“In a plant north of Los Angeles, machines now squeeze as many as 1.6 million pounds of the fruit with hardly any human help. The facility, larger than the average Costco store at roughly 190,000 square feet, then ships bags of juice to Chick-fil-A locations, where workers add water and sugar to whip up the chain’s trademark lemonade.

The automated plant frees up in-store staff to serve customers faster, according to the company. Squeezing lemons was a tedious task that added up to 10,000 hours of work a day across all locations and resulted in many injured fingers.”

From Bloomberg.

“Productivity in the U.S., as measured by how much the average worker gets done in an hour, has been on the rise. That matters because the faster that productivity grows, the faster the economy can grow as well. The success of the U.S. economy, and why it has grown so much compared with other countries over the past century and more, has hinged on its productivity. 

Productivity—the total output of the economy divided by hours worked—rose 2% in the third quarter compared with a year earlier, according to the Labor Department. That marked the fifth quarter in a row with an increase of 2% or better. In the five years before the pandemic, there were only two such quarters.

The gains in part reflect massive changes in the U.S. economy since the onset of Covid-19. Companies learned new ways of doing things and adopted new technologies, while an upheaval in the labor market moved workers into more productive jobs.

Another big change in the American labor force—a massive influx of immigration—might also have played a role. Immigrants are often slotted into manual-intensive jobs, which could allow other workers to move up to more highly skilled jobs.”

From The Wall Street Journal.

“In a newly-released research paper, Evan Cunningham, a Ph.D candidate in Economics at the University of Minnesota, studied the effects of Amazon’s continued spread across the country—growing from just a handful of warehouses, or ‘fulfillment centers,’ in 2010, to more than 1,300 today in the U.S. alone. On balance, it turns out that Amazon warehouses provide a net positive to local economies.

‘I find Amazon’s entry in a metro [area] increases the total employment rate by 1.0 percentage points and average wages by 0.7 percent,’ Cunningham writes. ‘The composition of employment shifts from retail and wholesale trade to warehousing and tradeable services, primarily driven by younger workers. Employment gains are concentrated among non-college workers.'”

From Reason.

“How do employment, tasks, and productivity change with robot adoption? Unlike manufacturing, little is known about these issues in the service sector, where robot adoption is expanding. As a first step towards filling this gap, we study Japanese nursing homes using original facility-level panel data that includes the different robots used and the tasks performed. We find that robot adoption is accompanied by an increase in employment and retention and the relationship is strongest for non-regular care workers and monitoring robots. The share of specific tasks performed by robots increases with the adoption of the respective type of robot, leading to reallocation of care worker effort to ‘human touch’ tasks that support quality care. Robots are associated with improved quality (reduction in restraint use and pressure ulcers) and productivity.”

From National Bureau of Economic Research.