Job seekers were scarce. Batesville Tool & Die managed to fill just 40 of its vacancies.
“You could count on one hand how many people in the town were unemployed,” said Jody Fledderman, the CEO. “It was just crazy.”
Enter the robots. The company invested in machines that could mimic human workers and in vision systems, which helped its robots “see” what they were doing.
The Batesville experience and others like it have been replicated countlessly across the United States for the past couple of years. Chronic worker shortages have led many companies to invest in machines to do some of the work they can’t find people to do. They’ve also been training the workers they do have to use advanced technology so they can produce more with less.
The result has been an unexpected productivity boom, which helps explain a great economic mystery: How has the world’s largest…
