In these two short movies, you can observe how planting and weeding looks like in Finland. In many countries, such forest activities are performed manualy, and probably many forest workers would like to have such a job like these guys in movies. Watch this out! 

Harvester planting

In the movie below, you can observe firstly how the process of planting looks like in Finland. I described it in one of my former posts on this blog. Click link below to learn more abou planting techniques in Finland.

>>READ MORE: Express planting in Finland

Cleaning/Weeding by the use of harvester

Couple years, after planting has been made, we need to perform weeding , i.e. we need to remove mainly herbaceous plants and shrubs that are of the same height, but still competing for the resources that could be used by the selected trees. The movie below presents how the process of weeding looks like in Finland by the use of specialized harvester.

Minimum wage and technology development

Generally, I am completely against the introduction of minimum wage by governments. As an economist, I see more disadvantages than advantages of this operation. The graph below shows what is the relation between minimum wage and unemployment. We see that by increasing wage over the free market wage (introduction of minimum wage), we increase the quantity of labor and decrease demand for that labor. This is how the unemployment is created.

The main problem is that this unemployment touches mostly not “clever” guys from labor unions who push govermnent to do that, but usually young, not qualified employees (e.g. students), who did not get enough job experience.

>>READ ALSO: Greatest challenges for forest robots

Labor economist Joseph Sabia from San Diego State University said:

“While alleviating poverty is a widely shared goal, raising the minimum wage is unlikely to achieve that end. In reality, it is more likely to result in making many low-skilled workers worse off. The minimum wage fails to reduce net poverty because of its adverse effects on employment and poor ability to target workers living in households below the poverty threshold.”

Furthermore, economist Milton Friedman said that

“one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

One positive thing about minimum wage

Nevertheless, I think that there is one positive thing about the introduction of minimum wage. It is the technology development. In other words, automation involves the substitution of machines for human labor and rise in minimum wage fastens this process.

>>READ ALSO: Forest stands volume estimation by using Finnish Multi-Source National Forest Inventory

When the minimum wage increases companies usually start using new technologies to relieve margin pressure and reduce their workforces. There are already a lot of evidences that low-skilled workers are replaced by computers. For instance, we can see self-checkout counters and online features, which replace customer-facing labor.

This is currently happens in Scandinavia in Europe, Finland and Norway are good examples here. Movies above show how forest workers are replaced by modern technology.

Author of main photo and movies: Rafał Chudy