Robots Are Catching Up to Humans in the Jobs Race
6th October 2019
The latest U.S. jobs report tells a complex tale about American workers and the industrial economy. Unemployment, at 3.5%, is the lowest it has been in half a century. At the same time, hiring missed projections and wage gains have cooled off. The Institute for Supply Management’s factory index, a key measure of U.S. manufacturing output, slipped in September to its lowest level since June 2009. The ongoing U.S.-China trade dispute and weakening global economy contributed to a figure so low — 47.8 — it missed every estimate in a Bloomberg survey, which had expected the index to rise from August’s 49.1.
Meanwhile, a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that increased adoption of robotics and automation equipment has been a substantial driver of the declining labor share of income for U.S. workers, even during a period of extremely low unemployment. In the last global recession, industrial robot shipments fell significantly but did not stop; the labor-force growth rate for manufacturing, needless to say, went negative. I’m not a macro-economist, and I won’t predict anything about the health of the global economy. Instead, let’s look at something micro with global implications: how the world’s industrial robotics markets have grown and changed in the past decade