Throw out the employee handbooks and get out the mechanical manuals—your future employees may not be human!
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The South China Morning Post reports that the first factory in China that will “employ” only robots on assembly lines is now under construction in Dongguan, a top manufacturing center, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
The new facility will have 1,000 machines, which will reduce the number of human employees needed by 90 percent (well, someone has to program, fix, and “manage” the robots, and tend to the facility).
The province department of labor is attributing the move to a workforce shortage in the area, which it says is short between 600,000 to 800,000 manufacturing workers in what is known as “the world’s workshop.”
The department of labor says one reason for the shortage is a downturn in the number of workers who are moving into Dongguan from rural areas has lessened dramatically. Dragronfly Group, a management consultancy concentrating on China, says “the appeal of becoming a migrant worker and traveling to find a job in a coastal city has dropped,” while many people are heading to coastal areas with better wages and working conditions instead of inland manufacturing hubs.
HRSBT has run plenty of articles on robots in the workplace, but this report seems the most extreme.
So, while many of the employment headaches caused by Homo sapiens will be eliminated (as well as those problematic benefits and leave issues), the term “human resources” may no longer be appropriate in companies with only 10 percent human staff. Will it be called “robot resources?”