The Cheap Labour Trap: What the Robotics Incentive Gap Reveals About Your Productivity Alibi
If your automation business case only works when wages rise, you haven't built a business case — you've built an excuse with a spreadsheet attached.
Economists are telling governments that without policy incentives, firms won't automate functions where labour is cheap. Boards have quietly adopted the same logic as a strategy. It isn't one — it's a productivity alibi, and it has a shelf life measured in months, not years.
There was a line in the financial press this week that should have made more Boards uncomfortable than it did: without policy intervention, there are few incentives to automate business functions where labour costs are low.
It was framed as an argument for government action. Read it again as a description of corporate behaviour and it becomes something far less comfortable — a candid admission that a great many organisations have made cheap labour the load-bearing assumption of their operating model, and are now waiting for the state to give them permission to change it.
That is not a policy gap. That is a governance failure wearing a policy costume.