The authors had no special access privileges to the data. To get access, users have to create a user account at YS.
URL: Data are available from the YS for researchers who meet the criteria for access to confidential data. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The main dataset used to produce the results presented in the study are third-party data available from the Working Life Barometer survey (Arbeidslivsbarometer).The survey is provided by the Confederation of Vocational Unions (YS), a politically independent umbrella organization for labor unions, and organized by the Work Research Institute in Norway. Received: Accepted: NovemPublished: November 30, 2020Ĭopyright: © 2020 Schwabe, Castellacci. PLoS ONE 15(11):Įditor: Petri Böckerman, University of Jyvaskyla, FINLAND This negative effect is driven by low-skilled workers, which are those carrying out routine-based tasks, and who are therefore more exposed to the risks of automation.Ĭitation: Schwabe H, Castellacci F (2020) Automation, workers’ skills and job satisfaction. Such fear of future replacement does negatively affect workers’ job satisfaction at present. The results indicate that automation in industrial firms in recent years have induced 40% of the workers that are currently in employment to fear that their work might be replaced by a smart machine in the future. Our identification strategy exploits variation in the pace of introduction of industrial robots in Norwegian regions and industries since 2007 to instrument workers’ fear of replacement.
The empirical analysis uses microdata for several thousand workers in Norway from the Working Life Barometer survey for the period 2016–2019, combined with information on the introduction of industrial robots in Norway from the International Federation of Robotics. This paper studies the extent to which automation affects workers’ job satisfaction, and whether this effect differs for high- versus low-skilled workers. This fear of a possible future replacement is important because it negatively affects workers’ job satisfaction at present. Other workers that are not directly affected by automation may however fear that these new technologies might replace their working tasks in the future. When industrial robots are adopted by firms in a local labor market, some workers are displaced and become unemployed.