 De-skilling: Evidence from late nineteenth century American manufacturingJeremy Atack, Robert Margo and Paul Rhode Explorations in Economic History, 2024, vol. 91, issue C Abstract: The longstanding view in US economic history is that the shift in manufacturing in the nineteenth century from the hand labor artisan shop to the machine labor of the mechanized factory led to “labor de-skilling” – the substitution of less skilled workers, such as operatives, for skilled craft workers. Investigating the Department of Labor's 1899 Hand and Machine Labor Study, we show the adoption of inanimate power, which we call “mechanization,” did induce de-skilling at the production operation level. However, while the treatment effect of mechanization was economically and statistically significant, it accounted for only 16 percent of the de-skilling on average in the sample, using our preferred IV estimator. Broadening the scope of our inquiry, we find that variations in the division of labor, as captured by the share of production tasks performed by the average worker, accounted for a substantially larger fraction. Keywords: Mechanization; Automation; Division of labor; Labor displacement; De-skilling (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:exehis:v:91:y:2024:i:c:s0014498323000487 DOI: 10.1016/j.eeh.2023.101554 Access Statistics for this article Explorations in Economic History is currently edited by R.H. Steckel More articles in Explorations in Economic History from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.