Off the waterfront: The long-run impact of technological change on dock workers
Zouheir El-Sahli and
Richard Upward
No 2015-06, Discussion Papers from University of Nottingham, GEP
Abstract:
We investigate how individual workers and local labour markets adjust over a long time period to a discrete and plausibly exogenous technological shock, namely the introduction of containerisation in the UK port industry. This technology, which was introduced rapidly between the mid-1960s and the late-1970s, had dramatic consequences for specific occupations within the port industry. Using longitudinal micro-census data we follow dock-workers over a 40 year period and examine the long-run consequences of containerisation for patterns of employment, migration and mortality. The results show that the job guarantees protected dock-workers' employment until their removal in 1989. A matched comparison of workers in comparable unskilled occupations reveals that, even after job guarantees were removed, dock-workers did not fare worse than the comparison group in terms of their labour market outcomes. Our results suggest that job guarantees may significantly reduce the cost to workers of sudden technological change, albeit at a significant cost to the industry.
Keywords: Technological change; dock-workers; layoffs; employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/gep/documents/papers/2015/2015-06.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Off the Waterfront: The Long-Run Impact of Technological Change on Dockworkers (2017)
Working Paper: Off the Waterfront: The Long-run Impact of Technological Change on Dock Workers (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:not:notgep:15/06
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Discussion Papers from University of Nottingham, GEP School of Economics University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hilary Hughes (hilary.hughes@nottingham.ac.uk).