Labor Economics and Automation
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Labor is expensive and automation is getting better, but is any of it really cheap enough to start replacing labor needs on the farm? Wootzano founder Atif Syed thinks so. Well maybe not on the farm per se, but his is robots are making their way into fruit and vegetable packing houses.
Syed… “ If you are eating fruits and veg and processing them in any factor, it doesn't matter if the fruit and veg are grown in the country, you still need a robotic systems. Because you will have a person or a bunch of people working in a warehouse trying to do that manually. And obviously everyone eats fruit and wed, so from a dietary perspective, it touches every individual.”
Wootzano claims to be cost effective in displacing labor even in countries where the cost of labor is much cheaper than the U.S.
Syed… “ So the cost is very different in Malaysia compared to Japan compared to, so the price of robot actually changes. So you move the robot from Malaysia, bring it to the us, you'll pay the US wage, or you pay them the UK wage. Imagine the robot as a human being, right? If you're working wherever you are, you get the wage of the country you're working in. Because that's, that's, that's how it's, you know, so, and that made it possible for us to sell in all these countries. And we did some study and realized that actually for us to make money and not sell the robot as a charity, you know, the only few countries where we can't make any money are some countries in Central Africa. That's basically it. We can pretty much take this robot in almost every other part just based on human wage, uh, in those countries and deliver that and still make money and, you know, be sustainable as a business and not giving it out for free.”
Again that’s Wootzano founder Atif Syed.
