White Paper

Individuals with STEM skills are major contributors to the prosperity of the UK and the provision of these skills leads to significant economic growth, improvements in quality of life and greater innovation. A training in STEM at a Russell Group university endows graduates and postgraduates with the skills needed to become the high-quality labour force and leaders required for the future development of the UK’s economy and society.

This report was commissioned by Unions21 to better understand the changing landscape of the future UK labour market. Its purpose is to a) identify industries with high projected employment growth and b) analyse worker characteristics in these industries, in order to inform subsequent market research for Unions21 regarding workers’ views towards trade unions and collective bargaining. The report draws on already available forecasting data on the UK labour market, primarily the most recent Working Futures report from 2016 by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), which forecasts employment trends in the UK in the decade leading up to 2024.

Technology has constantly and consistently changed how people work and how economies and societies are organized. In the past, that global system has been somewhat disconnected, with countries working and growing independently. Abundant resources seemingly without limitation fed growth, education was limited to a few elites, and new industries represented new and more jobs for many. Globalization and technological advents enabled labor markets in developing countries to gain a slice of the global pie. This is a healthy trend in the world economy, with more people competing in and contributing to global output, resulting in increased economic efficiency. However, there are threats to the opportunities that today's technologies represent for tomorrow. In the twenty-first century, the technologies at the center of the "Fourth Industrial Revolution"---robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and others---are defining the future of work and our society into a drastically different system than ever before. While past industrial revolutions created and destroyed jobs, they eventually resulted in overall positive net job effects, including improving working conditions, efficiency, and enabling diverse people to enter global supply chains. Well documented labor and human rights abuses throughout past industrial revolutions convinced governments and civil society to protect workers. The new Fourth Industrial Revolution will be similar in that if it is not well managed, it could lead to job loss and human rights abuses. But if confronted now through economic modernization and forward thinking, the fourth industrial revolution could power a sustainable future where emerging markets mature, and developed economies do not face similar shocks to the Great Depression and Great Recession.

Canada is facing a quiet crisis. In the coming decade, half of all jobs will be disrupted by technology and automation. Some will change dramatically. Others will disappear completely, replaced by jobs that are yet to be invented. We are living through an era of radical change, with the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and automation transforming the way we work, even in unexpected fields such as law and customer service. How will we prepare Canadian youth for the workplace of the future? Over the past year, RBC conducted a major study of the Canadian workforce. We crisscrossed the country, talked to students, workers, educators and employers in every sector. We studied job openings and automation trends and dug into mountains of data to figure out how the country is changing and what we can do to prepare.

The commonly used figure to describe the gender wage ratio—that a woman earns 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man—understates the pay inequality problem by leaving many women workers out of the picture. This report argues that a multi-year analysis provides a more comprehensive picture of the gender wage gap and presents a more accurate measure of the income women actually bring home to support themselves and their families.

The Collaborative Economy is approaching thanks to advances in technologies related to Collaborative Internet, Big/Open Data, Crypto Currency and Additive Manufacturing. Policy makers wish to be prepared and understand their options in order that effective policies can be put in place in time to nurture the positive impacts and negate the negative impacts associated within range of potential afforded by this advance. The results of a short Delphi-inspired study reveal a wide range of opportunities and threats associated with the technologies supporting the Collaborative Economy. In the wider context, attention is drawn to a number of social, political, economic, moral and ethical issues also associated with the migration into this new way of working. Importantly, the impacts of the Collaborative Economy are not restricted to the conventional workplace, where economic activity currently takes place. In the Collaborative Economy, impacts are felt not only at home but also on the person, indeed the effects are felt everywhere. In conclusion, a number of policy options are presented for the consideration of policy makers.

This report is a follow-up to the CCC-sponsored roadmap that was published in May 2009 and presented to the Congressional Caucus on Robotics on May 21, 2009. That roadmap subsequently led to the creation of the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), which is jointly sponsored by NSF, USDA, NASA, and NIH. The NRI was launched in 2011. The present roadmap is an update to the former document in the areas of manufacturing, healthcare/medical, and service robotics. In recognition of the important role that space, and defense robotics has both to R&D but also as early adopters, new chapters were added for those areas. These new sections should primarily be seen as identifying areas with dual and multiple-use potential for multi-domain coordination. As such, the space and defense sections are complementary to independent roadmaps developed by agencies within those domains. The update of the roadmap has been organized by the Robotics Virtual Organization.

Automation will produce significant productivity gains that will reshape specific sectors and occupations. These gains are likely to be recirculated, with jobs reallocated rather than eliminated, economic output increased, and new sources of wealth created. The problem is likely to be one of how income and wealth are distributed. Automation could create a ‘paradox of plenty’: society would be far richer in aggregate, but, for many individuals and communities, technological change could reinforce inequalities of power and reward. These changes may well affect men and women differently, because men and women tend to have different jobs in the UK labour market. Our analysis shows that twice as many women as men work in occupations with a high potential for automation (9 per cent compared to 4 per cent of men), and that 64 per cent of jobs in these occupations are held by women. Migrants, and lone parents (typically women) are more likely to hold jobs with high automation potential. But technology is not destiny. This paper argues that automation presents an opportunity to narrow gender inequalities and sets out four propositions for change based on this premise.

Improving economic growth is a key policy objective for the Government. Therefore, understanding the drivers of productivity growth is a fundamental requirement for effective economic policy. Current measurements of productivity, based on the ‘tangible’ inputs of capital and labour, do not fully account for variations in performance. As a result of this there is a growing interest in ‘intangible’ assets and their potential to help us to better understand the sources of growth. Intangible assets are typically grouped into three main categories. • Economic Competences - such as brand equity which would include advertising and marketing expenditures. This category includes firm specific resources, including human capital (investments in training) and organisational structure (management). • Innovative Property - this includes both scientific R&D and non-scientific R&D. Non-scientific R&D includes research in social sciences and humanities, mineral exploration, new motion picture films and other forms of entertainment, new architectural and engineering design and new product development in financial industries. • Digitised information - this is often measured as IT capital, composed of software as well as databases. Existing studies at the macro level suggest intangible assets make a significant contribution to productivity growth and micro level studies suggest intangible assets help to explain difference in performance between firms. Because intangible assets are embedded in knowledge workers, and as such are difficult to disentangle from firms’ human capital, this research develops measures of intangible assets for UK firms based on the labour input of workers in high skilled organisation, R&D and IT related occupations. These measures are then used to assess how firms employ intangible assets to increase productivity and raise economic performance. The aims of this research are to explore: • the number and cost of intangible workers as a proportion of the overall workforce across a range of sectors; • the relationship between intangible assets and performance; and • the contribution of intangible assets to growth.