What Did Workers Do? Using Job Ads to Analyze the Task Content of Work in an Industrializing Economy

Erik Hellberg and Jakob Molinder
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Erik Hellberg: Uppsala History of Inequality and Labor Lab (UHILL) and Department of Economic History, Uppsala University

No 301, Working Papers from European Historical Economics Society (EHES)

Abstract: Ever since Smith and Marx there has been a debate about the impact of industrialization on the content of work. While shifts in the occupational structure associated with industrialization are well charted, we lack systematic evidence on the tasks workers actually performed during this period of economic change. We assemble a large corpus of job advertisements from Swedish newspapers from the 1860s to the 1900s and use a large language model (LLM) to extract task statements. We then categorize tasks along two dimensions: manual vs. cognitive and routine vs. non-routine. We first document a large decline in non-routine manual work, which was replaced in fairly equal proportions by analytical and routine cognitive and manual tasks, so that work overall did become more routine, in line with Marx's pessimistic prediction. The shift had more to do, however, with the decline of low-paid service activities like cooking and cleaning than with the disappearance of artisanal methods of production. At the same time, the economy also became more cognitive, relying more on human capital than physical labor. Routine jobs tended to be in the middle to upper half of the pay scale, meaning that structural change led to a "hollowing in" of the occupational structure and to inclusive job growth. We also find pronounced gender segregation: even among unskilled farm workers, men's and women's task sets were largely distinct. We also show that many occupations spanned multiple economic sectors, with implications for how we measure and interpret structural change.

Keywords: labor markets; tasks; industrialization; Sweden; economic history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 J24 N33 N34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05
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