Technology and Work - Detailed Notes

The World of Work: Key Trends

• Industrial Composition of Employment in Australia:
  • The industry share of the workforce has shifted significantly over time.
  • A graph illustrates the changes from 1890 to 2020, showing the rise of services and the decline of agriculture and manufacturing.
• Change in Employment by Industry (1992-2022):
  • Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services experienced the highest growth at 218%.
  • Mining saw a substantial increase of 212%.
  • Health Care and Social Assistance grew by 190%.
  • Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing declined by -25%.
  • Manufacturing decreased by -18%.
• Projected Employment Growth by Industry (2024-2034):
  • Health Care and Social Assistance are projected to have the highest growth.
  • Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services are also expected to see significant growth.
• Participation Rate in Australia (1966-2024):
  • The graph shows the participation rate for both males and females over time.
  • Data is seasonally adjusted and sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
• Part-time Employment (1980-2020):
  • The part-time share of total employment has increased over time.
  • The female share of part-time employment has remained high, around 70-80%.
• Multiple Job-Holders:
  • The number of multiple job-holders has fluctuated over the years.
  • The multiple job-holding rate is also tracked.
• Share of Employment by Type of Job (1986-2021):
  • The fraction of total employment is divided into non-routine cognitive, routine manual, routine cognitive, and non-routine manual jobs.
• Projected Employment Growth by Occupation Skill Level:
  • Skill Level 1 is projected to have the highest employment growth.
  • The data is sourced from ANZSCO.
• Changing Labour Market Structures:
  • Hollowing out of the labour market is occurring, leading to bifurcation.
  • There is growth in high-paid, high-skilled jobs and low-paid, low-skilled jobs.
  • The gig economy is experiencing rapid growth.
  • Greater flexibility and freedom for those with skills and bargaining power, but increasingly precarious conditions for those with low skills.
• Young People, Labour Markets, and Employment Career Paths:
  • Career paths are becoming more dynamic and less linear.
  • Today’s 15-year-olds will likely navigate multiple changes in employers and careers.
  • The transition from full-time education to full-time work is taking longer.
  • Typical careers involve periods of employment interspersed with training/retraining.

Technological Disruption, Globalisation, and Neoliberalism

• Changes in the nature of work and employment patterns result from technological change and neoliberal values/policies since the mid-1970s.
• Key aspects include:
  • Globalization, free trade, and consumerism.
  • ‘Trickle-down’ economics.
  • Small government and prioritization of free enterprise.
  • Individualism.
  • Labor market flexibility (part-time, casual, contract work).
  • Shifts in labor market participation.
• It's almost impossible to disentangle the impact of technological change from these other factors.

Historical Concerns About Technology and Work

• Concerns about the impact of technology on work are not new.
  • Examples include the Luddites during the Industrial Revolution and concerns about computers during the early Digital Revolution.
• Four Corners (1968) noted the fear of computers, potential impact on traditional work patterns and social lives, loss of work, and the threat of increased government control through a ‘national database’.

Technology and Work: Impact

• Technological change impacts:
  • The nature of work tasks (skill level, autonomy, enjoyment/satisfaction).
  • How work is valued (monetary and social value).
  • The distribution of work (access, amount, geographic distribution).
• Given the centrality of work as a distributive mechanism (source of income) and as a source of identity, this impact is crucial.

Technological Change and Work in the Early Industrial Revolution

• Mechanization in areas like textiles destroyed existing artisan/craft-based production models.
  • It led to mass unemployment and undermined working conditions (longer hours, lower autonomy, alienation, unsafe conditions) and living conditions (migrations to cities, urban slums, poor sanitation).
• However, it also provided:
  • Massive increases in productivity.
  • Increased access to cheaper and better-quality goods.
  • Eventually, increased wages, living conditions, and employment.

Taylorism and Technology (Scientific Management) in 1890s-1920s

• Taylorism applied scientific management principles (e.g., ‘time and motion studies’) to production processes and technologies.
• It involved the automation of processes wherever possible.
• It featured standardization, disaggregation, specialization (de-skilling) of tasks, and the introduction of ‘piece work’ as ‘incentivization’.
• Transformation of skilled craft production into mass production occurred.
• Enabled massive increases in output and productivity but at the cost of deskilling and ‘de-humanizing’ labor tasks.
• Robert F. Hoxie (1915) noted that Taylorism views the worker as a mere instrument of production, reducing them to a semi-automatic attachment to the machine or tool.

Fordism: Productive Technology and Consumption

• Fordism emerged in the early 20th century, named after Ford’s production line and approach to manufacturing, and extended on Taylor’s principles of scientific management.
• Productive technology aimed at manufacturing standardized products in huge volumes using special-purpose machinery and unskilled labor.
• It matched production advances with relatively high wages and the promotion of mass consumption (necessary to stimulate demand so it matches production).
• This model of production and consumption successfully underpinned modern industrial economies up to the 1970s.

Post-Fordism and Technology

• Dominant system of production and economic organization in the industrialized world since the 1970s.
• Shift from standardized, mass production aimed at mass markets (Fordism) to flexible, specialized production aimed at differentiated (niche) markets.
• Characterized by:
  • Globalized production and distribution networks.
  • Flexible production lines and ‘small-batch production’.
  • Economies of scope (diversification) instead of scale.
  • Specialized products and jobs.
  • ‘Just in time’ inventory management.
  • Hyper-flexible workforce (often ‘off-shore’).
  • Heavy reliance on automated production; new information technologies (especially in inventory control, transport and logistics); and ‘containerization’.

The Changing Nature of Work: Overall Impact

• At the individual level:
  • Task specialization and simplification (de-skilling).
  • Loss of jobs and industries.
  • Loss of autonomy and increased alienation from employment tasks (de-valued sense of identity from employment role).
  • Unemployment, upheaval, and social disadvantage for workers impacted by technological shifts.
  • But also safer and less arduous work and greatly increased individual wealth and living standards over time for those able to adapt.
• At the broader societal level:
  • The impact during the transition period is typically unequal and leads to rising inequality.
  • Leads to social dislocation, changing social/power relations, potential conflict.
  • But longer-term accompanied by an increase in productive capacity, wealth, and living standards across the board.
  • Historically, technological change creates major (but temporary) disruption during the transition period, but then benefits tend to flow through more broadly once adjustments are made and new work opportunities replace displaced jobs.
  • Impact has been shaped by existing and newly emerging social, economic, and political institutions (which reflect dominant values).
• John Quiggin noted: “In periods when legal, industrial, and political conditions favor workers, rapid technological progress has been largely beneficial, even when it implies the decline of some industries. When unions are weak, and policy favors employers over workers, disruptive technological change results in the loss of jobs, wages, and working conditions.”

The Digital Revolution: Differing Perspectives

• Michael Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian) predicts massive job disruption, similar to the Industrial Revolution. He emphasizes the necessity for planning to avoid significant social unrest.
• James Newton-Thomas and Jack Strocchi express technological alarmism, suggesting that computers will become computationally substitutable for humans in all economic activity within 20-30 years.
• Emma Dawson (Per Capita Australia) argues that the narrative of unprecedented threat from digital technologies and automation is exaggerated, calling it “nonsense”.

What the Research Says About Job Displacement

• Tech-driven job displacement is already happening.
  • McKinsey (2019) estimates 25% job displacement by 2030 due to automation (an average of 2% per year) in Australia.
  • The pace of change is on par with what the country has experienced since 2000, but it could speed up with rapid automation adoption.

Shifts in Skills Demand

• Total hours worked in Europe and the United States (2016 vs. 2030 estimate):
  • A shift from physical and manual skills towards technological, social, and emotional skills is expected.

Automation's Potential Impact on Jobs

• Most Vulnerable Jobs: Low skill, routine, repetitive, and predictable tasks (e.g., telemarketers, transport workers, cleaners).
• Least Vulnerable Jobs: High levels of creativity; complex social interaction/relationships; high levels of unpredictability (e.g., social workers, physicians, teachers, occupational therapists).

Hot Professions: McKinsey (2019)

• Projected net change in jobs by occupation type (2016-2030):
  • Care providers and educators are expected to see significant job growth.
  • Office support and other jobs in predictable environments are expected to decline.

The 'Known Unknowns'

• A third of the new jobs created in the United States in the past 25 years didn’t exist at the start of that period and 70% of these were linked to technology (McKinsey, 2019).
• Almost a million jobs could be created by 2030 in entirely new roles that don’t currently exist.

Uneven Impact of Job Displacement

• Left to its own devices, automation could have significant distributional impacts.
• Increased job churn could see Australia’s unemployment rate temporarily spike by up to 2.5 percent (e.g., from 5 to 7.5 percent).
• Without retraining for vulnerable workers, especially administrative and manual workers, and those in vulnerable regions, income inequality could widen by up to 30 percent (McKinsey, 2019).

Addressing the Challenge of Automation

• We need to think carefully about how we manage the transition, what kind of society we want to move to, what values we prioritize, and what institutions we will require.

Key Questions to Consider

• Why is ‘robots stealing our jobs’ or ‘humans running out of productive work’ a problem?
• Is it still a problem if we break the nexus between work and income?
• Couldn’t it lead to liberation from scarcity and toil?

The Future is Workless?

• John Maynard Keynes (1930) discussed “technological unemployment” as a temporary phase of maladjustment, suggesting that mankind is solving its economic problem.
• Tim Dunlop (2016) argues that relying on having a job to participate in society in a decent way is an increasingly obscene idea, given job losses or precarious employment due to technology.

Summary

• Technology itself is ambivalent (effects on work and employment can be positive or negative, depending on groups affected).
• Institutions are crucial in shaping the impact of technological development (facilitating, blocking, regulating, adapting).
• Institutions are social creations, and we have agency in creating them.
• History suggests that negative effects of transformative technological change on work can be mediated by institutions and collective action (e.g., the rise of the welfare state, labor laws) once sufficient pressure/public will for change emerges.