Word: robotized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...willingness of the robot to do the dirty work, like some mechanized Turkish Gastarbeiter, has muted alarms about the loss of jobs and has kept the labor unions mostly at bay. Welding cars and spraying paint are stupefying jobs, and, besides, they are ideally done at temperatures hotter than a worker can stand. "In the next five years," says Anthony Massaro, Westinghouse's chief of robotics technology, "we're going to lose 25,000 people in manufacturing due to attrition, and there's no way to replace them all. People joining the labor force these days...
Robert Cannon, president of an electrical workers local that represents many Westinghouse workers in New Jersey, accepts that reasoning. "Frankly, I welcome it," he says. "If we can bring in a robot here to do, say, the painting that a man does for $7, then we can move him to another job at $7.50 an hour. We say, 'Train our people for the skilled jobs that are in today's market...
Leaders in the robot industry claim that the main resistance to their inventions comes not from union labor but from management. "We are thrusting ourselves into the manufacturing area, and it's a very conservative place," says Joseph Engelberger, the ebullient president of Unimation. Top executives turn for advice to their technical managers, and these are naturally cautious. "Plant supervisors get worried because they don't understand robots," says Neale Clapp, a robotics expert for the management consultant firm of Block Petrella Associates in Plainfield, N.J. "They feel their authority is undermined." G.E., for one, commissioned a psychologist...
...this, the robot backers offer two answers. One uses the hard language of survival. "If we don't go to robots," says an expert at Carnegie-Mellon, "we'll just continue to lose to Japan and West Germany. Our economy won't grow, and there won't be any new jobs. New jobs have always come from new technology." The other answer is a gentler prophecy of benefits to come...
...everyone, of course, is so euphoric about the coming robot age. Brian Carlisle, Unimation's general manager for West Coast research, warns that "we're a long way from a robot that can assemble a carburetor." Nor are robots a panacea for all the ills that industry is heir to. The most automated factory of its time was the Lordstown plant that GM designed to produce the unsuccessful Vega, evidence that productivity is not worth much if the product is hard to sell. As the robotmakers look ahead, though, they see a promised land. It is a land...