The move comes a year after members of the far-left city council nearly ran Uber and Lyft out of the city.
The robots showed up on the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus last fall. For a few bucks, the small fleet of robots resembling fancy coolers on six wheels will deliver Chinese food and Starbucks coffee to students in need of a meal or a jolt of caffeine.
A university leader told a local news station that they were aimed at servicing “locations on campus that just don’t have great accessibility to food.” Plus, because they’re electric-powered, they can help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, a state study found.
Students said they’re cheap and convenient.
“I just think automated systems such as robots are going to be less expensive than an individual driving their car,” one student told a local reporter last fall.
But the robots are now in the crosshairs of the far-left Minneapolis City Council and members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters who see them as a threat.
In February, barely halfway through a one-year council-approved pilot study, Councilwoman Robin Wonsley called for a staff report on the program and the impact the robots are having on workers locally and in other locations. Wonsley identifies herself as Minneapolis’s “first Black Independent Socialist City Council member” and an opponent of the “rotten system of racial capitalism.”
A year after the council went to battle with rideshare companies over their payrates and nearly ran them out of the city, councilmembers are now eyeing increased regulation on the delivery robots. During a committee meeting on Wednesday, Wonsley — a leader in the successful campaign to raise the city’s minimum wage to nearly $16 per hour now — said she was “looking forward to figuring out how to not replicate mistakes” they made in their negotiations with Uber and Lyft.
It’s not clear yet what regulations the council is considering or if protectionist members will ultimately allow the robots to continue operating in Minneapolis at the conclusion of the pilot, but Teamsters members who spoke Wednesday were clear where they stand.
Justin, a Teamster cook at the university, called the robots “symptoms of a wider attack on working people” and complained that cities are being turned into “playgrounds for the rich tech bros who have remade those cities in their own image.”
“I am not against technological innovation and advance outright. I would love to see technological developments which improve our quality of life and lead to more leisure time to self-actualize outside of our daily wage labor drudgery,” he said. “But this is not the trend we are seeing.”
Another union member, Ryan, a university building and grounds worker who said he’s also studying creative writing and philosophy at the school, argued that “what workers need are regulations to ensure our safety and wellbeing.”
“The Teamsters have introduced bargaining proposals that would require the university to receive permission from the union before using such technology,” he said, adding that “the university should be pressured to accept this language at the negotiating table.”
While the union members fretted about a future “cyber-punk dystopia,” the pilot program operating now is small and the robots are limited. According to a staff report, there are only 15 delivery robots operating at the university. Combined, they’ve averaged 513 deliveries per month, or about 16 a day, with an average delivery distance of less than half a mile. Because it’s Minnesota, the robots can be outfitted with snow tires to deliver in the winter.
It is true, however, that food-service companies are turning to automation as blue cities and states mandate minimum-wage hikes, leading to soaring staffing costs. Fast-food restaurants in California, for example, have increasingly utilized robot cooks and ordering kiosks after the state raised the sector’s minimum wage to $20 per hour last year.
“As compensation and expenses go up, companies understandably will seek lower-cost options. In this case, autonomous delivery is one of those,” Andrew Hawkins, Minneapolis’s director of policy and research, told the council on Wednesday.
He suggested the council could regulate what the robots are allowed to deliver in the city. “People are a lot more receptive to a vehicle that is delivering medicine to, like, an elderly neighbor versus it’s delivering 17 Amazon packages a day,” he said.
The Minneapolis robots are produced by Starship Technologies, a company founded in Estonia and now headquartered in San Francisco. The company claims that its robots are operating at more than 55 U.S. universities, including Arizona State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California, Los Angeles. The company’s robots are also doing grocery deliveries in some global locations.
Starship leaders deny that their robots are harmful to the overall jobs landscape. A company spokesman told the Minnesota Star Tribune in February that its robots create jobs by increasing restaurant sales and requiring new workers to perform routine maintenance. Some restaurants are hiring so-called Robot Runners to load the robots.
Starship’s former CEO, Alastair Westgarth, told Forbes in 2021 that “at the end of the day, we hope that the number of jobs we create offsets the number of jobs that may be lost by autonomous delivery.” But he acknowledged that “employment will change.”
“If we look at history, as efficiency and autonomy come in, the economy grows, and more jobs are created — an obvious example is that there are no stagecoach drivers now, but there are car drivers,” he said. “At the end of the day, there will be more people taking care of our robots, more people providing services to the merchants we deliver for, people programming our software, developing our apps on phones and tablets.”