The Institute of Employment Rights:
Is a robot after your job?
12 May 2017
In 2015 by Georg Michaels[SIC] and Guy Graetz [SIC] published evidence from a dataset of companies in 17 countries gathered between 1993 and Subject articles 30 CLR News 1/2017 2007. They suggest that, while productivity increases with robotic innovation and some semi-skilled and lower skilled jobs are abandoned: “there is some evidence of diminishing marginal returns to robot use – ‘congestion effects’ – so they are not a panacea for growth. … this makes robots’ contribution to the aggregate economy roughly on a par with previous important technologies, such as the railroads in the nineteenth century and the US highways in the twentieth century.” Neither do robots do away with the contradictions within capitalist accumulation. This is because, as capital-bias and labour shedding takes place proportionately less, new value is created (as labour is the only source of new value) relative to the cost of invested capital. Added to this, as the economist Michael Roberts reminds us, worker resistance to the dystopia of permanent joblessness would surely ensure that the road to ‘full automation’, if ever constructed, would be a very rocky one.
Related publications
Robots at work: the impact on productivity and jobs Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels. Article in CentrePiece, Volume 20, Issue 1 Summer 2015