As innovation continues to expand, many manufacturing jobs appear to be on a downward trend. Any job that can be replaced by a robot is going to save the company tens of thousands of dollars over several years. Companies do this because robots essentially work for free, don’t need vacation or sick time, and they don’t have to worry about robot labor laws.
Yet, this sort of practice is only going to continue hurting the U.S. economy. Millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost to robots and as many as 36 million more are slated to be replaced over the next decade. This isn’t a good thing for those workers and there’s someone who has had enough.
New York mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio has a new idea. He wants to make sure that companies are looking to automate in the future, they should foot the bill for ensuring those workers get new jobs. “If a company is gonna put thousands of people out of work, they should bear responsibility for making sure that those folks get a new job,” de Blasio said in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
He’s looking to protect American workers. Not only should the company help employees find good work, he wants to institute what he calls a “robot tax” to make it more costly to automate jobs. He says that “many livelihoods are threatened by the unchecked growth of automation.” If Flint and Detroit provide any indication of life after huge manufacturing plants leave or cut jobs, then we should see massive problems in the near future.
Reapplying the Tax Funds
“Thirty-six million jobs that could be made obsolete [by automation],” de Blasio said. “We’re talking as early as 2030.” By paying the robot tax, those funds would then be appropriated to other necessary industries, such as creating green tech union jobs. Other industries include those which are rapidly growing, like education or health care.
“Workers displaced by automation would go to the front of the line for these new positions,” according to de Blasio’s press release for the plan. The plan would create an agency that would keep track of automation progression and regulate the use of robots. By seeing the impact of that automation, the agency could then require the company to pay a tax and even require permits to be used.
Offsetting the economic cost of automation isn’t a new topic. Bill Gates has spoken of the issue in the past. Even Andrew Yang, another presidential candidate, has talked about automation being a problem. That’s why he wants to offer every adult American an additional $1,000 per month as a universal basic income.
“I don’t care about what folks in Silicon Valley who are trying to justify that technology is somehow going to save us all,” de Blasio told Carlson. “You know, they’re resting their laurels on the universal basic income.”
