EuroWire March 2018

Transatlantic cable

According to the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Denmark, Norway and Sweden apply more than 27 per cent of their annual economic output to government services to help jobless people and other vulnerable groups. (The United States devotes less than 20 per cent of its economy to such programmes.) For Swedish businesses, Mr Goodman was told, these outlays yield a key dividend: employees have proved receptive to absorbing new technology. Thus it is that, from inside a control room carved into rock more than half a mile underground at the New Boliden mine, Mika Persson sits in front of four computer screens, one displaying the robot loader he steers as it lifts freshly blasted rock containing silver, zinc and lead. Mr Goodman noted that, if Mr Persson were down in the mine shaft operating the loader manually, he would be inhaling dust and exhaust fumes. “Instead, he reclines in an office chair while using a joystick to control the machine.” Mr Persson knows that robots are evolving by the day. “I’m not really worried,” he said. “There are so many jobs in this mine that even if this job disappears, they will have another one. The company will take care of us.” ‘No, I’m afraid of old technology’ This confidence is well-founded, to judge from a Boliden mine in the town of Kristineberg, where the company is pressing ahead with plans to deploy self-driving trucks, testing a system with the Swedish automotive giant Volvo. There, Boliden has expanded annual production to close to 600,000 tons from about 350,000 tons three decades ago – while the work force of about 200 remains constant. It is understood both in the mine and in the executive suite that the only way for the company to ensure profit is to continually increase efficiency. Wrote Mr Goodman: “This is why Mr Persson and his co-workers in the control room will soon be operating as many as four loaders at once via joysticks.” † † The question arises whether this easy management/labour reciprocity could ever be adapted to the USA, a very different system from Sweden’s with its high wages and famously generous social welfare system, where pay and working conditions are set through national contracts negotiated by unions and employers’ associations. Not readily, certainly. As Mr Goodman pointed out, making the United States more like Scandinavia would entail costs “that collide with the tax-cutting fervour that has dominated American politics in recent decades.” † † But he also suggested that, in an age of automation, it could be good business practice to maintain an ample, Swedish-style cushion against the looming threat of lost jobs. If the USA were to raise its spending on employment-related services to the level that obtains in the Scandinavian countries, might this not result in a workforce as favourably disposed toward automation as its Nordic counterpart? It couldn’t hurt. The Swedish minister for employment and integration, Ylva Johansson, told Mr Goodman that a Swedish union leader, asked: “Are you afraid of new technology?” would answer, “No, I’m afraid of old technology.” † † Said Ms Johansson: “The jobs disappear, and then we train people for new jobs. We won’t protect jobs. But we will protect workers.” Dorothy Fabian – USA Editor

5.1 million jobs by 2020. With respect to the USA specifically, a pair of Oxford University researchers concluded that nearly half of all American jobs could be replaced by robots and other forms of automation over the next two decades. Not surprisingly, a survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center found that 72 per cent of Americans are worried about a future in which robots and computers substitute for humans. By sharp contrast, according to a recent survey by the European Commission (EC), some 80 per cent of Swedes express positive views of robots and artificial intelligence (AI). Visiting Sweden, Mr Goodman was able to corroborate that talk of robots coming to finish off the humans has little currency there or elsewhere in Scandinavia. From Garpenberg, a pine-forested mining area 110 miles northwest of Stockholm, he wrote: “Here, robots are just another way to make companies more efficient.” (“The Robots Are Coming, and Sweden Is Fine,” 27 th December) ‘The company will take care of us’ The Boliden mines in Garpenberg have been in more or less continuous operation since 1257. Over a decade ago, Boliden teamed up with Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications company, to put in wireless Internet. This enables miners to talk to one another to fix problems as they crop up. The miners carry tablet computers that allow them to keep tabs on production all along the 60 miles of roads running through the mine. “For us, automation is something good,” Fredrik Hases, who heads the local union chapter representing Boliden technicians, told the Times . “No one feels like they are taking jobs away. It’s about doing more with the people we’ve got.”

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March 2018