Robots 'have created 261,000 new jobs' in US automotive sector, not destroyed them

Rise of the robots comes with a rise in jobs - but is this just a coincidence?

The increase in the use of industrial robots in the US automotive industry has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, rather than destroyed them, according to a new report from the Statistical Department of the International Federation of Robotics (IFR).

According to the IFR, the US automotive industry installed a new record of approximately 17,600 industrial robots in 2016, while between 2010 and 2016, the operational stock increased by about 52,000 units.

During the same period, the number of jobs in the US automotive sector rose by 260,600, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The suggestion from the IFR is that the creation and implementation of the robots, as well as the management of them, causes a rise in jobs.

In 2010, the number of robots in the automotive industry was 75,000 and the number of employees in the sector was 679,000. In every subsequent year, there was a rise in both robots and employees in the sector - leading to 2016 when the numbers had increased to 127,000 and 940,000 respectively.

Within the main industries that make use of robots, the automotive sector came out on top in the US for the estimated annual supply of industrial robots in 2016. The sector's 17,600 was far higher than in any other sector - electronics had 5,100, metal had 1,900, plastic and chemical products had 2,100 and the food industry had 1,300.

According to Joe Gemma, president of the IFR, the main driving force behind this growth is a combination of insourcing and improving production processes.

"The main driving force is the ongoing trend to automate production in order to strengthen the competitiveness of American industry globally, to keep manufacturing at home, and in some cases bring back manufacturing that had previously been outsourced to other countries," he said at the world robotics IFR CEO roundtable in Chicago.

Meanwhile, Jon Battles, Amazon's director of worldwide engineering advanced technologies, said that the key message should be the "optimism about jobs in the future - especially with technology".

The company had announced it was hiring 100,000 new full-time US workers back in January, and Battles said that this was directly on the back of a rise in the use of robotic systems.

"I want to make a really critical point: We are doing this level of hiring after installing 45,000 Amazon robotic systems in our fulfilment centres. I don't have any better success story to give than that and we are hiring in every job class and level," he claimed.

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