Waste Management, a very large - dare I say it? - garbage industry in Texas, is planning a significant reduction in its workforce. The reasons behind it are seldom discussed, but apply to many sectors of the economy.
Houston-based Waste Management will continue to shed jobs in 2025 by reducing dependency on roles that require physical labor and turning more to technology and automation for its services.
“There has been a long-term plan to not backfill specific vacated roles. By 2026, we’re anticipating that will lead to the reduction of about 5,000 positions,” said Kelly Caplan, senior director of external communications. ”At the same time, increased automation is reducing the demand for these types of labor-intensive roles.”
. . .
“Our average heavy equipment operator is approaching 53 years old. It becomes difficult to find folks to drive a truck or to work on a piece of heavy equipment,” Fish said on the show. “So this is almost by necessity that we’re using technology to replace difficult-to-hire roles. I think one thing that I wanted to make sure I was clear about on here, though, is we’re not laying folks off. All we’re doing is using attrition. Some of those jobs have very high turnover rates.”
There's more at the link.
Note the critical issues:
- These aren't layoffs, but natural attrition. Nobody will be fired, but as they resign or retire, they won't be replaced.
- It's hard to recruit employees for jobs that are physically hard work, unpleasant, etc. Therefore, automation is not only a viable alternative, it may be the only alternative.
- Companies are now building reduced workforces into their plans for the future.
That's going to impact a large number of industries and a lot more companies in the not very distant future. Expect it to impact the number of jobs that need to be filled. Excuses from pro-migrant pressure groups that migrants are "doing the jobs Americans won't do" sound pretty hollow against the reality that most of those jobs won't exist soon.
We've already seen how robotics and automation are impacting farms. Preparing the fields, planting, fertilizing, weeding and harvesting the crops can now be automated to a surprising extent, reducing the required workforce by a very large proportion. Cellular telephone technology, drone (UAV) supervision, artificial intelligence, satellite navigation and other innovations are becoming commonplace. Sure, the initial costs of the automation are high, but once it's paid for, it just goes on working (given routine maintenance). Its long-term cost averages significantly less than the wages of the number of people it would take to do the same work. It doesn't get sick, doesn't need vacations, works long hours without complaint, and never goes on strike. I know of a couple of big vegetable farms that now employ only about 15% of the staff they used to hire every season, and many of those they hire are skilled, educated technicians rather than unskilled labor. They earn big money to do a sophisticated job. Farm work ain't what it used to be . . .
Fast food is seeing the same transformation. Young men and women used to start out their careers by flipping burgers in a fast food joint, or waiting on tables. In many places, automated ordering kiosks have replaced cashiers to take orders, and food preparation is increasingly being handled by robotic equipment. All the advantages discussed above of automating farms apply to restaurants and fast food outlets, too.
Washington D.C. is now experiencing (at express-train speeds) the same phenomenon. Huge, overstaffed, slow, kludgy federal bureaucracies have grown too big to afford, and too large to be efficient at their jobs. President Trump is taking an axe to them, reducing workforces, insisting on technological updates where necessary, and slashing budgets to reflect our economic reality. It has to happen. If President Trump did not do it, someone else would have to, or else our sclerotic bureaucracy would implode under its own weight. However, tens (even hundreds) of thousands of jobs are going to be lost in the process. What will happen to those who are laid off? Do they have the skills to find good jobs elsewhere? In an era where good workers are harder and harder to find, will such jobs even be available for them, or will they have been automated out of existence? In the private sector at least, the answer to the latter question is increasingly "Yes".
Have our schools adapted? Are they preparing students to enter this increasingly technological workplace, to deal with the advanced automation they're going to encounter? I fear not. In fact, I think the poor quality of education in American schools is making them less able to deal with it than if they were home-schooled. Note this exchange on X over the weekend:
Think about that in the context of an increasingly automated society - and then compare it to schools that still behave like dinosaurs. Sure, there are big dangers about ideologically warped AI trying to propagandize our kids, rather than educate them; but whether we like it or not, the advantages of AI-assisted education are already so evident as to make them virtually unstoppable. Even companies that forbid their employees to use outside AI tools are faced with widespread disobedience from their staff, who simply find such tools too useful to ignore. I'm willing to bet that companies like Waste Management are already figuring out how AI can help their garbage disposal operations, too.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
Peter
16 comments:
Chatbots that are constrained by databases of known-good knowledge are quite useful. The technology is called RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and it is becoming more common as companies deploy their own systems. Having RAG forces the LLM to respond based on curated and known correct information, not from a general statistical model of English.
I'm expecting library science degrees to become more valuable as companies realize the need to identify, curate, and track the truly valuable information in the petabytes of junk files on their systems.
That it does... But I also wonder how parents are going to cope with the changes as they try to raise children amidst all the changes in the 'environment'...
Ideologically warped AI teachers, huh? Is that meaningfully different from ideologically warped live human teachers...?
My concern about AI education stems more from the significant studies that suggest that plopping kids in front of a computer screen all day is bad for them. Our school constantly pushes us to switch to online education and when you add up the time kids spend on phones to the time spent staring at Chromebooks, it's rapidly approaching 100%.
As far as jobs go, the good news is that at least some of those jobs will be transferred to factories where they make and design all the automated machines. Unfortunately they'll all be made in China, but hey, whose counting.
There is a book, The Next Hundred Years, that addresses this to some degree, at least to see the trend coming and that we will have to struggle through finding a solution.
To bound the problem, one hundred years ago you either worked or starved. A hundred years from now robots and AI will be handling everything, so no need to work. No need for an education. What then?
What will become of those with the itch to learn and to do? Are those the people that will become scientists, or robot repairmen? Or do we make a choice? Do we abandon IKEA furniture and accept only handmade furniture we can pass down through the generations? What will dronehood do to mental health and our understanding of our place in God's world. What will happen when people become even more disconnected from their food than they already are? To what standards do we have AI teach the children when AI can do the thinking and the cooking?
Some of us, at least, find our purpose and our connection with our fellow man through our work. However, legislation keeps raising the expense of an employee. Automation is cheaper than humans, especially if you have it doing low skilled labor. Low skilled employees make lots of errors, automation you only have to teach once and it doesn't call out sick on a sunny day. We talk about the internet making us more connected, but an electronic connection is not the same as a personal connection. The younger generations report being more lonely. Those who work will become the slaves of those who do not. Over-reliance on AI might leave people as gerbils in a habitrail called their home, separate from the rest of humanity, separate from purpose, and separate from God's world.
I'm not a Luddite. Having robots do things very dangerous for human's makes sense, but we should be careful not to become lotus eaters.
"Have our schools adapted?"
We're not going to see much improvement in the government schools in the near future (and the chiildren must start these learning processes in kindergarten); I fear the teachers' unions will see to that.
What do you recommend for my grandchildren: home schooling? private schools?
I recall when FedEx started using computers to map delivery routes. They were introduced with "Can you beat the computer?" Some drivers thought they could, but over time apparently discovered that while they might be able to beat the computer, the amount of time they were saving was less than the time they spent planning their route. "Eh, saves me some work, I'll use the computer's map."
I believe I read yesterday (not sure where - revolver link perhaps? ) that Waste Management was one of the three big companies Bill Gates invested in over the past decade. Not sure what that signifies but thought it was worth mentioning.
Just found where I read that - in this post I read at the Burning Platform: https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/02/16/the-world-as-you-know-it-is-about-to-end/#more-360916
The factory I work in is approaching 50 years in operation. Our site is using the latest and greatest when it comes to material handling and product distribution; the boss overseeing that part of the plant said the goal is to fully get rid of forklift drivers in 5 years. Looking at the (really cool and impressive) tech we have now, that goal is absolutely achievable. In my part of the factory the equipment we use is ~35 years old, but we’ve had to introduce automation as a response to the modern workforce; they just aren’t interested in doing the work that was once required. Our particular automation has focused on removing troubleshooting and manual input by the machine operators. I have mixed feelings about it, but at the end of the day we can’t deny reality.
Seems to me that, while we might be moving along the process of transitioning out of a scarcity-based society, the transition itself is going to be a stone cold b*tch. Not instantaneous, nor uniform across countries, and there are going to be a lot of angry, disposed people around for a long time (major fractions, or even multiples, of the average lifespan.)
It occurs to me, that the Great Filter (aka why we don't see signs of alien intelligence at work in the cosmos) might just be because making that transition is universally very hard and species that evolve to survive to that point, aren't evolved to survive after.
As far as schooling goes, it depends on the area. I did a mix of public, parochial and charter schools for my family, and added weekend outings plus educational movies to supplement. Homeschooling would be more of an option now, there's much more support available. Look at the options, and decide as a family.
Your store-bought cherry tomatoes are now oblong instead of round, because they needed them to be that way to make machine pickers better able to pluck them.
That alone is half a million wetbacks you don't require in the fields every year.
Automation isn't a bad thing, and losing jobs like buggy whip manufacture isn't a sign of recession.
AI gets fun when dedicated hackers introduce deliberate misinformation into the chatbot database.
This is why AI forums invariably descend into KKK-level racist madness in about a month.
Hilarity ensues.
And there is no correct level of floating turds that anyone is willing to accept in the punchbowl. Which is why AI is doomed before it starts, because it cannot discern, it can only aggregate and average.
I'm using Power Homeschool for my kids. It's currently down, server farm in LA... But it does work and I'm quite happy with it.
Do we really need any more library science majors coming out of existing colleges and universities? They tend to be very woke programs, if not as bad as the various fraudulent "studies" degrees.
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