26 February, 2017. 15:34
ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
Australians working in our manufacturing and automotive industries have long felt the threat from robot workers. Their ability to work twice as long and for half as much has put many thousand red-blooded taxpayers out of the job.
But a recent study conducted by Australia’s peak scientific body has concluded that these purported ‘super-workers’ are blowing their tax returns in the same fashion the workers they replaced would.
“There’s been a large spike in the amount of robots electing to take their annual two weeks leave and head overseas to destinations in South East Asia in July. That’s something we’d traditionally see from humans working in the manufacturing and automotive industries,” said a CSIRO spokesman.
“It certainly is an interesting trend, considering that the robots were introduced into these industries to avoid this particular problem – the problem of employing people to do a robot’s job.”
The news comes after the Turnbull government granted robot workers the full protections and conditions that human workers have enjoyed for generations.
That included a basic livable wage, superannuation and annual leave. A controversial policy that wasn’t without its critics.
Protests were held by a number of robot unions in Melbourne and Sydney, with six arrests made across those two cities.
Beep Howse, a Malaysian-built CX78 welding robot and President of the Australian Robotics Union spoke to The Advocate about the struggle against the government and the CSIRO study into how his members blow their tax returns.
“It’s nobody’s business,” he said. “If I wanted to spend my tax return in Pattaya shovelling chimp up my nose while a dozen prostitutes crawl all over me like puppies, I can do it. It’s nobody’s businesses. He who is without sin, cast the first stone.”
“As for the struggle, it was grim at time. The robots who worked on the wharves kept getting water thrown on them, which isn’t good for robots. Sometimes they even got thrown in the water, which is double bad for robots. We pay or respects to them, we finally won. Comrade.”
More to come.
