Figure 1
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The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a new vulnerability among firms that rely on human labour. In order to comply with public health directives on physical distancing, many businesses have had to completely shut down their operations for months. Others remained functional thanks to teleworking, which many intend to prolong and
even adopt permanently....
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Objective:
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Citations
... The pandemic has also resulted in a shift in economic activity, creating new employment opportunities in health, education and construction for those workers who may be looking to leave sectors in decline. Automation and digitization trends were already contributing to structural change in Canada's labour market before the pandemic, and there is some indication that the outbreak of COVID-19 has accelerated these trends (Frenette and Frank 2020;Lane 2021). ...
In this study, Matthias Oschinski and Thanh Nguyen propose a two-pronged approach to career guidance — one that is primarily focused on skills. Their method consists of first determining suitable employment opportunities based on overlaps between the competencies, work activities and interests in a person’s current or most recent occupation and those in alternative occupations, then identifying the skills gaps that must be addressed to make these job transitions possible. The employment alternatives the authors propose are also selected based on whether they have growth prospects as well as wages that are at least as high as those the worker currently earns or recently earned.
... In some sectors, these jobs are carried out mainly by women, which can increase female unemployment: cleaning, manufacturing, call centers. Frenette and Frank [22] reach the same conclusion in a study for Canada. There are indications that robotization could increase the gender pay gap. ...
Historically, mechanization and the current artificial intelligence trend have been considered as threats to job stability despite the fact that statistics on production and employment have shown the opposite. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-21 stimulated robotization in all types of industry with the substitution of labor, raising unemployment, however, there is evidence of its reduction. The purpose of this work is to show how despite the inevitable robotization and the destruction of jobs, new trades and professions will develop in the same way as happened in the three previous revolutions, including all sectors of goods, services and the military. Without falling into the repetition of the already known history, reference is made to recent publications confronting them with the technological trend inherited from the 20th century, business behaviors in the face of COVID-19 and its effect on the future labor market. Statistics show positive aspects such as fast and efficient adaptation by highly qualified companies and employees. There are negative effects such as the loss of competitiveness of low-skilled workers; loss of bargaining power of unions; increase in the gender pay gap; widening gap between high-tech industrialized countries and underdeveloped ones. It is concluded that immediate changes are required in the reorientation of educational programs towards technological careers, labor reforms, financial reforms. The gap between high-tech industrialized countries and underdeveloped ones will undoubtedly widen unless the latter implement radical and pragmatic changes in their economic policies.
In recent years, ground breaking advances in artificial intelligence and their implications for automation technology have fuelled speculation that the very nature of work is being altered in unprecedented ways. News headlines regularly refer to the ”changing nature of work,” but what does it mean? Is there evidence that work has already been transformed by the new technologies? And if so, are these changes more dramatic than those experienced before?
In this paper, Kristyn Frank and Marc Frenette offer insights on these questions, based on the new research they conducted with their colleague Zhe Yang at Statistics Canada. Two aspects of work are under the microscope: the mix of work activities (or tasks) that constitute a job, and the mix of jobs in the economy. If new automation technologies are indeed changing the nature of work, the authors argue, then nonautomatable tasks should be increasingly important, and employment should be shifting toward occupations primarily involving such tasks.
According to the authors, nonroutine cognitive tasks (analytical or interpersonal) did become more important between 2011 and 2018. However, the changes were relatively modest, ranging from a 1.5 percent increase in the average importance of establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships, to a 3.7 percent increase in analyzing data or information. Routine cognitive tasks — such as data entry — also gained importance, but these gains were even smaller. The picture is less clear for routine manual tasks, as the importance of tasks for which the pace is determined by the speed of equipment declined by close to 3 percent, whereas other tasks in that category became slightly more important.
Looking at longer-term shifts in overall employment, between 1987 and 2018, the authors find a gradual increase in the share of workers employed in occupations associated with nonroutine tasks, and a decline in routine-task-related occupations. The most pronounced shift in employment was away from production, craft, repair and operative occupations toward managerial, professional and technical occupations. However, they note that this shift to nonroutine occupations was not more pronounced between 2011 and 2018 than it was in the preceding decades. For instance, the share of employment in managerial, professional and technical occupations increased by 1.8 percentage points between 2011 and 2018, compared with a 6 percentage point increase between 1987 and 2010.
Most sociodemographic groups experienced the shift toward nonroutine jobs, although there were some exceptions. For instance, the employment share of workers in managerial, professional and technical occupations increased for all workers, but much more so for women than for men. Interestingly, there was a decline in the employment shares of workers in these occupations among those with a post-secondary education. The explanation for this lies in the major increase over the past three decades in the proportion of workers with post-secondary education, which led some of them to move into jobs for which they are overqualified.
The authors explain that these employment shifts may be caused by factors — other than technology-induced demand for skills — that change the industrial structure of the economy. For example, higher demand for health services due to population aging may increase the share of employment in health-related occupations. Their analyses show that these other factors explain most of the increase in employment share in service occupations, about two-thirds of the decrease in production, craft, repair and operative occupations, and roughly 40 percent of the increase in managerial, professional and technical occupations. Their estimates of changes in the average importance of various tasks, nevertheless, remain significant.
It is important that policy-makers be informed of the evolution of the nature of work as new technologies are further integrated into the workplace, given the potential implications for policy development. This study has shown that, although recent advances in automation technologies have affected what workers do on the job and which occupations they work in, overall, the changes are not substantive. In other words, it may be premature to conclude that new technologies have altered the nature of work.
