The advancement of technology in workplaces have put workers in the Philippines and in four neighboring ASEAN countries at high risk of displacement, a report of the International Labor Organization (ILO) said.
Citing a report titled “ASEAN in Transformation: How technology is changing jobs and enterprises,” the ILO-Bureau for Employers Activities (BEA) said
low-skilled laborers in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam could lose their jobs and livelihood.
The ILO said the robot age has become a reality among ASEAN manufacturers who have been introducing automation to improve productivity, quality, consistency and safety in the workplace.
The agency said the widespread use of robots does not automatically lead to job replacement.
Current trends showed that robots are being deployed in a human-centric, collaborative way to raise the productivity of high skilled workers, rather than replace them.
But the situation is different in labor-intensive industries such as textiles, clothing and footwear – which provide more than nine million jobs in the ASEAN region – because a majority of workers here are young women.
“Here, low-skilled jobs are particularly vulnerable to disruptive technologies such as additive manufacturing and automation. This could reduce export growth as destination markets in Europe and the United States bring production back home,” the agency said.
The social consequences could be particularly significant for some ASEAN economies such as Cambodia and Vietnam.
The report warned that while mass scale job displacement is not imminent,
the technology to replace mainly lower skilled jobs in ASEAN will increasingly be adopted as its cost declines and innovations become accessible to even small enterprises.
About 56 percent of all salaried employment in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam is at high risk of displacement due to the advancement of technology in the next couple of decades.
ILO-BEA director Deborah Massin said countries that compete on low-wage labor needed to reposition themselves.
“Price advantage is no longer enough. Policymakers need to create a more conducive environment that leads to greater human capital investment, research and development and high-value production,” Massin said.
The report suggested that the workforces have to be equipped with strong technical skills in order to be able to handle new technologies and work effectively with digitized machines.
The ILO study is based on two ASEAN-wide surveys involving more than 4,000 enterprises and 2,700 students.
Source:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/technology...000000906.html
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This is just so sad
