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| Ramon Certeza |
We are witnessing a great transformation in our times in the way things are being manufactured. Products that were crafted by humans in the past are now being manufactured by automatic machines and robots. We are now in the middle of, in today’s parlance, the ‘industrial revolution 4.0’, entailing the digitisation of the economy. This article will look at how digitisation rapidly transformed the factories of today and how unions are preparing to survive the factories of tomorrow.
Digitisation of the economy was the central theme of the World Economic Forum in Davos in December 2015, where prominent economists and European research institutions produced reports on the future of work, touching on possible consequences of digitisation on workers (IndustriALL, 2017). In May 2017, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation organised an international conference in Vietnam along the same line of inquiry that sought to answer two main questions: what is the impact of digital transformation on Asian economies, and has this transformation been made fair and inclusive? These two events catapulted the discourse to a new level, with differing views and perspectives from actors at different levels.
