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'No Drones or Driverless Trucks', Demands Teamsters Labor Union (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CNBC:
No drones or driverless vehicles for delivering packages -- that's one of the major demands from the Teamsters labor union in the big contract negotiation it's undertaking with UPS this week. The union wants to ban UPS from using such new-fangled technology, which the logistics company has been reportedly testing... The current agreement affects 260,000 full and part-time UPS employees and expires in July. "UPS is focused on a contract that provides the flexibility needed to remain highly competitive, given the challenge of an increasingly crowded logistics segment," the company told CNBC.
The Drive notes the smaller carbon footprint of drone deliveries, while adding that "one completely understands and empathizes with the aversion truck drivers have toward this stark, autonomous future.
"If it feels like their jobs are being endangered by the incredible exponential growth in technology, it's because they are."
The Drive notes the smaller carbon footprint of drone deliveries, while adding that "one completely understands and empathizes with the aversion truck drivers have toward this stark, autonomous future.
"If it feels like their jobs are being endangered by the incredible exponential growth in technology, it's because they are."
Good old featherbedding.. Tell me what else is new.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If their contract still protected animal drivers, none of them would have a job.
They built this country.
We should tell them that we will put "no drones" or driverless trucks into their contract as soon as we finish putting the "no horse-less carriage" rule into effect that the stablemen are demanding.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
They're called "teamsters" because they used to handle teams of horses to move freight. It's a good thing they didn't allow any new-fangled technology encroach on that business model!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
... With the transition from teams of horses to trucks, they were still the "driver." Now they are fighting the elimination of the "driver."
Just think the jobs that could created if all deliverers had to be delivered by hand or hand truck?
Forgoing driverless vehicles for package delivery will be the end of UPS. The cost of logistics will be too much to compete when FedEx and DHL start
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Even if they get their way and UPS doesn't use drones or driver-less trucks, other companies around the world will continue to develop the technology. When a the new technology is ready, they will get everything in place and then layoff every driver all at once. That will be far more devastating to them than if they are have a period of time to actually get new jobs.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It's the fundamental concept of how the economy is supposed to work, if you don't pay anyone!
If you automate all the jobs away, then where, precisely, is the money supposed to come from, that your potential clients would use, to buy your stuff in the first place? In other words: How would you make money in the first place?
Everybody would be fine with full automation, if the wealth that that causes would go to those, who actually worked to generate it. Instead of those, who merely leeched on them, mooching off of society, taking bailouts, causing inflation, stifling the free market by doing everything they can, to prevent their victims and their enemies to gain a lever that would keep it healthy and balanced.
People always teach kids that example with the lemonade stand, where $1 goes around in circles, and you end up with the same $1, making no money.
But that's how the entire economy works in the real world too! (At least the legitimate parts.) It's so much more complex, that it's well obfuscated.
The only way it can be different, is when money is literally made up out of thin air. (Like stock markets, bank loans, abused crypto-currencies, etc) And that's actually still the same, because by doing it, the money itself loses value. So the wealth still doesn't magically appear out of thin air, but comes out of the pockets of everyone who owns some of that money, via inflation.)
Frankly, the union should STFU, collect some money from its members, buy their own driverless trucks and drones, and spread the profits among the members, in return for their investment.
That would be compatible with the philosophies of the most extreme capitalists, libertarians, socialists and communists.
The only ones who would absolutely hate it, would be those who want to keep leeching. Be it the capitalist or the socialist kind.
We need to engage in the unsexy business of building a lot more rail. If something has to move from a port to 800 miles inland, barring it being military equipment that the military deems too sensitive to send by rail (ie things like nuclear weapons), it should be sent by rail most of the way. That is way more cost-effective than fleets of trucks for the same purpose and much more environmentally sound.
I'm actually surprised Musk hasn't hedged his bets on this and offered to have the Boring Company help build small networks of tunnels to make direct routes by rail cheaper and less reliant on eminent domain. (It wouldn't be big business, but it would be a great way to test the tech)
Many times this winter we got packages from UPS or FedEx and I thanked the driver for braving the elements for me. I feel the same about this as I do about pizza; if there is no one to walk the package to the door for me then the service is not nearly as good or valuable to me. Now if automation halves the delivery cost because it now lacks this service then fine, but I'd like to know what my inconvenience is worth. There is something to be said for human involvement.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
No parking in second row, no throwing of packages over walls, no rough handling of delicate packages, no stealing of valuable items, no poisoning dogs, ...
But seriously, in which millennium do they think they live?
When it comes to fighting technical innovation the unions always lose. Economics always wins. And if it's by old companies going out of business and the new ones based on automation rising.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Itâ(TM)s time we fire up the first Soylent Green factory.
Those angry men are more likely to put you in the meat grinder than the opposite.
Those angry old men are rather ignorant and stuck in their ways, much like the societal reward system.
Progress with no benefit to society as a whole is pointless.
Oh, but there IS a point to all of this. Just ask the owners of companies embracing autonomous/AI solutions. Greed is once again getting rewarded by the "employee" who never complains about minimum wage, getting sick, or at risk of creating a sexual harassment issue (that last one adopted for 2018). Believe me, the rich will be rewarded.
Science and technology is supposed to service us, not the other way around.
Most humans are wasting 40 - 60 hours a week doing a job that automation/AI will soon come along and do. The "service" would be to create a utopia where humans can do whatever they want to do in life, not merely accept what they can do, and turn it into a shitty lifetime of servitude.
Science and technology can deliver. The question is can a society hell-bent on greed adapt.
Just because the union puts this on the table, it doesn't mean they think they are going to get it. The more you have on the table to take off, the more you end up getting in return. It's negotiation 101.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If it's in the contract now, it becomes much more difficult to take it out later. In this round, the argument can be framed as "the union is demanding new protection", but if it's in there for one cycle, the next round will be "the company wants to take away this existing protection".
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Problem 1: We can't get the economy to grow at a sustainable 3% because we already have 4% unemployment. Without productivity growth or population growth, the economy is not capable of 3% growth long term. The labor is just not available.
Problem 2: Automation at restaurants, grocery store checkouts, and with driverless cars and trucks will allow businesses to do the same work with fewer workers. This huge increase in productivity will put millions of cashiers and drivers out of work.
Each problem is the solution to the other -- unless government steps in and prevents it from happening.
The union knows all too well that automation is inevitable. UPS' R&D of automated delivery shows that they realize they'll be roadkill if they don't get out in front ot the automation juggernaut, and the union sees that too.
What they really want is a guarantee that no jobs will be lost and no pay cuts, e.g. drivers will be retrained as drone wranglers.
The problem is that, say, an experienced driver makes $30-40/hour. As a driver, he's worth it because of high productivity and safety. However, as a drone wrangler he's starting from scratch and no more valuable than a newbie making $14/hour. Structurally high labor costs could put UPS at a huge disadvantage in the upcoming drone delivery price wars.
Drones and Driverless Vehicles are going to be the death of the Teamster's Union.
If UPS agrees to the Teamster's demands then UPS will be killed off along with the union as competitors undercut UPS by having lower costs of delivery.
If UPS balks then the Teamster's threat is they'll kill UPS now by striking. That in turn will hasten UPS to adopt drones and driverless vehicles quickening the death of the Teamsters.
Either way the Teamsters lose. They had their time and place. They are no longer needed and are now a parasite on the system. They are like the dinosaur lice that specialized to suck the blood of dinosaurs. When the dinosaurs died off so did those lice.
The only question is can UPS find a path forward that lets them get from here and now to then and there where they will have to go: drones and driverless vehicles.
I like my UPS driver. He's a great guy. But it is a job that is facing extinction. I wish him the best in finding a new and exciting job.
There's no way that robots can do what human drivers do. Driving a simple vehicle around some simple roads is one thing. Unloading boxes from a truck, putting them on handtrucks and getting them into our business is a whole different thing.
I don't respond to AC's.
Say most of routine human work can be automated. There will always be some demand for human labor - because we like to see each other's faces and because of one off tasks for which it's not worth building a robot. According to laws of supply and demand, a little bit of human labor will then buy a lot of robot labor. Works for $19.95 smartphones right? So you will work for two days per week and enjoy living in a home built by a home-building robot, eating produce harvested by a self driving combine harvester and so on. Just like in a primitive society people used to spend 3 days hunting a zebra and two weeks eating a zebra while painting cave walls and dancing around the fire. Except you get to live much nicer by having robots raise and butcher your zebras. Instead, we insist on confining ourselves to industrial monestories for much of our waking time. If anything, lots of software people can afford to work part time from remote and still get by in an affordable area of the country. Maybe that will set a trend? What the world needs now is an army of slackers.
It'll be so nice when AI takes over all contract and civil legal proceedures and 99% of the lawyers are unemployed homeless.
Brave future coming chaps, hold tight!
Unloading boxes from a truck, putting them on handtrucks and getting them into our business is a whole different thing.
The robot won't use a hand truck, the robot will be the delivery cart. And the truck will also be a robot, and besides driving it will be able to handle stacking. That's two things it will do better than UPS. I've had a UPS guy go off the side of the hill here where I expressly told him not to turn around, and where any idiot would have seen was a bad place to go in wet conditions, when there was plenty of room to turn around where I told him to turn around. I turn a Sprinter around there all the time, I'm not sure why he couldn't manage it. To top it off, he didn't bother to let me know he went off the side of the hill, so the first I found out about it was that a fucking tow truck came up my driveway. I'm a car guy, and that's not something I want to be seeing unexpectedly. A self-driving truck will be able to read the grade and simply not drive onto surfaces like that. Of course, it probably wouldn't come up my driveway at all, but that's fine. I prefer it that way. In normal conditions, it won't have any trouble at all.
As for the stacking issue, I have a friend who used to work for UPS. He told me they would inevitably wind up literally throwing packages on trucks. A robot won't do that shit. It doesn't go home, so it doesn't have some special time when it comes in or when it leaves. It can patiently stack boxes 24/7. And the trucks can run 24/7 too. They'll make deliveries during the day, and then they'll do the long hauls in platoons at night, eliminating the current UPS trucking fleet more or less entirely. The whole reason we use such large, cumbersome trucks in the first place is to permit one driver to haul so much freight. They are a liability in every other way. At first, we will do the same thing with autonomous vehicles, so this won't happen instantly — although the long-haul trucking jobs will still go away, since the big OTR trucks will be automated first. Local delivery trucks will be automated much later or at least much more slowly, because of the substantial cost per vehicle.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oh and something to add before you reply:
Killing or forbidding an invention or industry because a government decides that it is bad for society is perhaps the most defining economic element of fascism.
you're preoccupied with where the money comes _from_. The ruling class, OTOH, is preoccupied with where it goes _to_.
.1% of the population. We can stop it, but not while we're busy calling each other leeches while the aristocracy claims everything for themselves.
You've figured out that if we automate all the jobs away the entire economy will grind to a halt. Good job. I mean it. That's the first step. But you still think the ruling class is just like the working class, e.g. that they depend on the economy for their livelihood. This is incorrect. The ruling class makes their living by _owning_ things. They don't need a functional economy to do well.
The ruling class can own everything and rent it out to what remains of the working class. This is how things were done for centuries. They used a smattering of well fed knights to keep the peasants in line. One well fed knight was a match for a dozen or more peasants because the peasants were weak from being underfed. If that balance was tipped from time to time than a caste system would divide the working class and prevent them from over throwing the ruling class.
It took two world wars for the working class to claw a decent living in about 1/3 of the world. We only got it because our numbers were decimated and there weren't enough workers, and because the wars made brothers of us all and weakened the caste systems. Thanks to nukes and globalization that's probably not going to happen again. We're heading for a new dark age (or gilded age, if you prefer). Of complete, total monopolization of wealth by
One last thing, I'm sure I haven't changed your mind. I'm mostly just venting. But to anyone reading this who sees through the systems used to contain and oppress the working class, any ideas how to convince this AC before it's too late?
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of the owner class. Being able to live comfortably without risk off the things you own does. You can't just buy a robot, you have to know how to use it or hire people who do. That means either a) you're a skilled engineer, bully for you or b) you own enough robots that skilled engineers will work for you despite the fact that you yourself have no skills (and no, owning things doesn't count).
Said it before, say it again, when it comes to class warfare the best kind of war is one where the other side doesn't know they're fighting.
Not needing humans to toil is only a good thing if we have some mechanism to distribute the productivity increases besides "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Otherwise what we're gonna see if the rich turn their wealth into power and do terrible things to keep it. This isn't idle speculation. I've got 3000+ years of human history backing me up. You've got about 70 years post WWII of a few countries not being complete dicks to their working class and even then first chance they owner class got they shipped the jobs overseas where they could go back to being awful. History is on my side here; though that's cold comfort.
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