Giving Birth to Driverless: Labor Troubles

Perhaps total jobs in transportation will not be lost, BUT how anyone can say with a straight face that driving jobs will not be reduced and then disappear is mind boggling. Maybe I missed the learning-to-deceive day in the third grade. Trucking representatives and now a transit system assure lawmakers and tell labor that they will continue to employ as many drivers as they currently do.

Please.

To all of you:

• taxi and ride hailing drivers
• truck drivers
• shuttle drivers
• delivery van drivers
• postal carrier drivers

Focus on plan B, whether that is going back to school, starting a new business, getting a different job, or figuring out if there will be another position with your current - driving-oriented - employer. The autonomous revolution is coming soon.

Writing on the wall

If drivers or their unions doubt those words, they should open their eyes. Message to labor: Look at what happened to the taxi industry when Uber and Lyft arrived with a better product; look at all the record stores that have disappeared; ask how many 22 year olds use a clock radio alarm or have a landline phone. That's your future, not the utter BS that trucking and now transit are dishing out.

Who is dishing?

The obfuscation comes from the HART transit system in Jacksonville, FL. Florida lawmakers and pubic facilities have been in the forefront of driverless. HART will do a pilot with autonomous shuttles.

Except for one county commissioner who talked job training, the powers that be decided that they would respond to legitimate labor concerns with hedging. That's my read; I realize there is another, more reasonable conclusion here. These are two quotes from a St. Peters Blog post.

“Drivers are vitally important,” said HART board chairman. “I don’t think we’re going to have a system where employees aren’t driving buses. That’s not going to happen,” he insisted.  

HART CEO Katharine Eagan said that “depending on who you ask,” it will be anywhere between two to thirty years before autonomous vehicle technology will arrive at a point where a driver still needs to be monitoring a steering wheel.

Wanted: objective assessment of employment consequences

Two federal lawmakers, both New Englanders - a Republican senator from Maine and a Democratic senator from Rhode Island - are asking the GAO (the U.S. Government Accountability Office) for a report about the predicted employment fallout that vehicles with autonomous technology will cause. They are looking for estimates of timing for autonomous trucking and other widespread rollouts and analysis of what autonomous driving will mean for employment.