“We are under the threat of closure all the time,” says Andrew Peters without a hint of fear in his voice.
As though repeating himself for the hundredth time, the managing director of Siemens’ Congleton factory in Cheshire explains his workers are battling for survival. Competition in this historic market town at the foothills of the Pennines, where lush green hills rise to the craggy moorlands of the Peak District, is increasingly global.
“Everyone is in a race to make their products as efficient and productive as possible. If we didn’t have a drive on productivity we wouldn’t be in business.”
This particular plant turns out more than a million motor drives a year, used to control the speed of airport luggage belts including those at Heathrow and Gatwick. Production here is unrecognisable from a decade ago before the robots arrived, emblematic of industry across the country.
Over the past decade, the metronome of the modern economy has risen from a steady swing to an increasingly rapid clip. Keeping up has never been so tough.
Today the talk is of the fourth industrial revolution, management-school jargon to describe the rapid rollout of connected hi-tech networks across the economy. In the past two decades, the number of industrial robots in use around the world has multiplied threefold to 2.25m, according to Oxford Economics. On this trajectory, installations will multiply even faster over the next 20 years to reach 20m.
The impact on living standards cannot be overstated. There are potentially great benefits for improving the productivity of the economy – enabling higher workers’ wages or a four-day week. But there are risks as the pace of change accelerates that workers could be displaced.
The Guardian travelled to the Cheshire market town with the Fabian Society and the Community trade union’s Commission on Workers and Technology, a two-year study looking into the rapidly changing industrial landscape and its impact on workers.
Yvette Cooper, who chairs the group of trade unionists, business leaders and experts, says the purpose of these visits is to discover where the risks lie for workers across the country from the rapid rollout of technology.
“Good employers will see the benefits of working and involving everybody in new developments; it means you improve the skills of the workforce. With better tech, you can improve productivity, you can improve jobs. But too many employers see tech as an easy way to cut labour costs or to monitor the workforce,” she says.
The risks are real. Oxford Economics estimates as many as 20m manufacturing jobs around the world could be lost by 2030. Each new industrial robot eliminates 1.6 manufacturing jobs on average and almost twice that in low-skilled regions. With an ageing workforce the challenges are even greater.
As well as Congleton, the commission has visited an Asda warehouse in Wakefield, and heard from the writer James Bloodworth about Amazon’s working practices. After the Siemens plant, the commission took a minibus on the two-hour drive over the Peak District to Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, to hear from small firms about the impact of technology on their staff. AMRC was built on the site of the old coking plant at Orgreave, the heart of the miners’ strikes in the 1980s.
Martin Bagshaw tells them there was resistance at his firm, Tinsley Bridge Group, when robots were first introduced.
“It was the standard stuff about them stealing our jobs,” he says. After 42 years with the firm, which makes anti-roll-bars for trucks, he says he and other staff now favour the use of the machines. “It’s labour intensive and we have an ageing workforce. But we need to nurture them as they have got loads of experience.”
Britain is standing at the foothills of this climb forward. On the one hand, innovation has had its wings clipped by Brexit, a decade of austerity and a lingering sense of fear from the 2008 financial crisis. But rapid adoption of new technologies is beginning to emerge and the pace should only quicken. Despite this, workers are being left out of the process.
According to a poll for the commission, almost six in 10 employees said they were not given a say on the use of new technologies. People might be marginalised in the fully automated future.
At Siemens, the change is being mapped out with workers as much as possible. When new production processes are introduced, staff design how they work themselves in a virtual reality room known as the cave, where the entire Congleton plant is mapped out. Robotic workstations are mocked up first in cardboard to see how they fit in with the workforce. When the real thing arrives, it is kept in a glass box in the middle of the plant for transparency. Robots have replaced jobs here but new ones have come. Staff have been trained up along the way.
Sian Court, a higher degree apprentice at Siemens’ Congleton plant who runs IT courses for older workers, says some aren’t used to smartphones, online shopping or social media in the rapidly changing digital world, never mind the introduction of robots.
“It’s OK not to understand, and we offer to help them learn at their own pace. It will take time and it will adjust. But things are changing so fast,” she says.
Not everywhere will be like Siemens. The commission could miss the bad practices elsewhere that might lead to millions of people losing their jobs. Examples abound. Amazon workers are tracked by technology and trade unions kept away. Shop Direct put 2,000 jobs at risk last year moving to an automated warehouse. Researchers and unionists from left-leaning thinktanks are unlikely to be let in here.
Staff numbers dropped at Siemens by 30% after the financial crisis hit. But the introduction of new technologies has boosted productivity and enabled growth of new jobs. The workforce is much bigger than before the 2008 crash, at about 470 staff.
In the low-lying middle ground between the Potteries and Manchester, Cheshire has long been a hotbed of science and industry, despite the English pastoral landscape. Nearby Jodrell Bank has housed giant radio telescopes staring into space since the 1950s to trace the fading glow of the big bang. Just south of Manchester, Alderley Park is home to the UK’s largest bioscience campus.
Failure to build on this legacy and to make use of robots could lead to wholesale removal of manufacturing from this part of Britain to other countries with lower production costs, resulting in the loss of high-quality jobs. Using tech to turbocharge production can keep the country competitive.
Sarah Black-Smith, head of factory operations at Siemens, says: “Everybody wants this to be successful. We are looking at the next things coming forward, because we don’t want any reason for anyone not to want to manufacture here in Congleton.”
