165,700 US workers · median $39,070/yr · Production
EXPOSEDverdict contested
Almost nothing in this job is text or screen work, so language AI barely touches it — the threat is mechanization: conveyors, automated feeders, palletizers, and cobots that load, unload, and stage materials for machine operators. What protects the role today is messy, varied hand work (untangling jams, hand-sorting mixed parts, cleaning equipment in tight spaces, fetching odd-shaped stock) that is expensive to engineer around at low wages. There is no license, no signature, no client relationship, and very little discretion, so when a plant does invest in automation the position disappears rather than shrinks.
10-year outlook: Employment keeps eroding through the 2030s as plants add automated feeding and palletizing; the survivors are the helpers who converted into operators, setup techs, or maintenance assistants.
contestedtwo runs, 34 and 31 of 100 — unresolved
US employment, 2019–2025-45.3%
303,030165,700 workers
This fall is concentrated in 2020 and has not recovered since.
Median pay $29,100 → $39,070 +7.4% in real terms
(nominal +34.3%, less ~25% US inflation over the period)
The job count is not the verdict
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
-8.9%
168,500 → 153,500 on the projections basis
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -8.9% 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.
~23,600 openings
a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
One email if this score changes. Watch as many occupations as you like
from the same address — no account, and nothing is sent on a schedule,
only when a verdict actually moves.
Also known as
— 24 job titles this covers
Titles reported by people doing this work, from the US Department of
Labor's O*NET survey. If your job title is here, this page is about
your work even though the name doesn't match.
Five dimensions, 0–20 each, summed. Higher means more protected. The
arithmetic is shown so you can check it:
12 + 15 + 1 + 2 + 4 = 34.
· Scored 2026-08-11, and re-examined when evidence accumulates
rather than on a schedule.
Task resistance12/20
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier At 12 the job sits just above the midpoint because the predictable half — moving totes to a line, stacking finished cases, feeding blanks into a press — is already handled by conveyors and palletizers in modernized plants, while the unpredictable half (reaching into a jammed sealer, hand-separating parts that came off-spec, sweeping and wiping down a machine's tight interior between runs, hunting down an odd-length piece of stock in the back) still has no cheap engineering answer, which is why it isn't a 6 but also can't reach the high teens.
Embodiment15/20
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments A 15 reflects that essentially every duty happens standing on a plant floor with your hands on material — lifting 50-lb boxes, positioning stock, clearing scrap — in conditions that vary by shift, product run, and how the last operator left the station, though it stops short of the high end because you work inside one building with fixed machines rather than on a roof, in a trench, or in traffic.
Liability shield1/20
No licence, no signature requirement A 1 is right because nothing you do requires a credential — no forklift certification is assumed in the base job, no inspection stamp, no signature on a batch record; the machine operator or line lead owns the output, and the only paperwork touching you is the OSHA log and the employer's own training sign-off.
Trust premium2/20
Anonymous artifact production At 2, the work is interchangeable by design: helpers are assigned to whichever line is short that morning, temp agencies fill the slots for weeks at a time, and no customer, patient, or client ever knows which person staged their material — the only relational value is the shift supervisor knowing you show up and don't damage stock.
Judgment & accountability4/20
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs The 4 is not zero because you decide when a jam is safe to clear yourself versus when to stop the line and call the operator, and you catch obvious defects moving past you, but the standard is a posted work instruction and a lockout-tagout procedure rather than your own call, and anything ambiguous goes up the chain.
The verdict on this page is contested. We scored
this occupation twice, independently, and the two runs disagreed: 34/100 — EXPOSED
and 31/100 — COOKED.
Combining them doesn't settle it — the answer changes depending
on how the halfway points are rounded, which is a property of our
arithmetic and not of the job. Rather than pick the side that suits
us, we've left the original verdict in place and flagged it. Read the
dimension scores below and the reasoning attached to each; on this
page they carry the information, and the one-word label does not.
This occupation has already been through one.
Headcount fell 58.8% between 2017 and 2025 — 402,140 to 165,700 — while the
median wage held roughly flat in real terms
(+ 14.9% after inflation). A job being
commoditised usually loses pay along with headcount. One that
shrinks by half while pay holds is leaving a specialist core behind,
and the score above was assigned from the occupation title without
sight of that history — so it may be describing the job this used to
be rather than the people still doing it. Why this is a known limit.
What this job involves — and which parts are yours
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.
AI already does these at usable quality
These still need a person
What your selection can and can't move
Your task mix speaks to task resistance
(12/20 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 34 points
(21%).
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.
Active moats on the surviving side: embodiment, physical-presence
How to future-proof this job
Move from feeding machines to running them: get signed off as a machine setter/operator on the specific presses, extruders, or CNCs in your plant, since changeover and setup outlast material handling.
Take the plant's maintenance ladder — lockout/tagout, lubrication routes, basic hydraulics/pneumatics — so you become the person who clears jams and restores uptime rather than the person feeding the line.
Get a forklift/powered industrial truck certification plus warehouse system training so material movement you do is the supervised, exception-handling kind, not the repetitive kind.
Learn to tend and reset the automation your plant installs (robot cell load/unload, teach pendant basics, sensor faults) and become the cell attendant when the conveyor or cobot arrives.
Where this experience transfers — occupations you could move toward
Computed from U.S. Dept. of Labor O*NET skill and knowledge profiles:
high overlap with what you already do, a materially higher resistance
score, no large jump in required training, and no licence you would
have to start a new pipeline to get. Targets that pay meaningfully
less, that are themselves COOKED, or whose own headcount is falling
are excluded — a move into a shrinking trade is not an escape.
What would move this back up — beyond any one person
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 45/100, still EXPOSED.
4 specific changes that would raise this score
already happeningembodiment+2
Plant product mix shifting toward high-mix/low-volume or seasonal short runs (e.g. contract packaging, food co-packers) where changeover frequency makes fixed conveyor/palletizer lines uneconomic and the helper's job becomes almost entirely unstructured manual handling in varying cells; also confined-space and wet-sanitation cleaning tasks that cobots cannot enter under current safety standards
plausibletask resistance+3
Task-mix shift after the plant automates staging and palletizing: what remains for the surviving headcount is jam clearing, exception handling on mixed/damaged parts, and machine-tending judgment — effectively a lower-tier operator role. This raises the score for the remaining jobs while cutting the number of jobs, so it is not protection at the occupation level
plausibleliability shield+3
OSHA machine-guarding and robot-safety enforcement (ANSI/RIA R15.06 risk assessments) plus food-safety rules (FSMA, USDA HACCP) requiring a trained, named human to perform and log sanitation and lockout/tagout verification steps that cannot be delegated to automated equipment; some union contracts already specify bargaining-unit staffing for these logged checks
plausiblejudgment accountability+3
Formal designation of helpers as the recorded first-line quality/foreign-object inspection point under a customer audit scheme (SQF, BRCGS) or as trained authorized employees under 29 CFR 1910.147, making their sign-off on line clearance consequential
The limit. There is no realistic route to a trust premium — buyers never see this worker and no one pays extra for human material handling. Even with every lever above, the occupation stays exposed: the mechanism of loss is capital investment in fixed automation eliminating positions outright, and none of these levers slows that once payback pencils out.
These are conditions, not forecasts — what would have to happen, not
what will. Specific rules, cases and bills are named so you can go and
check whether they exist and where they stand; verify before relying
on any of them. Nothing here is legal or financial advice.
Where this work is, and what it pays there
BLS metro figures for 314 areas. The verdict
above does not change by city — the rubric judges what the work
involves, not where it happens — but pay and headcount do, and the
national median hides a very wide range.
Most of these jobs
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX
8,640
$37,890 -3%
Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX
8,120
$37,290 -5%
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA
6,810
$42,490 +9%
New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ
4,780
$40,970 +5%
Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN
3,710
$41,480 +6%
St. Louis, MO-IL
2,290
$40,190 +3%
Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD
2,190
$40,580 +4%
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA
2,080
$46,980 +20%
Best paid
Reading, PA
340
$54,550 +40%
Albany, OR
200
$52,290 +34%
Des Moines-West Des Moines, IA
200
$52,050 +33%
Percentages are against this occupation's national median of $39,070. Counts are jobs in
that metro, not vacancies. Metros where the BLS suppressed the cell
are absent rather than shown as zero.
Who is actually doing this — nobody, on the record
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 34.
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.
Read that as a gap in the reporting we can see, not proof of absence
— the dispatch runs on English-language feeds and misses plenty.
If you know of a case, tell us,
or add a field report from inside the job.
Quick take — do you do this job?
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous,
and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Nothing yet0%
It's changing0%
Displaced0%
Self-reported and unverified — a sentiment signal, not a survey. One
response per person per occupation; you can change your answer.
Field reports — what people say has changed
No field reports yet. A written account takes a paragraph rather than
a tap, goes to an editor before it appears, and is the one thing on
this page the rubric cannot produce on its own.
Watch this verdict
Kept current
The dispatch runs daily. 711 reported cases on
file, 357 of them things a named organisation actually did.
Newest landed yesterday.See it · RSS
Scores move on evidence, not on a clock. Re-scoring the
same occupation drifts a couple of points on its own, so a scheduled
refresh would mostly republish our own noise. An occupation is re-examined
when deployments accumulate against it — which is why a verdict changing
here means something. Last register revision 2026-08-11.
Employment updates once a year, when the BLS publishes.
Every occupation carries its own 2019–2025 series.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell
you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.
Cooked Index — Helpers--Production Workers: EXPOSED, 34/100.
Scored 2026-08-11 · printed from https://cookedindex.com/jobs/helpers-production-workers/
Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates, so this sheet goes out
of date. Check the page above for the current score, the reasoning behind
each dimension, and what would move it.