A month after Adidas announced it will be bringing its robot factory to Atlanta, a Georgia State study confirms that factory won’t be alone in the robot business for long.
David Sjoquist, a Georgia State urban economics specialist and author of Employment and Wage Trends in Manufacturing, has brought attention to the decline in manufacturing jobs in Georgia with his most recent study.
In the study, he uncovered the steady decline in manufacturing jobs since 2000 and predicted that the trend will continue in the future.
“We would project that in 2035, manufacturing employment in Georgia would be 248.6 thousand jobs, which would be a 36 percent decrease over 2014,” he said.
In his report he said the decrease is a result of advances in manufacturing technology, such as human-like machines, as they continue to upgrade throughout time.
“This trend is due to changes in production technology (e.g., replacing humans with robots) and the movement of manufacturing jobs offshore in search of low wage workers.”
When asked how this advancement will affect the economy he explained that it will have an overall negative impact, because it means a loss in jobs.
“A decline in manufacturing jobs is a negative for the state economy, since it means a loss of jobs.”
Sjoquist said that the workers who lose their jobs will have other options in the field but will not necessarily have the same wages as before.
“If the manufacturing jobs are lower paid manufacturing jobs, then when workers find new jobs, [where] they might be paid more,” he said. “However, many manufacturing jobs [now] pay more than the average wage, so workers might have to take lower salaries in their new jobs.”
The decline is only affecting those who are lower level manufacturing worker, so Sjoquist differentiated between the two.
“Lower skilled workers would have no more than a high school degree. Higher skilled workers would have at least a degree (or a certificate) from tech school or a two year school. Others would have a college degree, although that would not be very common.”
Sjoquist does not have hope that there will be increase in jobs for lower level manufacturing workers, but he does believe that the decline can be slowed.
“I don’t know if we can increase the number of manufacturing jobs beyond the growth that is expected in the short run as we continue to recover from the Great Recession. We can at least slow the decline by making the state a more desirable location of high tech manufacturing. Probably the most important thing to do in this regard is increasing the quality of the labor force by improving the education system.”
