Robots Are Coming for Your Blue Jeans as Automation Is Being Eyed for the Clothing Industry

The clothing industry is the last trillion-dollar sector that hasn’t been fully automated.  Many apparel makers have also been hesitant to talk about automation because of the ramifications and possible loss of jobs.  Still, there is a quiet effort underway to develop machines that can automate some parts of jeans factories and hopefully bring more manufacturing back from overseas.  Tim Aeppel, reporter at Reuters, joins us for how robots are coming for your blue jeans.

Next, as more of Gen Z enters the workplace and communications increasingly happen online and in text formats, something is getting lost in translation.  Older colleges are having a hard time keeping up with Gen Z’s use of emojis, slang, and even punctuation. Danielle Abril, “Tech at Work” writer at for the Washington Post, joins us for how workplace language is changing with younger employees.

Finally, when is a bumblebee a fish?  When a unanimous ruling by a California state appeals court deems it so.  Public-interest groups had asked the state to include four types of bumblebees on its list of endangered species, but the 50-year-old law only applied to birds, mammals, fish, amphibians, or reptiles.  Because the legal definition of a fish was vague and had been used to include other animals in separate instances, the bee was added to the list. Matt Grossman, reporter at the WSJ, joins us for the legal wrangling it took to get there.

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