COOKED
The job is physical — standing at a line, starting and stopping belts, clearing jams, sorting and positioning material, logging throughput — so language AI barely touches it directly, but conventional automation does: sensors, PLCs, vision-based sorting, and variable-speed drives were built specifically to eliminate the tending function. What remains is jam-clearing, manual feeding of awkward loads, and lockout/tagout maintenance help in cluttered plant environments, which is genuine embodiment but low-discretion and easily consolidated into fewer material-handling roles. No license, no client relationship, and almost no ambiguous decision authority means there is nothing holding headcount in place once a facility upgrades its line.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $34,660 → $42,420 -2.1% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-3.4%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 22,930 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -3.4% by 2034. This is the case where the score and the forecast agree, and it is the one worth taking seriously.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~2,600 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
FlumerBeltmanBelt TenderCoke LoaderSilo TenderUnscramblerBed OperatorChain PullerGrain LoaderSpout TenderBelt OperatorCement LoaderChip UnloaderCooker LoaderLine OperatorSilo OperatorSinter FeederTipple TenderStacker TenderTip-Out WorkerConveyor TenderTipple OperatorChip Loft WorkerChipper Operator
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Starting, stopping and speed-adjusting a belt, watching for spills and logging tonnage are already done by PLCs, load cells and photoeyes in any plant built after 1995 — the 8 rather than 3 reflects that unjamming a rock crusher chute, hand-feeding irregular bales or lumber onto a moving belt, and hosing down a plugged transfer point still need a body on the floor.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You work on catwalks and in transfer tunnels around pinch points, moving guards, shoveling spillage under tail pulleys, and reaching into equipment that will amputate — uncontrolled dust, noise and grade conditions put this at 15, short of the 18-20 reserved for jobs that move to a new unmapped worksite every day.
No licence, no signature requirement No state licence, no board certification: your employer's OSHA 1910.147 lockout/tagout authorization and a forklift or crane card are internal paperwork, so the citation lands on the company, not you — the 1 rather than 0 is only that authorized-employee designation.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs Your calls are bounded by written procedure — e-stop when the belt tracks off, radio the millwright, don't reach past the guard — and the real decisions about feed rate, blending and shutdown sit with the control-room operator or shift supervisor, which is why this sits at 4 and not 10.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (8/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (2/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (4/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 7 of this occupation's 30 points (23%).
Embodiment (15/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 43/100 — EXPOSED.
Waste/recycling and agricultural processing lines handle non-uniform, contaminated, deformable material where vision sorting still fails and jams are frequent; if the occupation's employment concentrates further in MRFs and food/ag processing (as single-stream recycling contamination rules and state organics-diversion mandates like CA SB 1383 push volume there), the surviving work is disproportionately unpredictable-environment jam and foreign-object handling rather than clean-line tending.
Genuine two-tier split exists: routine start/stop/speed and throughput logging vs. diagnosing why a line keeps jamming and improvising a fix. If PLC/VFD upgrades absorb the first tier while the role is retitled toward conveyor troubleshooting and belt maintenance (splicing, tracking, roller replacement) — the path many plants already take when consolidating material-handling roles — the remaining day is harder to automate, though headcount falls at the same time.
OSHA's lockout/tagout standard (29 CFR 1910.147) and machine guarding rules designate 'authorized employees' who must personally perform energy isolation; an update to 1910.147 (long on OSHA's regulatory agenda) or a state-plan rule that explicitly bars remote/software-only de-energization sign-off for conveyor jam clearing — requiring a named trained employee physically at the isolation point to verify zero energy — would make the tender the person whose signature the plant needs. MSHA's conveyor standards (30 CFR 56/57.14105-14107) already work this way in aggregate mining.
A union contract or corporate safety policy giving the line tender explicit stop-work authority — the unilateral right to halt production on suspected guarding or entanglement hazard without supervisor approval, as USW and some Teamsters warehouse agreements contain — converts a low-discretion post into one owning a consequential call. Post-incident, that authority is what OSHA and plaintiffs' counsel look for.
The limit. No realistic route to a trust premium: there is no buyer who knows this role exists, let alone one who would pay extra for a human at the belt. Even where the liability and judgment levers land, they attach to fewer bodies — the shield protects the position, not the payroll count, and a plant needs one authorized employee per isolation procedure, not twelve tenders.
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 1,070 | $42,420 +0% |
| Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA | 580 | $42,990 +1% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 540 | $44,910 +6% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 520 | $43,830 +3% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 470 | $41,140 -3% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 380 | $37,500 -12% |
| Memphis, TN-MS-AR | 380 | $38,100 -10% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 360 | $44,800 +6% |
| Wheeling, WV-OH | 160 | $64,160 +51% |
| Merced, CA | 40 | $62,970 +48% |
| Charleston, WV | 70 | $62,820 +48% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 30. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.