Robotic Nation Evidence

This article in the NY Times this morning talks about time shaving: Altering of Worker Time Cards Spurs Growing Number of Suits. Time shaving is the act of altering employee time cards to reduce the number of hours they worked and pay them less. According to the NY Times:

Experts on compensation say that the illegal doctoring of hourly employees' time records is far more prevalent than most Americans believe. The practice, commonly called shaving time, is easily done and hard to detect — a simple matter of computer keystrokes — and has spurred a growing number of lawsuits and settlements against a wide range of businesses.

Workers have sued Family Dollar and Pep Boys, the auto parts and repair chain, accusing managers of deleting hours. A jury found that Taco Bell managers in Oregon had routinely erased workers' time. More than a dozen former Wal-Mart employees said in interviews and depositions that managers had altered time records to shortchange employees. The Department of Labor recently reached two back-pay settlements with Kinko's photocopy centers..."

And so on. It's a growing problem.

There are several quotes on productivity, like this one:

"The pressures are just unbelievable to control costs and improve productivity," said George Milkovich, a longtime Cornell University professor of industrial relations and co-author of the leading textbook on compensation.

And this:

Kim Danner said that when she ran a Family Dollar store with eight employees in Minneapolis, her district manager urged her to erase hours so that she never paid overtime or exceeded her allotted payroll.... Ms. Danner said her employees could not do all the unloading, stocking, cashier work and pricing of merchandise in the hours allotted. "The message from the district manager was, basically, `I don't care how you do it, just get it done,' " she said.

This kind of pressure to increase productivity will be one of the things that makes it so easy for companies to replace humans with robots the minute that the robots are available.