Student Survey Finds Surprising Opposition to Remote Work in Labor Jobs

People with hands-on labor jobs may prefer to go to work even if their tasks could be done remotely through robotics, according to a survey of 218 students at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

The survey was conducted by computer science major Matthew Nicol, a senior from Allenwood, whose research is part of a National Science Foundation grant by Cong Wang, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

After meeting Wang through a friend in a humanities course, "I thought it was very interesting, the idea that you could have someone at the port operating the crane from their home," Nicol said. "My mind just started boggling with it. I sat down in the lab and never left. We started with the survey to get an idea of how people feel about remote labor."

Nicol defined labor jobs as people who traditionally need to be present at the work site, such as machine operators, package handlers, drivers, restaurant workers, retail workers, custodians, he observed. But when they were asked about working remotely, "I thought it was going to lean heavily online. I was surprised to see how many people weren't ready for that or did not want it at all."

Nicol said 72% of the respondents had worked in labor jobs. Within that subset, "15.9% of those who have done labor jobs say they would not consider any remote labor jobs, while only 4.9% of those who have no experience in labor jobs say the same. … 26.8% of who have done labor jobs say they would not do remote labor jobs if the salary were lower than their onsite peers, while a lower rate of 21.3% is found among those who have no experience in labor jobs. 41.4% of those who have done labor jobs say they would not do remote labor jobs if the benefits were lower than their onsite peers, compared to 36.1% among those who have no experience. Similar but not as significant differences have been observed when the participants are asked about contracts and unionization." He said a related concern is whether partially automating your job would make workers worried about employers going the rest of the way and replacing people with software, or making people do multiple jobs.

He also found that respondents value the communications and social aspects of their jobs. "Humans generally are social creatures. Remote labor in a way doesn't benefit that," he noted. For jobs such as crane operators, where the person is sitting in front of a digital control station and joystick anyway, it wouldn't be a leap to have them work from a comfortable office. That's a compromise between the distractions of being at work vs. the comfort of sitting at a desk instead of climbing a tower in the elements.

Nicol presented his results in a paper, A Survey Study on the Technology and Public Acceptance of Remote Labor, at the 9th International Federation of Automatic Control Symposium on Mechatronic Systems conference, held last fall in Los Angeles.

His next step is to perform another survey of labor workers outside of the NJIT student body, focusing on people in the field. After college, he wants to work in artificial intelligence. "I would like to work on the idea of trying to build a system for people to use one day," he concluded. He has an idea for a system where truck drivers perform their jobs in traffic and in cities, while robots take over at night or during long stretches of empty road.