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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

It's a great time to be a roboticist.

Unless the first step by the union is to forbid the use of robots. A union's first mandate is to protect jobs. Any technology that replaces union members with machinery is open to direct attack.

I have seen this in the entertainment industry. Newsrooms wanted to replace camera people with what were effectively industrial robots that moved the cameras around the studio as needed. Unions put up all sort of barriers, as is their mandate. Similar fights happened when projectionists were replaced by digital tech.

Then the warehouse will get built right across state lines or actually be owned and operated by a subsidiary.

Keep in mind the Union and Company enter a contract. The Union can’t just enact any policy they want.

With that said, I imagine a “no robot” policy would be a non-starter for Amazon to enter into such a contract

"Never robots" would indeed be totally unworkable, but a union could easily argue for a specific number of human workers per square foot of warehouse space. Local governments would likely want to support such a scheme as it keeps money local. I imagine insurance companies have an opinion too on minimum manning levels for automated facilities.

They could but I would be skeptical if it would work. I’m speaking from previous robotics experience in auto assembly plants with heavy and established unions. Even then, line employment was decimated by robots.

IMO, this would be a bad outcome for all parties involved. The jobs being replaced are highly tedious, ie, fold the box, put the thing in the box, repeat for next 8 hrs. Those displaced would likely find better jobs.

>Those displaced would likely find better jobs.

The article refutes this to an extent. One of the interviewees works at Amazon for ~$15/hr despite having previously work in an automotive plant for ~$23/hr, implying that they don’t exactly have a much choice to find better jobs but settle for whatever they can get

Agreed - but this is exactly the sort of thing unions have and do argue for[0] because the union's incentives don't align with the company's and the economy as a whole.

[0] https://www.westport-news.com/news/article/Marty-the-robot-d...

>> IMO, this would be a bad outcome for all parties involved.

Tell that to the "party" who is going to be fired. We can go on about the economic impacts of mechanization, what is good or not for the business, we can even talk about the rise of AI. None of that matters. The core of a union is protecting the current jobs of their current workers. That means standing up for people who are going to lose their job regardless of the cause.

>Unless the first step by the union is to forbid the use of robots. A union's first mandate is to protect jobs. Any technology that replaces union members with machinery is open to direct attack.

UPS is an interesting similar example along these lines. They have seen dramatic increases in deliveries per driver over the last ~30 years due to many process improvements.

I attended a talk by Jack Levis, a now retired leader on their delivery optimization system. One thing the union negotiated for was driver pay to scaling along with packages delivered. As a result, drivers can reasonably make 100k with some overtime.

Hypothetically the union could negotiate for $0.01/hour less than what a robot would cost., which would be an improvement over $0.01/hour more than the bare minimum an individual worker of a certain skillset would accept.

This is already happening - there is an absolute glut of warehouse robotics companies at this point. Mostly in adding robotics to legacy warehouses. New warehouses will almost exclusively be built with automation in mind.

Then it sounds like the workers are on the way out even if they don't unionize, so there's not much to lose.

Very easy position to take if you’re not a warehouse work worker that thinks a union is a difference between you losing your job

Automation is a cost optimization thing. If the union raises Amazon's costs, it pushes up the automation time frame. And if the union doesn't raise Amazon's costs, it probably didn't provide the workers any benefits.

Then the question for workers becomes would you like to have this job for longer with current conditions or for less time with better conditions.

I don't think an Amazon warehouse worker union is going to be able to get any sort of long term job availability promises from Amazon (but I could be wrong, of course).

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