Robots and Unions: The Moderating Effect of Organised Labour on Technological Unemployment

Henri Haapanala, Ive Marx and Zachary Parolin

No 2110, Working Papers from Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, University of Antwerp

Abstract: We analyse the moderating effect of trade unions on industrial employment and unemployment in countries facing exposure to industrial robots. Applying random effects within-between regression to a pseudo-panel of observations from 28 advanced democracies over 1998-2019, we find that stronger trade unions in a country are associated with a greater decline in the industry sector employment of young and low-educated workers. We also show that the unemployment rates for low-educated workers remain constant in strongly unionised countries with increasing exposure to robots, whereas in weakly unionised countries, low-educated unemployment declines with robot exposure but from a higher starting point. Our results point to unions exacerbating the insider-outsider effects of technological change within the industrial sector, which however is not fully passed on to unemployment.

Date: 2021-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://medialibrary.uantwerpen.be/files/57001/91f ... d26-5610c3d0b0b8.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:hdl:wpaper:2110

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, University of Antwerp Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Santiago Burone ().