Technological Unemployment

The unions in the construction industry remain stronger than they do in many other sectors, especially on larger projects.

In the sphere of occupational, health and safety their manic approach has substantially reduced accidents and deaths. No doubt about it. And this has positive effort has also helped keep them viable in this industry.

But they also actively work to stop the introduction of any imported labour-saving technologies. Their other fucntion is of course to keep up the number of jobs required in their industry.

There will come a day where in some foreign construction site there is one worker in a control room pushing buttons, but the equivalent Australian site will still have mid-twentieth century vision of hundreds of workers running around.

Back to OH&S – if there are no people on site then there can’t be any accidents. So logically, removing workers from a site by using new approaches to construction will reduce the number of OH&S incidents.

In the end it will come down to cost – do we prefer to pay 16x the lowest possible cost for new building? And just so a few people can dodge technological unemployment for a little longer.

The trouble in deferring technological unemployment is that the people affected will eventually meet their destiny but by then it is too late – they are too far behind to re-train.

I am not sure the construction unions are really doing their members a long-term favour.