Journal Article

Understanding whether technical change is beneficial or detrimental for employment is at the center of the policy debate, especially in phases of economic recession. So far, the effects of innovation – in its manifold declinations and intrinsic complexity – on labor demand have proven to be not unequivocal. This essay critically reviews the role of technical change in shaping employment dynamics at different levels of aggregation. First, it disentangles theoretically the role of different compensation mechanisms through which employment adjusts after an innovation is introduced. Second, it critically presents the most recent empirical evidence on the topic, with a focus on methods and limitations. Finally, it provides an attempt to conceptualize a number of stylized facts and empirical regularities on the innovation‐employment nexus.

Industry 4.0 promotes technological innovations and human-robot collaboration (HRC). Human-robot interaction (HRI) and HRC on the manufacturing assembly line have been implemented in numerous advanced production environments worldwide. Collaborative robots (Cobots) are increasingly being used as collaborators with humans in factory production and assembly environments. The purpose of the research is to investigate the current use and future implementation of Cobots worldwide and its specific impact on the African workforce. Exploring the gap that exists between the international implementation of Cobots and the potential implementation and impact on the African manufacturing and assembly environment and specifically on the African workforce. The study features a qualitative research design. An open-ended question survey was conducted amongst leading manufacturing companies in South Africa in order to determine the status and future implementation of Cobot practices. Thematic analysis and content analysis were conducted using AtlasTi. The findings indicate that the African businesses were aware of the international business trends, regarding Cobot implementation, and the possible impact of Cobots on the African work force. Factors specifically highlighted in this study are fear of retrenchment, human-Cobot trust and the African culture. Practical implications and value-add: This study provides valuable background on the international status of Cobot implementation and the possible impact on the African workforce. The study highlights the importance of building employee trust, providing the relevant training and addressing the fear of retrenchment amongst employees.

During the past decades the importance of soft skills for labour market outcomes has grown substantially. This carries implications for labour market inequality, since previous research shows that soft skills are not valued equally across race and gender. This work explores the role of soft skills in job advertisements by drawing on methods from computational science as well as on theoretical and empirical insights from economics, sociology and psychology. We present a semi-automatic approach based on crowdsourcing and text mining for extracting a list of soft skills. We find that soft skills are a crucial component of job ads, especially of low-paid jobs and jobs in female-dominated professions. Our work shows that soft skills can serve as partial predictors of the gender composition in job categories and that not all soft skills receive equal wage returns at the labour market. Especially “female” skills are frequently associated with wage penalties. Our results expand the growing literature on the association of soft skills on wage inequality and highlight their importance for occupational gender segregation at labour markets.

Digital computers have transformed work in almost every sector of the economy over the past several decades (1). We are now at the beginning of an even larger and more rapid transformation due to recent advances in machine learning (ML), which is capable of accelerating the pace of automation itself. However, although it is clear that ML is a “general purpose technology,” like the steam engine and electricity, which spawns a plethora of additional innovations and capabilities (2), there is no widely shared agreement on the tasks where ML systems excel, and thus little agreement on the specific expected impacts on the workforce and on the economy more broadly. We discuss what we see to be key implications for the workforce, drawing on our rubric of what the current generation of ML systems can and cannot do [see the supplementary materials (SM)]. Although parts of many jobs may be “suitable for ML” (SML), other tasks within these same jobs do not fit the criteria for ML well; hence, effects on employment are more complex than the simple replacement and substitution story emphasized by some. Although economic effects of ML are relatively limited today, and we are not facing the imminent “end of work” as is sometimes proclaimed, the implications for the economy and the workforce going forward are profound.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will provide the funding and the research will be overseen by Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government. The past few decades have seen important progress in poverty alleviation and public health: 31 countries are currently classified as low income, down from 65 countries in 2001, and extreme poverty halved between 1990 and 2010. What about digital transfers to people in conflict zones so that they have the cash to buy food?” The research agenda is still being established, although it is likely to involve some combination of automation, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, energy generation and storage, and biotechnology.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper describes the set-up and results of the “futures forum” study. Through different methodological approaches, the future of work and its implications for the future (physical) workplace are explored. What will our office workplace look like in 2025 and how best to support future work, in alignment with the different organisational support services [human resources, information technology (IT), facility management and real estate] Design/methodology/approach - Different stakeholders were involved through different methods. First, a global literature study summed up some of the contemporary views on future directions and future studies. Second, focus groups were held with office end-users and employees of 11 participating organisations. Third, a Delphi study was applied to a multidisciplinary expert group. And finally, results were further developed in a “pre-design” workshop. The “forum” refers to the consortium of private and public partners that supported the study. The research involved large (>1,000 employees) knowledge-based and administrative organisations. Findings - The fast-developing digitalisation will have substantial repercussions for work processes and environments. New types of work and work processes are appearing and need to be accommodated. Work will be organised in a more dynamic manner to adapt to the rapid changes in the market. Automation will lead to a continuous decrease of administrative processes which leaves more complex, knowledge-intensive work in organisations. Digitalisation and technology will lead to new ways of working and other necessary capabilities in the organisation with great emphasis on IT and technology-based activities. This dynamic environment brings the demand for an agile response of the support services in the organisation and a work environment that can accommodate changes easily. The main findings centre around eight themes for the future workplace that were considered to be the main, joint priorities of support services. These themes are changes in work, move towards digitalisation, adaptive potential of organisations, liberation of old structures, attract and retain employees, self-employment and self-marketing and future employee needs. Because of the dimensions of the research topic, a broad thematic perspective was applied so a further in-depth exploration might be valuable. The stakeholders that were involved in the data collection were mostly contacted through research partners, which might narrow research findings. Originality/value - Many “future studies” have been taken place in the past, and they all apply a different research scope. This study aimed specifically at large office organisations in The Netherlands and on the implications for the future workplace that are to be addressed in a communal way by the organisations’ support services.

Recent debates of basic income (BI) proposals shine a useful spotlight on the challenges that traditional forms of income support are increasingly facing and highlight gaps in social provisions that largely depend on income or employment status. A universal “no questions asked” public transfer would be simple and have the advantage that no-one would be left without support. But an unconditional payment to everyone at meaningful but fiscally realistic levels would likely require tax rises as well as reductions in existing benefits. We develop a comprehensive BI scenario that facilitates an assessment of the resulting fiscal and distributional effects in a comparative context, undertake a microsimulation study to quantify them, and propose a simple decomposition to identify the mechanisms that drive effects in different country contexts. Results illustrate the challenges, but also the strengths, of existing social protection systems. A BI would fix benefit coverage gaps that exist in many countries but would require very substantial tax rises if it were to be set at a meaningful level. As support would not be targeted on those most in need, it would not be a cost-effective way of directly reducing income poverty.

Technological innovation is changing the nature of many jobs and the qualifications employers seek in their workers, convincing more young people to pursue a college education and other postsecondary credentials--at least according to the conventional wisdom among public policy experts. This view of skill-biased technological change has been described as a race between education and technology. The Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz explain rising income inequality in the US as a result of the education system failing to keep pace with technological innovation and the rising demand for higher-level skills. This analysis resonates well with the idea of a burgeoning knowledge economy and has helped fuel the global expansion of higher education. If the nation is anticipating a growing need for workers with advanced skills, then education is at the heart of economic and social policy. Supporters of this scenario expect that as in the past, new positions and professions will emerge and create new jobs to replace any eliminated by new technology.

In connection with the development of skills, the aim of this article is to identify the conditions for success of an integration policy for new hires. Based on a sample of 48 semi-structured interviews conducted with production operators owned SNCF Infrapôle Center Network, the results show that the development of individual and collective skills is characterized by a number of factors ( working conditions, providing meaningful actions, monitoring the integration, interaction) that positively influence the success of such a control device. [googletranslate_en]