Welcome to February!

Alright dear readers! It’s that time!

I’m calling this future Friday because, well, why not?

Whip out your 2005 rating schedule and go to page 3-3.  You’ll see that at least one of the “baker” positions has occupational group 420 and another, the Baker Helper, has occupational group 460.

Dough brake machine operator on page 3-8 has 460 as well.

Making bread in the literal sense can be physically demanding job, and most of the occupational variants for 420 and 460 are pretty high up there.

In other words, if your applicant makes it into those occupation codes, odds are good your PD is going up.

The job itself lends itself to repetitive strain, lifting injuries, and occasionally burns.

Yikes – an expensive profession to insure for industrial injuries.

But your humble blogger isn’t worried.  To quote legendary anchorman Kent Brockman, “I, for one, welcome our [robot] overlords.”

InterestingEngineering has an article about BreadBot, a bread-baking robot that is touted as making a fresh loaf of bread every six minutes!  Touting as advantages its small demand for floor space and the fact that fresh bread needs fewer preservatives (and avoids the costs of paying for delivery of bread baked elsewhere), the real advantage from your humble blogger’s costs is the savings on the cost of labor.

Employees will still be necessary to refill the dry ingredients, but that work is not going to generate the high PD that actual bread baking does.

Foodandwine.com estimates the cost as “$100,000 over a five-year lease” which might not be a bad investment to replace the labor costs of a bakery department.

The future is coming to shrink the world of workers’ comp; are you [b]ready?

Have a good weekend, dear readers!