This has motivated the industry case studies in this volume, addressing the implications of the increased use of robots and ITC-enabled automation in the apparel and electronics industries as well as in retail warehousing and business process outsourcing.Just as Freakonomics brought economics to life, so Storm in a Teacup brings physics into our daily lives and makes it fascinating. Relatively absent in these discussions is a sense of how automation plays out on the shop floor.

The COVID-19 crisis has lent renewed urgency to the discussions on such restructuring of global supply chains. developing countries with strategic entry points into global markets and continue to employ large numbers of workers, often disproportionately women. These shifts would be enabled by automation in the labour-intensive sectors that have provided. Yet for developing countries a key concern is the prospect of “reshoring” or “nearshoring” – the opposite of offshoring – in which production shifts from developing back towards developed countries. Much of the discussion of the impact of automation on employment has focused on developed countries.

Consistently with reshoring as a mechanism, I find that the employment effect is mirrored in similarly large reductions in Mexican exports and export-producing plants. This negative effect is stronger for men than for women, and strongest for low-educated machine operators in the manufacturing sector. Using these instruments, I show that US robots have a sizeable negative impact on employment in Mexico. To purge results from endogeneity, I use robot adoption in the rest of the world and an index of offshoring as instruments for robot adoption in the US and the share of Mexican imports, respectively. I construct a similar measure of exposure to foreign robots, based on the initial geographic distribution of export-producing employment across industries, industry-level robot adoption in the US, and a US industry's initial reliance on Mexican imports. Recent literature estimates the effect of robots on local employment by regressing the change in employment on exposure to domestic robots in local labor markets. I analyze the impact of robots on employment in an offshoring country, using data from Mexican local labor markets between 19. Using robots instead of humans for production may lower the relative cost of domestic production and, in turn, reduce demand for imports from offshoring countries. Robots in advanced economies have the potential to reduce employment in offshoring countries by fueling reshoring. Special attention is paid to the consequences for labour strategies focused on improving working conditions at these companies' factories. This paper seeks to map and discuss the importance of, and commonalities between, tier 1 companies in the actual production of garments, and discusses their main characteristics. However, much less attention has been paid to those companies that have appeared as their mirror image, namely to the emergence of Asian garment manufacturers-or tier 1 firms-that have also expanded their businesses significantly over the last few decades, but have little or no control over end-consumer markets. The role of branded companies and retailers in the garment industry has been studied extensively over the last two decades. The possibility of fragmenting and outsourcing production across a spatially dispersed network of manufacturers has “freed” lead companies from surveillance of their production processes, helped reduce costs and, ultimately, relieves them of the organizational requirements associated with mass labour processes. The garment industry can be considered an archetypal global sector in which production processes have been transnationalized since the late 1960s.

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