RISE OF THE ROBOTS
How are unions preparing for an increasingly automated workplace?
Henry Ford didn’t just revolutionize the transportation industry with his invention of the Model T automobile, he also brought significant change to the workplace with the addition of the assembly line.
Before Ford, the Industrial Age replaced workers with machines in factories around the world, and since then we’ve witnessed the increased use of automation and the rise of computers, the Internet, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which have affected both workers and consumers in almost every industry. Now, a research paper released by the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) states that an estimated 50 per cent of Canadian jobs will be disrupted by automation over the next decade. The report, “Humans Wanted – How Canadian Youth Can Thrive In The Age Of Disruption”, says that Canada’s young people who are entering the workforce are unprepared for the rapidly changing workplace.
The head of Canada’s largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), says workers have been faced with the impact of technological change for many decades. “There are new inventions and new technologies that do come about that do drastically change the workplace at any given time, but it’s nothing new in any sense,” says Mark Hancock.
“When I went to school back in the late 70s and 80s, it was discussed that people wouldn’t have to work much after the year 2000 – that it was going to be a life of leisure, that everything was going to be automated. That sure didn’t come to fruition.
“People like to dream about what’s possible and a lot of those dreams are being achieved. There are some real positives and there are some negatives and both go hand in hand with automation,” Hancock says.
CUPE represents more than 665,000 workers across the country, working in public sector fields such as health care, emergency services, education, early learning and child care, municipalities, social services, libraries, utilities, transportation, airlines and others. And, Hancock says that technological change has been helpful in some of those areas. He points to the technological change that affected garbage collection a number of years ago, when the automated trucks cost some jobs, but brought some benefits as well. “The positive was that, before that time, back injuries were huge among the membership,” he says. In the health care sector, Hancock says the automated lifts in hospitals have also cut down on back problems. In both cases, displaced workers have been largely been moved into other positions.
The key, says Hancock, is for unions to work with management to ensure there is adequate language in collective agreements concerning technological change. “Because we had language in the collective agreement, there were no job losses and the money that was saved went into new types of social initiatives,” he says.
The largely non-union service industry will likely feel the biggest impact of technological change, says Hancock. He points to new initiatives by fast-food restaurants that let consumers order and pay for their food through their smart phones, retail outlets with their price scanners, and banks like RBC, which can be accessed by smart phone and computer. “Where there used to be good paying jobs, now they are being replaced by either machines or banking on your phone or your laptop or your iPad or whatever, so it’s definitely had an impact,” Hancock says. “So, a lot of those types of jobs, we’ll see coming down the pike, [where] those big multinational corporations that have the ability to do the research and spend the money on automation and it will affect those jobs,” he says.
The RBC report said those changes mean there will need to be a shift from a jobs economy to a skills economy, that young people will need a portfolio of “human skills” to remain competitive and resilient in the labour market. It also stated that Canada’s education system, training programs and labour market initiatives are inadequately designed to help Ca- nadian youth navigate through that new economy and that employers are not prepared, either.
Hancock says one possible example of human skills could be what’s happened with libraries. “The Internet was supposed to be the death knell for libraries, but we’ve seen that library services have really expanded, because people have realized that it’s not really about the books, it’s about the people that work in those libraries,” he says. In other words, the human skills are being utilized.
Good or bad, automation and other technological changes will continue to have an effect not only on Canadian workers, but their educators and employers, too. The RBC report calls for a national review of post-secondary education programs to assess their focus on “human skills” including global competencies. And, it says employers will have to do more than simply implement the changes, but, through hiring, training or retraining, they’ll need to recruit and develop the skills needed to ensure their organizations remain competitive in the digital economy.