-PJ
“A large order would mean, we need to hire 10-15 welders to fulfill it – and they’re just not out there,”
When I was in Junior High and High school, every boy in school knew how to weld, we all took the shop classes.
I believe automation will produce an abundant supply of material goods — that is: wealth.
I believe many humans will find that their labor will no longer be required by society — we don’t need everyone to be a robot technician.
I believe we will live in a post-scarcity society in which people have time and their hands, and plenty of “stuff”.
I’m not sure human society will handle it well when almost everyone has idle hands.
If you pay them, they will come. Blaming everything on lack of applicants is BS. There are always people willing to work if you are willing to pay. We like to call this system the “free market”.
On the other side of the coin, we have welders wanting too much money. Now they have some serious competition....
Sky net is coming
Then we need more welding placement programs. Finish the welding course, pass the practical tests, then automatically get a job with X company as a welder.
We have a massive number of younger adults looking for decent jobs after being screwed by the college system. This may not be the dream they thought of, but it’s far better pay than food service jobs.
Wir sind die Roboter.
IDK.
I’ve worked in robotics and there is a lot of misinformation out there.
My favorite example of a robot is one that was the size of a forklift. Cost a quarter million.
It’s job was to move postage stamp sized pamphlets 2 feet...
Robots need more work.
With any luck, robots will be able to deliver basic nursing care at home by the time I need it.
Better that than some nurse’s aid from one of the Stans.
Lots of jobs, from the Walmart cashier, to the McDonald’s worker to the welder are being and will be replaced by automation robots.
It will be what to market demands.
Domo arigato, Mr Roboto, domo ... domo ...
Robotic mig welders have been around for many years. They can’t do anything faster than a 20-year-old who knows most of the alphabet can do, but the robot can make the same motions repetitively and consistently without getting bored. Larger assembly lines can use these machines to boost efficiency and lower the cost per part of repetitively fabricated parts.
The lede that got buried in this story was how robotic welding machines are going down market. Smaller shops and factories had to make a choice about where to risk: invest big money in robotics or continue to use manual processes. Robotics means higher capacity, but sales have to be there to recoup the investment and the machines are only part of the cost as professional designers and engineers have to be on board to make the most out of a big investment. For a company maybe worth two million dollars total, a new outlay of two million dollars in machinery and staff can be too big of a risk to accept.
A lot of american machine shops and parts suppliers in recent years had to make this choice. Bringing the total amount of risk down so a small shop can price competitively with an overseas competitor, and a market strategy that doesn’t require a big upfront investment is indeed a big change. Of course, this company has probably figured out how to price the rentals and service agreements so they make out like kings and the companies who use them aren’t going to reap the total benefits of cost savings as if they would if they owned the machines outright, but there are always tradeoffs, and being able to cut the expenses when the workload is slow can be a big selling point for some companies.
the amount of buzzwords in this article is astonishing ....
here’s my understanding: small welder robots can now be rented like any other tool from a local tool rental outfit, and they’re very easy to program: like their big cousins in auto factories, when you put them in learning mode you can have a master welder guide them through the necessary welding motions, and then after that, they’ll replicate the remembered welding motions over and over again until your batch of parts are all welded up and then you take the robot back to the rental store ... and that’s a lot cheaper than having the master welder welding all of the parts himself ...
Now the incels will be competing with robot welders. Slowly the skilled jobs are going away through automation, in large part because we've raised a couple of generations of clueless unskilled layabouts.
I had one employee who asked for a couple days off even though we had a hard deadline looming. It was a time for all hands on deck. When I asked him why he needed the time off, he said he was going to get together with his friends to play video games. I just about stroked out, right then and there. To this day it still sends my blood pressure soaring, just thinking about it.
Plenty of robots used in welding already. This one may be a little different but there are so many used in production jobs now.
-PJ
Re: Massive labor shortages?
Remedy:
Higher Wages.
Better Benefits.
Improve Working Conditions.
Presto - highly skilled welders are knocking on your door.
It’s almost like magic!
He and his friends built their own trailer home before WW2 (which he later served in as a welder) and lived out of it while they went to welding school. After getting married, he cam,e down from NH to East Boston MA to apply for a job, and rented a room and bought a dozen donuts and a quart of chocolate milk to live off for 3 days, ss he would have to return then. They hired him on the 3rd day.
That job meant often working in very bad weather, and sometimes welding around corners and using mirrors, and since he was only 5' 2'', he was a good fit for working on subs and in tight places. And sometimes when work demands were slow he worked a second and even third job in order to pay the bills for a family of 5 kids and the wife. They called him "honest Stan." Thank God for such a God-fearing man. He died at 79 from pancreatic cancer (no smoker or drinker).
He taught my youngest brother to weld, and they worked together for many years, and he semi-retired at 62.
So why is there a shortage of welders today? I think it is the same reason there is a shortage of truck drivers and other blue-collar jobs. The younger generations overall tend to not want to do that kind of work, nor have to, and lack the commitment that their predecessors had, and thus immigrants tend to be the ones doing such work (and ther cultures are not equal), if all all.