Abstract:     The relationship between employees and machines has become a key issue in the process of replacing human labor with machine (RHLM) in the manufacturing enterprise, while little is known about its practical evidence of front-line employees at the micro-level. Based on the survey and interview of a typical manufacturing enterprise, this research discussed the overview of the relationship between employees and machines and its effects in the practice of RHLM. The results showed that: (1) RHLM is not only replacing human labor, but also changing the work content of employees, and it is the general trend of enterprise practice that RHLM from the part of job area and being human-machine symbiosis at the whole level of the enterprise. And the employees replaced by the machine are mainly manifested in several kinds of flow directions, which generally present a double-path circulation trend inside and outside of the enterprise organization. (2) There have been organizations already advocating employees to treat machines as colleagues, and over 60% of the interviewees hope to treat machines as colleagues. Besides, more than half of the interviewees say they treat machines as partners rather than tools or competitors, and more than 40% of the interviewees support to strengthen the degree of RHLM. (3) Machines are both replacing human labor and enhancing employees, and employees′ love and hate for the machines are mingled, because they are not only worried about being replaced by machines, but also cannot work alone without machines. In addition, RHLM has a double-edged-sword effects on employees′ work income, efficiency, intensity, time, and motivation. (4) Employees are optimistic about human-machine collaboration. They generally prefer to collaborate with humans rather than machines, but there are also differences due to role situations, that is, more employees prefer human collaborators (rather than machines) as peer colleagues or supervisors, and more employees prefer machines (rather than humans) as subordinates. (5) The machine characteristics (compared with employee characteristics) are generally having more prominent effects on human-machine relationship, and different characteristics present significant differences in its impact on human-machine relationship.Compared with the existing literature, the contributions of this study lie in two aspects. On the one hand, compared with the macroeconomic or theoretical model analysis of existing research, this research conducts a practical investigation on the front-line employees at the micro level of typical manufacturing enterprises, which can provide new evidence support for interpreting the RHLM phenomenon of enterprise. On the other hand, most of the existing studies have explored the RHLM phenomenon of enterprise from the perspectives of machine technology R&D innovation, efficiency optimization, and digital-intelligence transformation, while this study provides new evidence explanations from the perspective of the relationship between employees and machines, and explore the two-way interaction relationship between employees and machines based on multiple dimensions, such as the interaction between employee and machine, employee′s attitude towards machine, and machine′s impact on employee, which helps to expand the theoretical boundary of employee-machine relationship in the context of RHLM. The findings of this study can provide reference for guiding enterprises to implement the RHLM practice of employee-orientation, and they can also lay a theoretical foundation for the deepening research of human-machine relationship.

Key words: replacing human labor with machine, human-machine symbiosis, human-machine team, human-machine labor division, hybrid workforce