A health-care worker receives groceries delivered with a Starship Technologies robot in Mountain View, Calif. Automation has increased to keep workers safe during the pandemic, but will it eventually cost them their jobs? For decades, the attitude of unions and their advocates to increased automation could be summed up in one word: no. They feared that every time a machine was slipped into the workflow, a laborer lost a job.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a small but significant shift in that calculation. Because human contact spreads the disease, some machines are now viewed not exclusively as the workers’ enemy […]
Full Post at www.inquirer.com