ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST AUTOMATION

Since the time when production automation became a national issue in the late 1950s and early 1960s, labor leaders and government officials have debated the pros and cons of automation technology. Even business leaders, who generally see themselves as advocates of technological progress, have on occasion questioned whether automation was really worth its high investment cost. There have been arguments to limit the rate at which new production technology should be introduced into industry. By contrast, there have been proposals that government (federal and state) should not only encourage the introduction of new automation, but should actually finance a portion of its cost. (The Japanese government does it.) In this section we discuss some of these arguments for and against automation.

Arguments against automation

First, the arguments against automation include the following :

1. Automation will result in the subjugation of the human being by a machine. This is really an argument over whether workers` jobs will be downgraded or upgraded by automation. On the one hand. automation tends to transfer the skill required to perform work from human operators to machines. In so doing, it reduces the need for skilled labor. The manual work left by automation requires lower skill levels and tends to involve rather menial tasks (e.g., loading and unloading workparts, changing tools, removing chips. etc.). In this sense. automation tends to downgrade factory work. On the other hand, the routine monotonous tasks are the easiest to automate, and are therefore the first jobs to be automated. Fewer workers are thus needed in these jobs. Tasks requiring judgment and skill are more difficult to automate. The net result is that the overall level of manufacturing labor will be upgraded, not down graded.

2. There will be a reduction in the labor force, with resulting unemployment. It is logical to argue that the immediate effect of automation will be to reduce the need for human labor, thus displacing workers. Because automation will increase productivity by a substantial margin, the creation of new jobs will not occur fast enough to take up the slack of displaced workers. As a consequence, unemployment rates will accelerate.

3. Automation will reduce purchasing power. This follows from argument 2. As machines replace workers and these workers join the unemployment ranks, they will not receive the wages necessary to buy the products brought by automation. Markets will become saturated with products that people cannot afford to purchase. Inventories will grow. Production will stop. Unemployment will reach epidemic proportions. And the result will be a massive economic depression.

Arguments in favor of automation

Some of the arguments against automation are perhaps overstated. The same can be said of some of the declarations that advocate the new manufacturing technologies. The following is a sampling of the arguments for automation :

1. Automation is the key to the shorter workweek. There has been and is a trend toward fewer working hours and more leisure time. (College engineering professors seem excluded from this trend). Around the turn of the century, the average workweek was about 70 hours per week. The standard is currently 40 hours (although many in the labor force work overtime). The argument holds that automation will allow the average number of working hours per week to continue to decline, thereby allowing greater leisure hours and a higher quality of life.

2. Automation brings safer working conditions for the worker. Since there is less direct physical participation by the worker in the production process, there is less chance of personal injury to the worker.

3. Automated production results in lower prices and better products. It has been estimated that the cost to machine one unit of product by conventional general-purpose machine tools requiring human operators may be 100 times the cost of manufacturing the same unit using automated mass-production techniques. Examples abound. The machining of an automobile engine block by transfer line techniques (discussed in Chapter 4 and 5) may cost $25 to $35. If conventional techniques were used on reduced quantities (and the quantities would indeed be much lower if conventional methods were used) the cost would increase to around S3000. The electronics industry offers many examples of improvements in manufacturing technology that have significantly reduced costs while increasing product value (e.g., color TV sets, stereo equipment, hand-held calculators, and computers).

4. The growth of the automation industry will itself provide employment opportunities. This has been especially three in the computer industry. As the companies in this industry have grown (IBM, Burroughs, Digital Equipment Corp., Honeywell, etc.), new jobs have been created. These new jobs include not only workers directly employed by these companies, but also computer programmers, systems engineers, and others needed to use and operate the computers.

5. Automation is the only means of increasing our standard of living. Only through productivity increases brought about by new automated methods of production will we be able to advance our standard of living. Granting wage increases without a commensurate increase in productivity will result in inflation. In effect, this will reduce our standard of living. To afford a better society, we must increase productivity faster than we increase wages and salaries. Therefore, as this argument proposes, automation is a requirement to achieve the desired increase in productivity.

No comment is offered on the relative merits of these arguments for and against automation. This book is concerned principally with the technical and engineering aspects of automated production systems. Included within the engineering analysis is, of course, consideration of the economic factors that determine the feasibility of an automation project.