British
workers are being shut out of decisions over the rising use of robots
in the UK economy, according to a report from
the commission
on workers and technology, run by the Fabian Society
and the Community trade union, almost six in 10 employees across
Britain in a poll said their employers did not give them a say on the
use of new technologies. From
a series of factory and workplace visits across the country to gather
evidence, the two-year commission has heard that workers often feel
powerless and frustrated about their lack of influence over tech
decisions.
The
findings come as another report finds the use of robots in poorer
regions triggers the loss of almost twice as many jobs as in
wealthier ones. In a study by the
consultancy firm Oxford Economics, the rapidly growing use of robots
is expected to have a profound impact on jobs across the world,
resulting in up to 20m manufacturing job losses by 2030. Around 1.7m
manufacturing jobs have already been lost to robots since 2000,
according to the study, including as many as 400,000 in Europe,
260,000 in the US and 550,000 in China. The
global analysis of 29 advanced economies found that each new
industrial robot eliminated as many as 1.6 manufacturing jobs on
average. In the lower-income areas of the nations in the study, this
figure rises to 2.2 jobs, with 1.3 jobs lost in a richer area.
Automation
is rapidly invading one industry after another, and, wherever it is
implemented, all but a relative handful of the workers formerly
employed are "automated" out of jobs. Common ownership of
every facility and factory needed for social production -- is the
only answer to the grave problems raised by the advent of robotic
manufacturing and distribution.
Capitalist
production processes, which has long made the worker an appendage of
the machine, is now moving to restrict the "privilege" of
being a small cog in the machine to a smaller fraction of the working
class. The "superfluous" remainder of us face an insecure
future of miserable subsistence as some sort of helots of the
capitalist state. Indeed, it could bring to a head the conditions
requisite for the establishment of an industrial feudalism.
However,
the evils which have accompanied the progress of technology are not
in the least inherent in machinery itself. They are inherent, rather,
in the private ownership of the tools upon which society's life
depends. If freed of the fetters of private ownership and converted
into social property, new technology - especially the automated
plants would immediately become a blessing and not a curse. Owned in
common by the community, these efficient industries could be
cooperatively operated to produce an abundance for everyone, readily
turned out with but a little labour contribution from each.
Rather
having capitalist owned and controlled production menace us with with
increased industrial tyranny the self-management of free producers
would be a liberating experience for us all.
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