The Robotics Revolution Is Changing What Machines Can Do

The Robotics Revolution Is Changing What Machines Can Do

When David Stinson finished high school, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1977, the first thing he did was get a job building houses. After a few years, though, the business slowed. Stinson was then twenty-four, with two children to support. He needed something stable. As he explained over lunch recently, that meant finding a job at one of the two companies in the area that offered secure, blue-collar work. “Either I’ll be working at General Motors or I’ll be working at Steelcase by the end of theyear,” he vowed in 1984. A few monthslater, he got a job at Steelcase, the world’slargest manufacturer of office furniture,and he’s been working at its Grand Rapidsmetal plant ever since.

Stinson is now fifty-eight. He has a full, reddish face, a thick head of silver hair, and a majestic midsection. His navy polo shirt displays his job title—“Zone Leader”—and, like everyone else in the plant, he always has a pair of protective earplugs on a neon string draped around his neck. His glasses have plastic shields on the sides that give him the air of a cranky scientist.

“I don’t regret coming here,” Stinson said. We were sitting in the plant’s cafeteria, and Stinson was unwrapping an Italian sub, supplied by a deli that every Thursday offers plant workers sandwiches for four dollars instead of eight. “There’s been times I’ve thought about leaving, but it’s just getting to be a much more comfortable atmosphere around here. The technology is really helping that kind of thing, too. Instead of taking responsibility away from you, it’s a big aid. It’s definitely the wave of the future here.”

William Sandee, Jr., a sixty-four-year-old worker on the paint line, sat down next to Stinson with a carton of fries and a cup of ketchup, and tossed his safety goggles on the table. “We try to have some fun with it,” he said in a low near-growl. “It can get intense.”

Sandee, who has neatly combed gray hair and an alert, owlish face, began working at Steelcase in 1972, after waiting in line with six hundred people just to put in an application. “They made it very lucrative to be a Steelcase employee, back in the day,” Sandee said. Plant managers were known to drive fancy cars and have second homes on the lake; the company paid the college tuition for employees’ children, who often spent summers working at the local plants; and there were company picnics and a bowling tournament, which once had fifteen hundred players. (The tournament is still held, now with around three hundred participants.)

In the nineties, Steelcase employed more than ten thousand workers in the United States and operated seven factories around Grand Rapids, making chairs, filing cabinets, desks, and tables, and the screws, bolts, and casters that went into them. Packed shoulder to shoulder, workers polished and painted wood and assembled steel parts by hand. Today, there are only two Steelcase plants in Michigan—the metal factory, which makes desks and filing cabinets, and a nearby “wood plant,” which produces wood furniture. In total, they employ fewer than two thousand workers. The company’s only other U.S. plant, in Athens, Alabama, employs a thousand full-time workers.

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