politics, economy and employment & labour
Several days ago Steven Hill presented at the Graduate Center CUNY in New York his new book “Raw Deal: How the ‘Uber Economy’ and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers”. It discusses (according to Steven’s presentation – I have not read the book yet) the decline of trade unions, the future of jobs and robotics. It […]
Good economic policy rests on a clear idea of what the state and business should do or leave to others. This clear division is missing in Industry 4.0. During a recent conference in Berlin, an industry leader quipped “Industry 4.0 is the first industrial transformation to be enacted by the state”. Surprisingly, the audience’s reaction was […]
David Autor, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), joins Social Europe Editor-in-Chief Henning Meyer to discuss the impact of technological changes on the world of work and the wider economy. The discussion highlights why washing machines will not go to the moon any time soon and why the developing world might have more to […]
Richard B. Freeman, Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University and Co-Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, joins Social Europe Editor-in-Chief Henning Meyer to discuss the impact of technological changes on the world of work. Will machines substitute old jobs and create new ones? Or will machines just take […]
As Labor Day looms, more Americans than ever don’t know how much they’ll be earning next week or even tomorrow. This varied group includes independent contractors, temporary workers, the self-employed, part-timers, freelancers, and free agents. Most file 1099s rather than W2s, for tax purposes. On demand and on call – in the “share” economy, the “gig” economy, or, […]
After more than half a decade of debate dominated by the global financial crisis, 2014 saw a departure from this singular focus. Thomas Piketty started a global discussion about historical patterns of inequality and their negative repercussions. And looking to the future rather than back in time, The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and […]
In 1983, the American economist and Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief made what was then a startling prediction. Machines, he said, are likely to replace human labor much in the same way that the tractor replaced the horse. Today, with some 200 million people worldwide out of work – 30 million more than in 2008 – Leontief’s […]
In current debates, it is often discussed whether digitalization is good or bad for employees. Some expect that with the so-called digital revolution, work will spill over onto the rest of life even more than it does today. Employees’ self-organization, said to increase through digitalization, threatens to overburden them. Health problems such as burn-out and […]
If we look at what kinds of jobs have expanded most in recent years, we can split European countries into two: those that experienced job polarization (with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs growing, and the middling type shrinking relatively) and those that experienced upgrading (with a relative expansion of ‘good’ jobs). These patterns can be traced […]
The following is a transcript of a Social Europe podcast in which Social Europe Editor-in-Chief Henning Meyer discusses the impact of the Digital Revolution on the nature of work and inequality with Michael A. Osborne, Associate Professor in Machine Learning and Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment at the University of Oxford. Okay […]
The potential scope of automation – driven by computerisation and intelligent robots – has increased significantly in recent years and will continue to do so. Not surprisingly, this is changing the world of work in advanced economies. The process of automation is not only replacing routine manual tasks; it has the significant potential to empower […]
Fears about the impact of technology on the labor market are nothing new. In the early nineteenth century, a group of English textile workers known as the Luddites worried that new technologies like power looms and spinning frames would cost them their jobs. They protested by smashing the machines. Today, anxiety that new technologies could […]
