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14 People Make 500K Tons of Steel a Year in Austria
- mpalmes 9y agoI would imagine there will still be a sizable number of jobs outside of Voestalpine group from contractors/companies maintaining machinery and transport companies. Will be interesting the long term impacts as well on the local communities in a country like Austria.
- ramy_d 9y agoDon't know about that, 3 of the 14 employees monitor the plant, the rest: The other employees maintain equipment or retool the plant for various wire gauges—hundreds of variations ranging from 4.5 millimeters to 60 millimeters.
- mpalmes 9y agoGood point, that takes care of maintenance. Definitely a small/efficient workforce for the amount of output.
- guimarin 9y agoWe should not be employing people in jobs that can be automated. We should try and automate everything. We should develop technologies, processes, and abilities so that everyone can learn new things. The people that want to learn will be incredibly leveraged and provide a ton of value to society. Those who don't want to learn should be given enough for basic subsistence. A stipend which covers food, shelter, clothing, catastrophic healthcare, reasonable water access, and unlimited data. I would also push that all humans can be close to nature in some way, be it a park or otherwise. We have the technology to do this. Instead we have protectionism and fear.
- savanaly 9y agoI agree with this for the most part. There is a real human need though, and not one that makes a lot of rational sense, but a need nonetheless, to be needed. And for a lot of people in that world you described it wouldn't be met. It's kind of perverse right, because people don't want you to artificially create need for them (it wouldn't be fun to receive your basic income in compensation for digging and then filling in a big hole), they want it to be a genuine need for their talents. And unfortunately although we evolved that yearning to be helpful, we also evolved the ability to automate away most of the tasks that would have stimulated that.
- pstuart 9y agotl;dr: we all need a reason to get up in the morning.
- seer 9y agoI think iain bank's "the culture" novels explore this future in depth quite well. I will not spoil it but the basic idea is "games" - people will just be able to play all the games they want and compete with one anoher without the need to survive.
- marvin 9y agoAlso, there is absolutely no abuse of power in Banks' society. This would certainly be a problem in a fully-automated capitalist society. I think Banks is a great inspiration, but it is not a world we will get by default. It needs active political effort.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y agoChairman Mao would be proud. (clicky: https://www.google.com/search?q=Chairman+Mao+steel https://www.google.com/search?q=Chairman+Mao+steel )
- mbroshi 9y ago"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment." - Warren Bennis
- devoply 9y agoI wonder what sort of qualifications you need for that sort of job. I would like to be prepared for that sort of future.
- BigChiefSmokem 9y agoA Doctorate in Dog Food Science with a minor in kennel cleaning.
- TetOn 9y agoAnd minimum seven years experience with existing factory dog.
- devoply 9y agoNo I would think the minimum requirement would be 20 years of experience with the same factory dog with the sort of requirements that go on these days with businesses -- it's only going to get worse.
- ohazi 9y agoYou guys are all wrong. The only requirement for this job is that you have to be a Good Boy.
- flukus 9y agoOh you've only got experience with Labradors? This is a rottweiler company.
- Mz 9y ago
- strict9 9y agoSimilar story for Gary, a once booming town around a single industry (steel). >The Gary Works is a major steel mill in Gary, Indiana, on the shore of Lake Michigan. For many years, the Gary Works was the world's largest steel mill, and it remains the largest integrated mill in North America. >The Gary Works remains Gary's largest single employer and a key element of the city's tax base. However, employment levels have fallen substantially since the mid-20th century; the plant and allied facilities employed over 30,000 people in the early 1970s, but only 6,000 in 1990, and 5,000 in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Works
- brianwawok 9y agoOh the smell of the Gary Works. It is rough.
- calichoochoo 9y agoThat's really neat, from an urbanist's point of view. Looking at that facility in Google Maps, I see that it hasn't got anywhere near 30000 parking spaces. All those people must have lived there and walked in, which is something modern business has largely lost.
- chrismealy 9y agoWhere was all the equipment in the new factory made?
- vkou 9y agoIn another factory, which may well had also employed <20 people. It almost certainly did not require 10 * 1000 person-years to produce all the machinery that this factory needs to run for 10 years. If it did, it wouldn't have been a cost savings.
- sparky_ 9y agoAustria's generous social welfare system and wide availability of other blue-collar-yet-comfortable-pay work should mean that the average joe won't be screwed over too much by this. Unlike in the US, where laid off folks really have no recourse.
- dv_dt 9y agoI would go further. Because Austria has blocked off the tempting and easy path of abusing a labor market to secure a profit stream, other long-term paths were explored that ultimately ended up in a higher level of productivity & profit for society as a whole.
- nickbauman 9y agoThere's a theory that any market that is subject to higher and higher productivity gains will eventually become highly volatile followed by its collapse.
- Animats 9y agoThat's a hot rolling mill. They're not making steel, just forming it. The old, messy plant next door makes the steel. Better hot rolling mills have been mechanized for a long time. Here's a plain rebar mill in Delhi that's for sale.[1] There must be some people around somewhere, but they're not near the machinery when it's working. The machinery is huge, but not computerized. On the other hand, here's a rolling mill in India that has lots of people handling hot metal with tongs.[2] That's about where the US was in 1935. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW0jAMxAN3Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW0jAMxAN3Y [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-lGaC8OJGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-lGaC8OJGs
- theoh 9y agoEven the automated ones are dangerous to be close to, apparently. There's a characteristic type of snarl-up known as a "cobble" where white-hot steel rod flies everywhere: https://youtu.be/uxbsgWOjX5o https://youtu.be/uxbsgWOjX5o
- MrBuddyCasino 9y agoSlightly click-baity headline: "While about 300 other workers in Donawitz carry out support roles such as shipping logistics and running the internal rail system, the rolling mill itself will be operated by just over a dozen people."
- delazeur 9y agoYeah, and that's not even remarkable. 70-90% of employees in a modern manufacturing facility will be in maintenance or support roles.
- lancewiggs 9y agoTo emphasise this. The entire plant needs to be maintained, with daily, weekly, quarterly, annual and longer preventative maintenance schedules. Sometimes these will require taking down the whole plant for a week or two, other times for shorter times or the work can be done without interruption. There is also unplanned maintenance - when the plant stops working and a team is needed to get it bak up and running. For this yo gals need a warehouse full of critical spare parts - and people to manage it all. The plant also needs people working on product development (e.g. different wire materials and weights), process development (improvement in capacity to over name place capacity), health and safety (even with a hands-free plant like this there are plenty off hazards and a large amount of environmental and H&S compliance work), and so on. All these people need managers. And then there is demand management - figuring out what to make and when, goods inwards (and its quality control), dispatch and managing all the associated paperwork and QC. And there need to be people who make are those controlling computers and all the transmitters and controllers are working properly. and so on. But a laudable achievement nonetheless.
- test1235 9y agoEven in a software house - I worked at a company where there were 11 other employees for each developer (most of them salespeople).
- edpichler 9y agoHere is an interesting video about automation "No one should have to do work that can be done by a machine, by Roberto Mangabeira Unger" on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5OyrsHmjW0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5OyrsHmjW0 PS: He is Brazilian, and gave lessons about the field of philosophy to Obama on university.
- amadeusw 9y agoThank you for sharing. Today I learned that wage labor was intended to be a transitional relationship until free labor can be achieved.
- anovikov 9y agoThere is clearly a mistake in hours per ton of steel calculation. It just can't be true. It is probably per thousand tons, then 250 hours to make 1000 tons of steel sound reasonable - wholesale market of steel is ca. $300 a ton so that would be about $1000/hour worked, about average for a highly automated industry.
- holri 9y agoNo wonder. Working hours are heavily taxed while energy / resource consumption is not.
- cornflake 9y agoThe economics behind this disruptive innovation in the steel industry were broken down really well by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen in his writings and this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5FxFfymI4g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5FxFfymI4g
- rurban 9y agoIncidently I worked on planning the next generation fully automated VOEST-Alpine plant in Kapfenberg several years ago, when I worked as architect. Sorry, but I don't have the pictures. They still haven't decided on it. This is just a new rolling mill to produce HQ wire, all the blue collar workers are in the iron blasts next door. You can easily get summer jobs there, which is better than going to Switzerland working in a nuclear power plant. Some pictures: https://www.google.de/search?q=voest+alpine+donawitz https://www.google.de/search?q=voest+alpine+donawitz For the introduction of this new automated mill they didn't cut any jobs: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fdiepresse.com%2Fhome%2Fwirtschaft%2Feconomist%2F5211856%2FvoestalpineChef-will-Arbeiter-durch-whitecollar-workers-ersetzen&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr... "Digitization will continue to have no negative impact" said Eder. The transformation process would "take certainly 15 years - without job cuts," as the CEO said. The automation process and foreign producers (Mittal) with its cheap labor had a huge positive impact on us architects then. We were able to cut costs on huge steel buildings, e.g. the RESOWI University in Graz, which I also worked on, the largest building in the country. It was planned for 1.2bill and was finished under 800m, just because the steel price exactly from this company VOEST Alpine went down dramatically. Before everything was build with concrete, brick or wood, then suddenly steel had an unexpected rise in popularity.
- dustinmoris 9y agoBlue collar is dead, white collar is the new blue collar and AI is the new white collar.
- grashalm01 9y agoI've played enough factorio to know that you only need one person. Also handling the rail system at the same time.
- amarant 9y agoclickbaity as the headline may be, it is yet another indicator that the only way to secure future employmentrates is to invest in education. "unskilled" workers as the article calls them, wont be needed anywhere in the not at all distant future.
- lmm 9y agoEducation is an easy answer, but are we sure education will be enough? Is everyone educatable to the point where they will be skilled enough to contribute to the economy?
- fergie 9y agoOn a related note, its really surprising how industrialised Austria is- their Alpine valleys are full of heavy engineering.
- TotallyGod 9y agoBut how many people were required to build the automation and also to keep it running? If they're anything like automated check-out stations in grocery stores, they employee more people than the low-tech solution did previously.