Steel Driving Machine
August 9, 2017 <? /* php if ( comments_open() ) : ? */> • 10 Replies	<? /*php endif; // comments_open() ?*/>
By Lloyd Graff
It is rare to read a long article in The Washington Post that delves into the life of a guy who pushes the button on a punch press thousands of times a day. But Chico Harlan did it brilliantly in his feature piece last Saturday.
The two-thousand-word article was about more than just Bobby Campbell who works at Tenere Corporation in Dresser, Wisconsin. It was probably the best depiction of the struggle to find capable and reliable factory staff in America 2017 that I have read. I wish I had written it.
I talked to The Post's Chico Harlan on the phone to compliment him and get more background on the piece. He spent nine days in a Holiday Inn Express in the middle of no-where Wisconsin because he and his editors, and indirectly Jeff Bezos of Amazon who owns The Washington Post, thought the piece was that important. The American labor market, especially manufacturing, is a multifaceted mess, and this mid-sized firm named Tenere, owned by a private equity group, was that rare company which would allow a reporter like Harlan full access to the shop floor and the lives of its employees.
Tenere is a big fabricating job shop. On a good day it has 550 employees banging out sheet metal components primarily for the electronics industry. They are not high-tech products, but they must fit nicely for the disk drive companies that purchase them. Tenere has a plant in Mexico, but the core of the business is in the northwest corner of Wisconsin, 90 minutes from the Twin Cities. Not many folks live in the small towns like Dresser, and you aren't going to attract many young people with $12-$13 per hour jobs. Harlan says Tenere chronically is 120 workers short of where they would like to be, with a three-shift operation of punching, bending and assembly. The firm is constantly trying to hire and continually discarding the weak applicants who often self-select by quitting during their first week. They have bent their hiring standards to allow in people who have had criminal or substance abuse problems and still they cannot get the people they need. The writer spent a lot of time with Bobby Campbell, the press operator with a long-term drinking problem. Harlan wrote sympathetically about Bobby's agonizing ride home each night in which he passes a dozen gas stations and mini-marts selling beer. His urge to stop and buy a dozen cans is often unbearable, and if he buys them he'll probably down them all in one sitting.
Tenere has a lot of folks like Bobby Campbell to deal with, which is what brought the company to Matt Bush and Rob Goldiez and their robot rental startup, Hirebotics, after a manager read about them in the trade publication, The Fabricator. Day after day Bobby Campbell misses his quotas, but Tenere needs Campbell because he is the best they can get – at least until Matt and Rob brought in the robots from Denmark made by Universal Robots.
Hirebotics is a year-old company according to Goldiez. He and his partner are engineers, formerly working at a unit of Berkshire Hathaway, who saw the potential for being the vital facilitator between the robot seller and the end user like Tenere that faces huge operational problems on a shop floor lacking sophistication and distrustful of automation. Goldiez told me they are being swamped with inquiries since The Post piece and the article in The Fabricator.
A Universal Robot is a $32,000 robotic arm, not one of the monster Kuka or ABB machines welding car bodies you see at Toyota or Ford.
Matt and Rob packed two robotic arms and their wiring packages into their car in Nashville and drove to the northwest corner of Wisconsin to install them themselves. They are very hands-on guys. Their intriguing business proposition is that they rent the robots by usage for $15 per hour. The machines are expected to be used 80 hours per week, minimum. Records of uptime are kept on the Cloud.
It took eight days for Bush and Goldiez to officially integrate the robots into Tenere's production, making "claws" and "holsters" out of sheet metal. They are not really replacing people, just augmenting production for people like Bobby Campbell who tries his best but cannot keep up with the company's production goal.
For highly reliable Annie Larson, another Tenere employee highlighted in the story, the second robot installed is a godsend. Her team is supposed to be comprised of 12 people but usually only 6 or 7 show up. Her robot doesn't have sick kids or divorce court to deal with and hits its quotas every day. She's happy about it because it takes stress out of her life when the team falls behind.
Tenere is now planning for robots 3 and 4 from Hirebotics. They had been considering busing in people from a Somali community in the Twin Cities, a 90-minute trip, but the robots may make that unnecessary. For now the company is starting to manage its "arms" race.
Question: Over the next 10 years will robots save or kill more jobs in America?
Read Harlan's Washington Post Article "Rise of the Machines."
10 thoughts on "Steel Driving Machine"
Charles D Schultz August 10, 2017 at 6:14 am
Thanks for this post! Finally some real news on the manufacturing job front.
allen August 10, 2017 at 6:33 am
Historically automation's increased employment by making society wealthier. Part of the cost is displacement of the workers in the jobs vulnerable to automation. Society's now so wealthy that the leading health problem of our poor is obesity.
If history's any guide than the dislocations caused by the latest generation of automation will ultimately result in life being even better than it is now. That's not much of a comfort if you don't have much in the way of skills and find yourself unemployed due to automation but it's also inevitable. If you do nothing to prepare yourself for that inevitability than you aren't due much sympathy.
But we humans can be an idiotically stubborn bunch the more so due to the unprecedented wealth of our society.
If you're rich you're more likely to get your way than if you weren't and we are all rich, by historical and evolutionary standards, so less likely to have run into the sort of forceful reminders that the world doesn't revolve around us as most people, down through history, would have.
But even historically we've generally chosen to fight such changes rather than bow to them. The word "luddite" comes from a name given to a group that fought the introduction of weaving machinery which largely put an end to hand-weaving. Are we better or worse off as a result of the end of commercial hand-weaving?
Obviously, we're vastly better off so we'll be better off in the future. But right now, for a lot of folks, it looks pretty grim. I'd love to wave a magic wand and solve that problem but with no magic wand the historical, and inevitable, solution is that technology will grind on pushing those who'll bow to its force in new directions and crushing those who won't.
John Van Der Laar August 10, 2017 at 6:51 am
Nicely put, Allen.
steve August 10, 2017 at 8:32 am
Automation will help "productivity" in AMERICA. Automation will create jobs. But not nearly as many as it "kills". it will create wealth, as that's what manufacturing, Mining, and Agriculture do for societies. It will be interesting to see how the Payroll taxes and Income taxes are affected over the next 20 years.? Less baby boomers working. More Robots working? Hmmm… Can Robots buy homes and pay property taxes?
Dana August 10, 2017 at 11:53 am
It's same in manufacturing everywhere. They cry they want good workers. Then they pay $12 to $13 an hour. Go learn a trade then get paid what a person at McDonald's gets.
Realismatwork August 10, 2017 at 2:24 pm
A manufacturer is competing against Asian factories who pay a quarter of that .
So until Asian countries fill up and unionise the American ( and European – in fact the Western ) factory worker is on a hiding to nothing .
Globalisation – being the export of jobs to be able to make things cheaper in Asian ( to the benefit of the person's owning the Asian manufacturing plant ) – resulting in the loss of jobs and stagnation of wages in the West .
All to make a communist dictatorship like China stronger so it can take over the USA one day – as who will be left to make the steel, guns and bullets in the West .
Lloyd Graff August 10, 2017 at 2:57 pm
Trying to run a factory in the United States is enormously difficult. The Post article was unusual because the writer actually talked to workers and followed them through their days. Robots are crucial to thefuture of manufactufing here because real people have real problems that get in the way of daily output and always will. Discussions about unions and China and lousy wages miss the point. There is demand for good product everywhere. The companies and people who provide it efficiently will win big. Universal Robots, Hirebotics and maybe Tenere will be successful if they make good stuff. The workers will ultimately lose if they fail consistently. Life will go on without them.
Now Lloyd,
Don't "stereotype" a few "factory" workers with problems, and then typecast the rest of us? Many MANY of us are clean cut, honest, hardworking souls who care about our companies! Yes robots will help. But we could use some "marketing' help that puts manufacturing in a POSITIVE light? we're not all victims….(yet). But globalization hurts! Our tax code hurts. Our Property tax code hurts! Our health insurance costs hurt!
Fritz August 10, 2017 at 5:32 pm
The greatest productivity and industrial sales boosters have resulted from shifts forward in communications capabilities and real-time feedback mechanisms- whether that be productivity, or quality, or scheduling coordination, or training, or whatever…
For every 1 job that a worker loses to a cobot or robot in thier factory, their employer will lose 200 jobs to a competitor who provides AR technology to thier human workforce.
People won't lose jobs en masse on the scale that people are worried about now until about 12-15 years from now when robot to robot communication achieves self-propagating, software redefinale, controller/drive integration capability.
Don D August 11, 2017 at 2:33 pm