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It's interesting that Europe, with its (in-)famously stricter labor laws, has a higher robot ratio than the US. I would have thought that companies in the US wo
by apu 16y ago
It's interesting that Europe, with its (in-)famously stricter labor laws, has a higher robot ratio than the US. I would have thought that companies in the US would be able to fire workers much more easily to replace them with robots, and yet this doesn't appear to be the case.
- jonasvp 16y agoI find that very logical - in countries where employees are expensive to hire and to let go, buying robots is a easy strategy to cut costs. Given that you have to train a new employee with uncertain success, getting a robot with a limited but constant output will seem a safer bet.
- HeyLaughingBoy 16y agoI'm sure that's a part of it, but a bigger reason is probably just that the US has a very large number of manufacturers and most of them are too small to afford the robots this survey is discussing. I've known many small job shops turning out thousands of parts a day with (automated, but not robotic) WW II surplus equipment; in some cases with the stenciled words "Property of War Department" still visible on the cabinet! Machine tools have lifetimes measured in human generations. There are also many small manufacturers that do everything by hand -- remember that most US small businesses are run part time -- a quick look at my bookmarks shows URLs of a few tiny businesses making just a few thousand units of their product a year.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- sueders100 16y agoMany of the manufacturing jobs in the US are unionized. The unions can make it more difficult to fire people.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]