1990: Packaging Workers
In the early 1990s, packaging machines came onto the scene as production companies searched for ways to once again cut down on costs.
A report by MIT in 2020 said its findings showed: “Industrial robots grew fourfold in the U.S. between 1993 and 2007 … to a rate of one robot per thousand workers.” The report added that Europe was slightly more advanced than the U.S., with the rate of industrial robots growing to 1.6 per thousand workers over the same time period.
The notion that tech jobs would be the wave of the future continued to grow in the 1990s, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicting in a 1992 academic journal that it would create 18 million jobs by the end of the decade.
“If you look at what has gone on over the past decade, it’s apparent that the new jobs are going to be mainly white collar,” Tom Nardone, then-economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in the journal. “Over the long term, there will be a lot of technical jobs, and jobs in the health field.”
