Buiter, Christian (2020) Climbing Down the Ladder? With a special focus on mid-level workers at risk of job automation in European labour markets. Master thesis.
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Abstract
Ongoing automation processes may render a fair share of existing mid-level jobs redundant. Midlevel workers are put in a difficult position, as laid-off workers might find it difficult to get appropriate new jobs again for lack of new skills or jobs having been made scarce by new technologies. This can create scenarios where mid-level workers, when laid-off, are forced to take on jobs at lower levels i.e. moving down the career ladder. As a result, these workers suffer decreased employability due to job automation. The extent of this phenomenon and how individualdemographic and regional contextual factors influence it are studied in this thesis. The results, however, somewhat contradict the polarization effect automation is expected to have as low-level jobs are found to be most at risk of suffering decreased employability due to automation. For all lowlevel workers, 9.48 percent are found to be at risk of climbing down the ladder, while for the midlevel workers this is 5.46 percent. Indicating that jobs which were previously perceived as being low at risk of automation may have started to gain more automation potential and have been subjected to labour displacements as automation ingenuity improved. In this study, the evidence is found that education and training play a crucial role in protecting oneself from experiencing decreased employability. Demographically, the evidence is found that females and young workers are more at risk compared to males and other age groups. The regional context also plays an important role in the extent of workers experiencing decreased employability due to automation. Where for instance, strict employment protection legislation is found to have a lower likelihood of the phenomenon compared to lenient employment protection. Moreover, governments that intervene in labour markets to help workers in disadvantageous positions seem to substantially lower the likelihood of these workers experiencing decreased employability due to job automation.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Master) |
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| Degree programme: | Economic Geography |
| Supervisor: | Koster, S. |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Oct 2020 09:49 |
| Last Modified: | 20 Oct 2020 09:49 |
| URI: | https://frw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/3388 |
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