Britain’s problem is not too many robots – it’s too few

an article by Liam Byrne for the New Statesman


Robots weld vehicle panels at the Nissan Sunderland plant

Harry Bridges was the legendary president of the American dockers' union who won his spurs organising through the bloody strike of 1934. But it was the mechanisation revolution of the Sixties that really put him to the test. Bridges knew he couldn't turn back the tide. So he set out a different question: how to win for his members “a piece of the machine”. The challenge, said Bridges, was how to get the machines working for the workers and not against them.

That question – the “Bridges test” – is once again the challenge for progressives as we face the future of work.

There is much to alarm us. Think of James Bloodworth's chilling account of life in an Amazon warehouse, where ubiquitous monitors have become what my friend Clive Efford calls the digital “butty man”; deciding who gets paid what at the end of the week. Or the death of DPD driver Don Lane, who worked himself to death in fear of the firm's penalties for slowness. Or Deliveroo's court-won freedom not to pay minimum wage or holiday pay.

The statistics behind the stories are even worse: 10 per cent of UK jobs are at risk of significant change. But the sectors hit fastest and hardest – retail and transportation – are those that employ the majority of the British working class. We could lose more working-class jobs than during the shutdown of coal, steel and shipbuilding combined.

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