The impact of Covid-19 has hastened the pace of technological adoption across industries, leading to widespread job losses and a re-designing of job roles and scopes to accommodate the ‘new normal’ of how business is conducted. The biggest shift this crisis will see is that of jobs being automated and offshored from higher-income countries to lower-income ones, accelerating a transition that has been gradually rising over the last decade.

Such rapid changes have left many workers circumspect about the future of their jobs, and there is a real risk - of which many governments are cognizant of - where the bottom third of wage earners will be left behind after the economic seismic waves generated by this pandemic. That the lower-income is especially vulnerable to forces of automation was noted in a study by the Centre for Business and Economic Research (CBER) and the Rural Policy Institute’s Center for State Policy, Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. They found that a low risk of automation was associated with much higher wages, averaging about US$80,000 a year whereas occupations with the highest risk of automation have annual incomes of less than $40,000.

In the shipping industry, the bulk of these jobs most at risk to automation fall mainly into the categories of non-routine tasks and manual-intensive skills as defined by Autor, Levy, Murnane, (2003). They developed a framework which I’ve specifically tailor-fit for job roles within the logistics industry, particularly with third-party logistics companies. Their research findings are further corroborated by Frey and Osborne’s (2013) seminal work, which quantifies the extent to which occupations in the United States can be replaced by modern technology. The main contention is that nearly every occupation can be computerized in the next couple of decades, with the exception of those that involve high amounts of three broadly defined activities – creative intelligence, social intelligence, and perception and manipulation – that currently present automation bottlenecks.

Frey and Osborne concluded, “We find that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are likely to be substituted by computer capital.” They also surmised that occupations requiring knowledge of human heuristics and specialist occupations - skills that the higher income and senior level labor force embody - were the least susceptible to automation.

News Source From: The Maritime Executive