Shadow of the ‘Automation Bomb’ Looms Over U.S. Workers

A vintage postcard of Sparrows Point.

Nearly 50,000 United Automobile Workers hit the bricks recentlyat General Motors plants in 19 states, wondering about their future. Theyshould talk to food service workers and office clerks and truck drivers who areworking now but soon enough will worry about that same future.

Nearly 50,000 on strike at GM, but that only covers afraction of the problem. More than 200,000 people work in car manufacturingaround the country, and millions more have jobs connected to those strikers’ jobs,in an ever-widening shadow.

And in a world where technology creeps ever closer to jobsonce handled by humans, who doesn’t feel threatened today?

Remember when GM’s Broening Highway plant in Baltimoreemployed thousands of people? There were jobs there for more thanthree-quarters of a century. In peacetime, they produced millions ofChevrolets. In wartime, they produced military parts for aircraft.

And then, in the spring of 2005, the plant shut down.

Remember when Bethlehem Steel employed 30,000 people here,and jobs were handed down through the generations like family legacies? In“Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American IndustrialMight” (University of Illinois Press), Mark Reutter wrote:

“Out of its furnace fires came the steel for the tail finsof Chevy Bel Airs and Thunderbird convertibles, the tin plate for Campbell’sSoup cans, the hulls of ocean tankers and Navy destroyers, the wire and girderplate of suspension bridges, and a thousand and one other products that madeour culture of bigness and abundance possible.”

Goodbye, long ago, to Sparrows Point and all those jobs.

And goodbye to millions more. In the 2016 presidentialcampaign, Donald Trump promised to bring back manufacturing and mining jobs.That was a con job. Even in an economy where jobs have been added over the lastdozen years, the numbers are modest or flat in those professions.

Robots are replacing humans, in America and around theworld. A U.S. Labor Department study of 800 occupations, reported last month inthe Washington Post by columnistDavid Ignatius, said 59 percent of future manufacturing jobs could beautomated, along with 73 percent of food service and accommodations workers and53 percent of retail workers.

“The ‘automation bomb’ could destroy 45 percent of the workactivities currently performed in the U.S.,” Ignatius reported, “representing$2 trillion in annual wages.”

But if all those wages are lost, who’s going to have money tobuy the products produced and distributed and sold by robots?

That’s the balancing act they’re facing at General Motors right now. We know that balancing act pretty well around here. We’ve fallen a few times from the high wire. And the wire’s getting higher, and shakier, everywhere.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).

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