A return to Victorian sweatshops

Are robots about to make us all redundant? That’s today’s big scare story, says Sonia Sodha. But it’s a “dangerous distraction”. The real threat to the labour market is that many workplaces, far from becoming too “futuristic”, are reverting to “quasi-victorian labour exploitation”. The recent revival of our garment industry, for example – tight turnaround times for “fast fashion” means production has to be local – has seen the creation of 20,000 jobs in the East Midlands. But the workers, mostly migrant women with limited English, have to work in “sweatshop-style factories” and are denied basic employment rights. Nor can they afford to take their unscrupulous employers to employment tribunals, since hefty tribunal fees were introduced in 2013. It’s a similar story in more high-tech sectors, such as logistics: here, technology is being used not to replace workers, but effectively to turn warehouse staff into robots: fitting them with tracking devices; delegating all their decisions to computers. It’s not the march of the machines we should fear – it’s the emergence of a “two-tier labour market” in which vulnerable workers are denied their rights and their dignity.