Abstract
Industry 4.0 offers new possibilities to combine increased productivity with stimulating workplaces in a good work environment. Used correctly, digitalization can create attractive jobs in safe control room environments, which provide space for the employee’s full expertise and creativity. This is true also for the mining industry. But, to succeed, it is important to analyze the development from a worker’s perspective. What will happen to their work? What skills will be needed in the mine of tomorrow? We must also consider the risks, such as privacy issues, increased stress, and work-life boundaries. These questions must be understood if we are to create workplaces that can attract a young and diverse workforce to tomorrow’s mining industry. In this article, we try to illustrate what the new technology can mean for the individual miners. We formulate the notion of Mining 4.0 (Industry 4.0 in the mining industry), where we try to create an image of how the future might look from a miner’s perspective and how mining companies may navigate their way to a future that works for all miners. To illustrate the range of possible outcomes, we formulate two scenarios: one utopian and one dystopic. At the end of our article, we bring forward six recommendations that can be considered a beginning of a road map for the human side of Mining 4.0.
Highlights
Future mining will be shaped in a context where it is necessary to produce at costs that are determined by international competition [1]
The German union IG Metall is trying to address the problem by opening itself to self-employed members; in 2015, they promoted the launch of the platform “Fair Crowd Work” [43], intended to gather crowd workers from all over the world and allow them to exchange their views and rate working conditions on on-line labor platforms. This shows that the effect a technology change in the mining industry or in individual mining companies will not be limited to the industry or company—it will have significant bearing on society as well
Based on our experiences and the discussion we conducted above, we want to bring forward a number of recommendations that can be considered a beginning of a road map for the human side of Mining 4.0:
Summary
Future mining will be shaped in a context where it is necessary to produce at costs that are determined by international competition [1]. The emerging digitalization in the mining industry offers new possibilities for increased productivity and at the same time could create stimulating workplaces in a good work environment. The German union IG Metall is trying to address the problem by opening itself to self-employed members; in 2015, they promoted the launch of the platform “Fair Crowd Work” [43], intended to gather crowd workers from all over the world and allow them to exchange their views and rate working conditions on on-line labor platforms This shows that the effect a (revolutionary) technology change in the mining industry or in individual mining companies will not be limited to the industry or company—it will have significant bearing on society as well. If technology is not accepted, or if the mine is not accepted, it does not matter how good the technology is; it will not be used, or the mine will be allowed to be established
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