The Dangerous Economist: Meet the Robots Slicing Your Barbecue Ribs

The meatpacking industry is investing billions of dollars to automate notoriously difficult jobs

Do businesses replace workers with robots or other capital to cut down on costs? Or do they add robots because there is a labor shortage? Or, as mentioned in some of my related posts, do robots and humans complement each other?

If robots and humans are substitutes, if the price of human labor rises then the demand for robots would increase. The article mentions a labor shortage in the meat industry. If market forces are allowed to work, then a shortage should lead to a price increase which then means an increase in demand for robots. Many articles I read on shortages never mention that price is below equilibrium.

Excerpts from the article:

"In Denison, Iowa, a robot spends eight hours a day slicing apart hog carcasses at a plant owned by Smithfield Foods. It serves a dual purpose: producing more ribs for barbecues and smokers, while helping ease the U.S. meat industry’s long-running labor shortages.
Meatpackers are increasingly looking to robots for help. Smithfield, the largest U.S. pork processor, began rolling out automated rib pullers at its pork plants several years ago, which company officials said helps leave less wasted meat on the bone and relieves workers from some of the industry’s most physically demanding jobs—allowing workers to be reassigned from pulling loins or ribs to food-quality inspection jobs."
"Raising wages or offering signing bonuses to attract plant workers eats into processors’ profitability. Meat companies are collectively spending billions of dollars on automating some of the more-difficult plant roles, which they said can improve staffing and safety while cutting costs.
Meat processors said they don’t see automation replacing workers or leading to layoffs, partly because turnover in plants is already high and the goal is to move workers to more skilled, harder-to-fill roles."
"The U.S. meat industry, with more than $200 billion in annual sales, is under pressure to run more efficiently. Profit margins across the three major protein segments—chicken, beef and pork—were strained over the past year as operating costs increased, chicken and pork prices fell and cattle herds dwindled."
"Fully autonomous processing operations are still a long way off and carcass-scanning computers can’t yet match humans’ ability to disassemble and debone larger cattle and hog bodies that slightly differ in shape and size."