In 1961, General Motors installed a cutting-edge new technology—a Unimate robot—at its factory in Ewing, NJ. The hydraulically powered, telescoping arm was used to tend a furnace, where it picked and placed red-hot, diecast metal parts into pools of cooling liquid.
Resembling the gun turret of a tank, the robot cost $25,000—nearly $272,000 in today’s money—and took about an hour to program. It worked nearly around the clock for more than 10 years and is now housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Three years after that first installation, GM ordered 66 Unimates for its assembly plant, in Lordstown, OH, and it’s been full speed ahead ever since.
Initially, the robot was greeted with a good deal of suspicion. I remember chatting once with a long-time manufacturing guy who used to manage a GM assembly plant in the early ’70s. He loved telling a story of how perfectly programmed robots suddenly went haywire when the corporate brass was in town to inspect the factory. Even though robots had always been intended to free people from “dirty, dull and dangerous” jobs, union workers would nevertheless sabotage them, fearing that the machines would take their jobs.
Fifty years later, attitudes have certainly changed. According to a survey conducted by Messe Munchen, the German firm that organizes the Automatica trade show and other events, workers around the world believe that robots are improving manufacturing and boosting competitiveness, rather than stealing jobs.
The survey questioned 1,000 workers in each of five countries: U.S., China, Japan, U.K. and Germany. Across the board, workers are embracing robots.
In the U.S., for example, 69 percent think that robots help manufacturers deal with the lack of factory workers, and two-thirds believe that robots will enable manufacturers to keep production at home.
Rather than fear robots as a threat to employment, workers now welcome them to take over dirty, dull and dangerous tasks. In the U.S., 75 percent believe that robots reduce the risk of injury to humans by performing tasks such as heavy lifting. Seventy-three percent see robots as an important tool for handling hazardous materials, and 65 percent say robots will assist workers, allowing older people to stay in work longer.
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“Showing how robots can take over repetitive or dangerous tasks, while allowing workers to focus on higher-value jobs, is important for the successful integration of robotics into a factory workforce,” says Patrick Schwarzkopf, an advisory board member for Automatica at Messe München. “Driven by a number of technological innovations, such as artificial intelligence and easy-to-use programming, industrial robotics is becoming more accessible to companies than ever before.”
Although U.S. workers have changed their attitude about robots in recent years, they are still not quite as welcoming of the technology as workers in other countries. For example, 60 percent of U.S. workers believe that robots will create more skilled and better-paid jobs. In contrast, 82 percent of Chinese workers and 72 percent of Japanese workers think that. Similarly, 67 percent of U.S. workers believe that robots will improve the quality of the work as they take over dull routine tasks. However, 84 percent of workers in China and 83 percent of workers in Japan believe that.
Evidently, managers in U.S. assembly plants still have a bit of work to do getting buy-in for robots. But, robots are clearly an easier sell on the shop floor than they used to be, and that’s good news, indeed.
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