Standing beside a computer-controlled machine nearly two stories high, autoworker Ron Fuller glances at the computer display before him, then taps the pressure-sensitive screen with a forefinger.
Above his head the machine is deftly twirling an engine block that weighs hundreds of pounds. Methodically, almost silently, the machine uses its mechanical arm to grasp metal pistons from a nearby line and insert them into the engine.
The machine performs the complex sequence of tasks tirelessly, without any commands from a human. Fuller’s job is to monitor the performance of the five “piston-stuffing” machines that have been operating at Navistar International Corp.’s sprawling diesel-engine plant here since early 2002.
Two years ago, he said, the work now handled by the custom-made machines “took 10 people on every shift.”
That’s just the work cuts in Fuller’s modest corner of Navistar’s 1.1 million-square-foot Indianapolis plant. Altogether, the Warrenville, Ill.-based truck and engine maker eliminated about 400 jobs–or a quarter of the plant’s workforce–through a $350 million automation program that has trimmed employment at the site to about 1,200.
The same kind of productivity enhancing, job-shrinking makeover that occurred at Navistar’s once grimy engine plant is playing out in factories across America. In automating their plants as part of a stepped-up search for efficiency, American companies are vaporizing tens of thousands of jobs every year.
“The automation of factory production is just as significant as globalization for explaining the loss of manufacturing jobs,” says Robert Reich, a professor at Brandeis University and former Labor secretary in the Clinton administration.
Indeed, although it is a wrenching process, many experts argue that sacrificing some jobs to automation may be the best way to prevent millions more U.S. jobs from migrating offshore.
Since mid-2000, a total of about 3 million U.S. manufacturing jobs have vanished. The disappearance of almost 18 percent of the nation’s production jobs has hurt the families of displaced workers, put a drag on the U.S. economy’s recovery, and, with elections coming, has become a charged political issue.
Many of those jobs were lost to the recession that took hold in 2001. But a good number of them are not coming back, even when the now recovering U.S. economy regains its former vigor.
“Long-term trends indicate that even after the economy has fully recovered from the 2001 recession, employment in manufacturing is unlikely to return to its prerecession level,” the Congressional Budget Office noted in a mid-February report.
Many people blame the downbeat jobs outlook on U.S. manufacturers who are shifting production to cheap-labor nations such as China or Mexico. In addition, many smaller U.S. companies have simply tossed in the towel and gone out of business in the face of offshore competition, throwing their employees out of work.
But as candidates rail against foreign competition, they are ignoring a less visible factor that is also claiming American jobs: automation.
American manufacturers have been automating plants–replacing workers with “smart” equipment like industrial robots and computerized factory machines–since the early 1980s. But the automation trend has been accelerating in recent years, as U.S. companies face intense price competition from abroad at the same time that soaring health-care and pension costs have been making U.S. workers ever more expensive.
U.S. automakers have eliminated thousands of jobs, as have the companies that supply them with components.
Automation can have an impact on the nation’s job scene even when no workers lose their jobs to the process. Over the past several years, Chicago building-products maker USG Corp. replaced five drywall factories with all-new facilities, allowing it to double output at those sites without hiring any new workers.
The automation trend may be one reason that U.S. employment has been recovering at such a disappointingly slow pace.
Higher capital spending sometimes suggests that companies are expanding, said John Hancock Financial Services economist Bill Cheney, but “right now, it seems that increased capital spending equates to more up-to-date labor-saving technology.”
The new surge in automation is being fueled in part by technical advances, said David Autor, a labor economist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
The price of industrial robots and other manufacturing technology has declined dramatically, he said, and so “there’s been an enormous change in the amount of the bang companies are getting for their buck.”
The lower cost alters an employer’s calculation as to whether it makes economic sense to replace human labor with capital equipment. In addition, says the economist, manufacturing gear has become more flexible and adaptable.
Humans have long been slower than machines, and less capable in performing repetitive tasks. The human advantage used to be that, in contrast to robots, they were flexible enough to jiggle a dashboard to make it fit properly, or to notice that somebody up the line had used the wrong screw.
“When General Motors first started trying to make cars using robots, the robots would smash windshields, or grow confused if things were slightly out of alignment,” Autor said. But a series of technical improvements, particularly advances in robots’ visual acuity, has in recent years made machines superior to humans for many industrial tasks.
It is not wrong for U.S. manufacturers to seek such efficiencies, many observers suggest. By eliminating 300 jobs through automation, they argue, an American factory might save 900 other jobs by rendering the plant efficient enough to withstand foreign competition.
In such circumstances U.S. companies “face two choices,” said Autor: “One is to outsource [offshore], the other is to automate.”
Navistar’s Indianapolis plant first opened in 1937, cranking out engines for the company’s corporate predecessor, International Harvester.
With the latest makeover, which Navistar implemented at the same time it shifted to making a newly designed engine, the facility has moved to a new production model. It is a mode of production in which startlingly adept machines handle most chores, and direct human input has been dramatically reduced.
“Instead of making a part themselves” with a drill press or a machining tool, explains plant manager Tom Horn, most plant workers’ job now is to “make sure the process is under control and going right.”
To a visitor accustomed to the labor-intensive factories of the past, it is disconcerting to see a rod of raw steel enter one end of a processing module and emerge a hundred feet down the line–without any human action–as a fully processed engine camshaft. It is machined to a complex shape that is accurate to within thirty millionths of an inch.
In the old days, products moved through the plant on a production line that moved inexorably ahead. “It went by and you threw parts at it,” said Horn. Now employees control the flow of product past their work station, releasing an engine only when they have completed their task.
The Indianapolis plant is relatively quiet, clean and well lighted. In many areas, workers no longer tend machines but monitor computers that control the machines.
Even where humans carry out hands-on assembly work, they use quiet, computer-linked electric hand tools instead of the rackety pneumatic equipment of the previous era.
With automation, Navistar expends 9.5 worker hours making one engine, compared with 13.5 under the old system.
Still, the revamp remains a touchy issue.
“People say, `Oh, you’re automating,'” said Horn, “but we’re making better jobs.”
As his piston-stuffing machines roll smoothly through their tasks, Ron Fuller sounds the same note.
In the old days, everybody tried to get out of the job the machines are doing, he said, because it was so physically demanding. And even the slightest slip of hand could scratch the inside and ruin the entire engine.
“I hate to see people out of a job,” he said, “but I’m glad to see them get rid of this work. Everybody that stuck pistons got their shoulder operated on.”
