in packages. It has opposed technology such as autonomous vehicles and drones and is wary of projects that do work with fewer employees.

This isn't tenable for the company. The union might be able to stall automation in UPS for a few years, but it'll end with UPS being unable to compete with its competitors. At that point UPS will have a lot more leverage in union negotiations because the alternative will be bankruptcy and everyone losing their jobs. Hopefully union leadership adopts a longer-term view before then.

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That type of automation will probably knock out 1 in 5 jobs, or more. The workforce will change. And those who don't move up the value chain (become robot technicians and programmers) will be pushed out. I totally sympathize with the union and understand it's motivations. When things like healthcare are linked to having a job in America, replacing people with machines is rough.

The automation will impact the ground facility guys, who are low seniority chum whom a union will typically sacrifice.

My guess is that they overutilize seasonal/temp people and understaff later in the year from the unions pov.

Even if it does eliminate 20% of jobs (that number is way too high), opposing it in the short-run won't solve anything permanently, as the GP said. Then when UPS is losing money and facing layoffs, the leverage will be massive. The union needs to adopt a long-term strategy or risk getting destroyed 5-10 years down the road.

Amazon, with all of its technological and operations might, is pathetically terrible at their own last mile delivery operations (I'm going to discount them hauling trailers from distribution centers to USPS sort facilities; anyone can do that). To displace UPS and Fedex, you would require immense amounts of capital for your delivery network, and staff properly compensated and treated well for quality work (ie a union or benefits of sufficient quality, a union isn't required).

Arm chair "logistics experts" should go sling packages for a few weeks to see what it takes to compete with real operations before declaring existing operations dead if they don't "disrupt themselves". UPS, Fedex, and USPS aren't going anywhere.

While I agree that delivery logistics are not easy, I don’t think it is something that will take massive amounts of capital. Simply increasing the compensation for delivery people high enough to get competent full timers would likely solve the problem. And due to the union wages of ups, there is a lot of room to raise wages for drivers.

The trick with the capital requirements is Amazon is totally willing to contract out to small regional conpanies; so you can have big plans, but start small and grow, if it works out. There's room outside of Amazon delivery too.

Name a regional last mile delivery firm with the quality of UPS, FedEx, or USPS.

FedEx full timers. Their subcontractors are terrible.

I haven’t had bad luck with Ground or Home Delivery, but I could see there’s variability based on location.

You are saying that you don't think UPS' automation efforts will reduce the effective workforce by 20% in the next decade? I would strongly disagree with your certainty, and believe if their per-package efforts don't decline by > 20%, they will consider their efforts a failure.

Also, it is possible the union sees no end-game in sight and is just trying to preserve jobs as long as possible. (The robots won't have a union, and if they did, this union would be unlikely to be a part of forming it.)

I think I agree that the UPS union's decision is possibly a poor one, but come on -- it's easy to see why they made it. Making self-interested, short-sighted decisions is literally what humans are best at.

(Plus, it's not like we can pretend to predict the future and better than they can!)

> At that point UPS will have a lot more leverage in union negotiations because the alternative will be bankruptcy and everyone losing their jobs

The history of companies with incalcitrant unions isn’t the unions getting crushed at the last minute. It’s everyone losing jobs because the company goes bust.

Not to mention that even if they did suddenly decide to cooperat, it will be far too late.

It is tenable. We will be fine I think. The answer is to use the AI automation and humans in a symbiotic relationship where in the AI or the human would not be as effective without the other. Its easy to justify the workforce on the books if they are producing for example, 10x more than what they do now and despite the myth of unions, we actually have a ton of good employees who would jump at the chance to do some of this stuff.

The bottom line is that there are ways to make this work and be vastly profitable, but I think ultimately, the question is whether our management and union leaders will work to do that.

If there was a 10x larger market for shipping then UPS and its competitors would have already taken it.

Some things actually are zero sum games. And we are a lot closer to that now than 50 years ago when there was so much more room for growth.

Yeh I see what you are saying, you could very well be right.

> At that point UPS will have a lot more leverage in union negotiations because the alternative will be bankruptcy and everyone losing their jobs. Hopefully union leadership adopts a longer-term view before then.

Unfortunately that's not usually how it works out. See for example, Hostess a couple years back. The union thought management was bluffing about their imminent bankruptcy, turns out they weren't.

Or they could do the socially correct thing and not automate.

Or, all that automation is just vaporware outside of marketing demos and the unions will be fine.

Have you ever seen a modern factory?

yes in fact, but we're not talking about a factory.

How are you writing this on the web?

I wasn't aware me posting on a webzone was actually displacing thousands of manual laborers.

What do you mean? Have you seen switchboard operators? Surely internet packets displaced the phone companies!

What about most things that you own today? Surely the metals you come across the very electronic you’re typing away on didn’t come from a blacksmith?

I’m sure I could go ad nauseum but I hope you get my point. I’d believe you if you lived somewhere in the artic circle in a remote corner of that desert. But here you are on HN of all places!

Edit: typo

those jobs are already gone. the fact they were eliminated decades ago doesn't support the idea of accelerating joblessness through automation.

Why is it socially correct to not automate?

I’m genuinely curious to hear this point of view. I don’t believe unskilled labor (or minorly skilled labor) has a right to a job anymore than a very skilled laborer does.

There’s a reason why cement trucks were created when you could (and can) still mix cement by hand. It’s wildly inefficient at a certain project scale, and I hold the same view for other items.

I’d love to know why you feel it’s socially wrong to push forward automation.

I assume people are against automation because it leads to more unemployed. In the future we will probably have most manual labor automated by robots and have massive amounts of people without jobs, no healthcare, barely surviving at all in terrible conditions.

But you know, its all their fault of course, they could've just learned to code!

I think the fear is exaggerated, automation has been happening throughout the history of mankind.

Should we not have vehicles because it put the horse/buggy drivers out of a job? Have cars made by hand and not by more efficient, safer automation because it puts people out of work?

I completely understand & respect that viewpoint that this does not all happen in a vacuum so the people working manual labor likely did not get or have access to the same opportunities as those "who learned to code".

Who is to say that the automation opens room for better-paying jobs or leads to innovations in health-care that make universal health care more affordable to tax-payers so it can get passed into legislation?

There's negative consequences of slowing automation as well.

we never had a boston dynamic robot doing a backflip though. But I guess that's kind of my point, advances in robotics/AI/AGI can't be compared with the invention of the car, but that's exactly the argument that's going to justify a never seen before degree of poverty of masses of people.

Stopping or even slowing automation is though of course completely pointless on multiple levels, if a company isn't going to automate, their competitor will (and drive them out of business), if a country decides to legislate against automation another country will not, in the global economy its a futile effort.

Furthermore there really is no reason for people to "work" at all, if machines can do the same why not let people do what they want to do, instead of pointlessly enslaving humanity forever, that sounds pretty evil.

I used to hold the same viewpoint - automation is nothing new - but this video by Kurtzgesagt (more specifically the statistics cited in it) convinced be is that automation actually IS different this time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSKi8HfcxEk).

The big difference is that automation now replaces jobs at a pace that is faster than we can create them. The whole video is good but the particularly interesting stats are at the ~8:00 minute mark.

basically. assuming your last line is sarcastic.

sorry for the late response.

I really feel that it would do a lot of good in the world to hold back at least some automation of robot type jobs. We as a society need a bigger lead time in the education and social development areas to just expect large swaths of the population to sit around with nothing to do.

Granted, that is the ultimate goal of a would-be post scarcity economy. Unless we're switch to space communism and get matter replicators soon this will only result in social strife.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QndP_PCRSw

If UPS doesn't deploy something like that, a competitor will...

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