Allister Sparks
I AM writing this from London where the little supermarket down the road is a revelation. It employs just five people – a manager, three assistants to keep the shelves properly stocked and a security man at the door.
There are no check-out attendants. In this store, as in an increasing number around Europe, you, the customer, check yourself out.
This is how it works. You walk in, choose your goods and place them in a shopping basket. You go to the check-out point where you place the basket with contents on a scale which records the total weight. You then remove each item to scan the price, with the automated system checking that the weight of the item removed from the basket matches that of the item on the scanner.
If it doesn’t, an alarm buzzer will go off to alert the tiny staff.
When all items are scanned a screen tells you the total amount and an automated voice tells you to swipe your credit card. That done, you leave. No cash will have changed hands and there will have been no human contact, unless the security man deigns to give you an acknowledging nod as you walk out.
This is just one aspect of the automation revolution about to sweep the world that strikes a visitor to one of its more developed regions. Automation is taking over the jobs of the lowly skilled. The unskilled worker, of which our South African education system is producing another million every year, is becoming obsolete.
In my last column I wrote about how the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union’s (Amcu’s) five-month strike in the platinum mining sector is bound to hasten the introduction of mechanisation in the South African mining industry, putting tens of thousands of miners out of work. Now this observation in a suburban London supermarket brings home the fact that what awaits our mining industry is but the tip of an iceberg.
It has set me wondering whether President Jacob Zuma, now that he has some time for rest and reflection after his exhausting election campaign, is thinking about the implications of this for our people. Does it feature in the minds of any members of our very large and very well paid cabinet? Or in the nightmares of our trade union leaders?
In his 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, describes visiting a Lexus car factory in Tokyo staffed by only 12 auto workers who were operating robots that did the actual building of the cars.
That was 15 years ago, but I wonder whether Irvin Jim, general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa), has thought about it as he takes his members out on strike. Toyota, the company that manufactures the Lexus, makes cars in South Africa because our labour is cheaper than in Japan. But there has to come a point where that ceases to be an adequate economic incentive.
Not least in the balance of advantages is that robots don’t go on strike.
Now robots are even making an appearance in the grocery trade. Here in London fewer and fewer people are trundling around the high street or making weekly trips to hypermarkets on the edge of town to buy their groceries. Now it is online shopping. You telephone one of the big chains, Tesco or Waitrose, place your order, give them your address and credit card details, and within an hour or two the stuff is delivered to your door.
The key to this is what are called “goods-to-person pickstations” – giant warehouses belonging to the supermarket chains. That is where the robots operate. Trained “pickers” operate robots which move around the warehouses to make up the individual orders and load them in vans for home delivery.
Last year 5.5 percent of all grocery shopping in Britain was done this way. This year it is expected to exceed 6 percent. Within five years it will more than double that. And as this exponential growth continues, so will the staff complements of the big supermarket chains diminish.
Indeed so, too, will the supermarkets themselves eventually disappear. The Guardian newspaper reports that Tesco has already turned one into a shopping mall with a cafe, a clothes shop, a restaurant and even a community centre.
Filling stations have become another anomaly in the modern automating world. South Africa must be the last country in the modern world to employ staff to fill your petrol tank. Everywhere else you do it yourself and pay the electronically recorded amount at the cash desk. Yet not long ago our tenuously employed petrol-station attendants ran the incredible risk of going on strike – a vivid illustration of their lack of awareness of the approaching revolution.
Then there are London Transport’s all-purpose Oyster cards, first introduced 11 years ago, which dispensed with the need for conductors in the city’s 8 000 buses and ticket collectors in its 270 tube stations. Now you can top up your Oyster card at electronic machines at every station and even through your home computer, so dispensing with the need for ticket sellers – a factor which contributed to two strikes earlier this year.
Soon the process is to be advanced still further, with London Transport announcing that from next week no cash tickets will be issued on buses. Everyone wishing to use London’s buses and underground trains will need an Oyster card – in addition to the 43 million already issued.
The system has cut the cost of fares considerably, by half in off-peak hours, but it has put thousands of Londoners out of work.
This brave new Aldous Huxley world is swiftly on the advance. Here in the developed world it is eroding a whole layer of the lowly skilled working class. It is part of the reason for the world-wide growth of inequality, for the loss of jobs by the many is accompanied by burgeoning earnings for the fewer skilled technicians required to operate the new machinery.
Unemployment, poverty, inequality. Those are the three big threats to the future of our democracy. All are going to be seriously worsened by the rapid advance of automation. The technological revolution is upon us, bringing with it all the economic transformation and social trauma that the industrial revolution brought to the nineteenth century.
It is past time that all elements of our society – government, business and labour – got down to thinking more collectively and creatively about how to deal with it.
This is the great challenge of the new South Africa. We have spent far too much time arguing and finger-pointing about the grievances and crimes and failures of the past. Yes, there are serious legacies and they will endure, some for many years to come. And they need to be addressed and redressed. But we don’t need to let it dominate the public debate to the extent that it does.
Societies that entrench a culture of nurturing historic grievances, such as the Irish, the Israelis and the Palestinians – and, yes, we South Africans – tend to be static.
Dynamic societies look and plan ahead. Given the magnitude of the problems facing us, that should be our priority.