Accepted in: Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society
We study the effect of the adoption of automation technologies – industrial robots, and software and databases – on the incidence of atypical employment in 13 EU countries between 2006 and 2018. Robots do not affect the total employment rate but significantly increase the involuntary atypical employment share, mainly through fixed-term work. Software and databases increase total employment and are neutral for atypical employment. Higher trade union density mitigates the robots’ impact on atypical employment, while employment protection legislation plays no role.
This paper develops a task-adjusted, country-specific measure of workers’ exposure to artificial intelligence (AI) in 108 countries, covering approx. 89% of global employment. Accounting for within-occupation task differences significantly amplifies the development gradient in AI exposure. We attribute these differences primarily to cross-country differences in ICT use intensity, followed by occupational composition, human capital and globalisation-related firm characteristics.
Using Polish household survey data, we show that cigarette tax hikes reduce smoking more among less-educated populations, who are more sensitive to affordability changes. By 2027, the planned excise increase is projected to lower smoking by 250,000 people, cut consumption by 8.4%, and raise revenues by 10.9%.
We study workers’ and employers’ preferences for remote work, estimating the willingness to pay for it using discrete choice experiments with more than 10,000 workers and more than 1,500 employers in Poland. Both workers and employers prefer hybrid over fully-remote work. However, only 25-35% of employers – those with positive views on remote work productivity and high-quality talent management – value remote work costs in line with workers’ willingness to pay, particularly in non-routine cognitive occupations.
We study implications of automating routine cognitive work in shared service centres (SSCs) in Poland. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews, we highlight the negotiated nature of automation processes shaped by interactions between headquarters, SSCs, and their workers. Workers actively participated in automation processes, eliminating the most mundane tasks. This resulted in upskilling, higher job satisfaction and empowerment. Yet, this depends upon the fact that automation is triggered by labour shortages that limit the labour-intensive expansion of SSCs.
Measuring worker-level job tasks of Ukrainian war refugees in Poland, we find substantial task degradation, namely performing more routine-intensive jobs in Poland after displacement than in Ukraine before the full-scale war. People who experience a greater task degradation were more likely to plan to return to Ukraine by 2023, particularly those who initially, in 2022, did not plan to return.
