EXPOSED
Almost nothing here is text or screen work, so language models barely touch the job — the threat is capital, not chatbots: goods-to-person systems, autonomous mobile robots, and improving suction/multi-grip picking arms already handle high-volume sortation and palletizing in purpose-built facilities. What survives is messy: irregular loads, damaged cartons, trailer unloading, retail backrooms, construction sites, and any building not designed around robots. The job doesn't disappear — it concentrates in the un-engineered spaces while the biggest, most standardized warehouses shed headcount per unit shipped.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $29,510 → $40,240 +9.1% 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
+1.5% 2,988,900 → 3,033,100 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +1.5% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
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.
~384,300 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
GripIcerBoxerCaddyCagerFlyerMoverPilerWaxerBaggerDumperHookerIcemanLifterLoaderLuggerLumperMuckerPourerPullerRagmanSackerShaverSorter
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Trailer unloading of floor-loaded mixed cartons, breaking down collapsed pallets, and hand-stacking irregular freight in a 1970s dock with no clearance still beat every commercial robot, but the high-volume half of the work — case picking to a conveyor, palletizing uniform SKUs, tote induction — is already being done by machines in new-build DCs, which is what holds this at 13 instead of 17.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments The whole shift is lifting 50-lb boxes, climbing in and out of trailers at ambient temperature or in a freezer, walking uneven yard surfaces, and reaching into spaces a fixed arm cannot see into; the only reason it isn't 20 is that a growing share of the work happens inside conditioned, engineered warehouse aisles rather than construction sites and open yards.
No licence, no signature requirement No licence, no certification, no exam — a forklift authorization under 29 CFR 1910.178(l) is employer-issued training, not a credential you carry, and when freight is damaged the carrier or the employer pays, never you.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs Calls are real but bounded — deciding stack height, whether a carton is too damaged to ship, when a load needs re-securing — and they're governed by pick lists, load diagrams, and a supervisor who is thirty feet away.
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 (13/20 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 (3/20) 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 8 of this occupation's 39 points (21%).
Embodiment (18/20) 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.
Tire Repairers and Changers EXPOSED
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 48/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift is genuinely two-tier here: if goods-to-person and robotic palletizing absorb the high-volume standardized picking and stacking, the residual role concentrates in trailer/container devanning of mixed floor-loaded freight, damaged-carton triage, retail backroom replenishment, and exception recovery around robot lines — work current manipulation stacks fail at. Watch for job postings retitled toward 'robotics attendant / exception handler' at Amazon, Symbotic and GXO sites.
Narrow but real: OSHA powered-industrial-truck certification (29 CFR 1910.178(l)) and hazmat handler training under 49 CFR 172 Subpart H already require a named trained human. If OSHA finalizes a rule requiring a certified human spotter or attendant present whenever autonomous mobile robots operate in mixed pedestrian aisles — the direction of the ANSI/ITSDF B56.5 safety standard revisions and of state warehouse-quota laws like California AB 701 and NY S8922 — a headcount floor becomes legally attached to robot deployment.
If load-securement and shipping-condition sign-off is pushed onto the dock worker — carrier claims practice and FMCSA 392.9 securement duties already make a named person answerable for whether a load ships or is refused — the exception call (reject damaged pallet, re-block a shifted load) becomes an owned consequential decision rather than a throughput task.
Already near ceiling. Only route up is a shift in employment mix toward the least engineered settings — construction material handling, moving and storage, agricultural packing sheds, and older multi-story urban warehouses that cannot be retrofitted for AMRs — as engineered facilities shed per-unit headcount.
The limit. Trust premium has no realistic route: buyers of freight handling pay for throughput and damage rates, never for the mover being human, and there is no consumer-facing surface to charge on. Combined realistic ceiling is roughly the high 40s, and it comes mostly from capital cost and safety rulemaking, not from anything the work itself confers.
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 157,920 | $40,550 +1% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 120,720 | $42,390 +5% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 118,290 | $43,290 +8% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 81,940 | $38,510 -4% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 78,460 | $39,020 -3% |
| Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA | 69,820 | $46,060 +14% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 56,420 | $44,950 +12% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 52,520 | $38,000 -6% |
| Topeka, KS | 2,140 | $49,140 +22% |
| Hanford-Corcoran, CA | 790 | $48,420 +20% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 30,710 | $48,400 +20% |
Amazon · North Sea Terminal Bremerhaven
German outlet buten un binnen reports that planned automation at the North Sea Terminal Bremerhaven is expected to halve the terminal's workforce.
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