Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Fighting the Minimum Wage: 2 of the World's Largest Employers are Replacing Workers with Robots

Two of the world's largest employers are replacing tens of thousands of their workers with robots:

Foxconn, a key manufacturing partner for Apple, Google, and Amazon, is the world's 10th largest employer and it has already replaced 60,000 workers with robots, according to a recent note written in part by analyst John Seagrimat CLSA.

Walmart, the third-largest global employer with 2.1 million workers, wants to replace its warehouse stock-checkers with flying drones that can scan miles of shelves in a fraction of the time.

Robots in and of themselves are not a negative for labor (SEE: Robots and Jobs), but when minimum wages are high, they provide incentives for firms to adopt more robot technology than would otherwise exist and the low-skilled workers because of the high minimum wage will find it difficult to find new work.

-RW

(via World Economic Forum)

2 comments:

  1. Argument is flawed. No matter how low minimum wage gets, robots will always be cheaper.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Walmart employees who work in the distribution centers make much more than minimum wage.

    ReplyDelete