Automation, Trade Unions and Involuntary Atypical Employment

Piotr Lewandowski and Wojciech Szymczak

No 02/2024, IBS Working Papers from Instytut Badan Strukturalnych

Abstract: We study the effect of the adoption of automation technologies – industrial robots and software and databases – on the incidence of atypical employment in 13 E.U. countries between 2006 and 2018. We combine survey microdata with sectoral information on technology use and exploit the variation at the demographic group level. Using instrumental variables estimation, we find that industrial robots significantly increase atypical employment share, mostly through involuntary part-time and involuntary fixed-term work. We find no robust effect of software and databases. We also show that the higher trade union coverage mitigates the robots’ impact on atypical employment, while employment protection legislation appears to play no role. Using historical decompositions, we attribute about 1-2 percentage points of atypical employment shares to rising robot exposure, especially in Central and Eastern European countries with low unionisation.

Keywords: robots; automation; atypical employment; trade unions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 J51 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-eur, nep-ipr, nep-lma, nep-tid and nep-tra
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