Now You Can Rent a Robot Worker:
Polar Manufacturing has been making metal hinges, locks, and brackets in south Chicago for more than 100 years. Some of the company's metal presses—hulking great machines that loom over a worker—date from the 1950s. Last year, to meet rising demand amid a shortage of workers, Polar hired its first robot employee.
The robot arm performs a simple, repetitive job: lifting a piece of metal into a press, which then bends the metal into a new shape. And like a person, the robot worker gets paid for the hours it works.
Jose Figueroa, who manages Polar's production line, says the robot, which is leased from a company called Formic, costs the equivalent of $8 per hour, compared with a minimum wage of $15 per hour for a human employee. Deploying the robot allowed a human worker to do different work, increasing output, Figueroa says.
"Smaller companies sometimes suffer because they can't spend the capital to invest in new technology," Figueroa says. "We're just struggling to get by with the minimum wage increase."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 20 2022, @06:13AM (1 child)
Don't forget the one-off effect on the poor that is the effective 25% reduction of their debts. Student loans might not be bankruptcy-cancelable, but you can inflate them away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 21 2022, @04:07AM
Yep, that's how the roughly $275tn equivalent WWII debt was paid off, they inflated it away.