Et is one of the truisms of the computer age that employees have to live in constant fear of robots – at least if they have mainly been doing routine jobs up to now. It seems only a matter of time before these people are no longer needed as workers.
According to popular belief, if you are lucky enough not to lose your job, you cannot hope that your salary will make any big leaps. As machines learn, the market value of those that don’t have more to offer than their mechanical competitors drops.
New research now offers at least some hope for those stuck at their jobs. The economist Ronald Bachmann from the RWI economic research institute in Essen, together with three colleagues, took a closer look at what has become of jobs since the 1980s, which at the time were particularly characterized by routine and little thought.
Professions change
In the as yet unpublished study, which is available to the FAS in advance, the authors state that it is true that many of these professions have been left behind financially. But that is by no means the case for everyone. Some have even improved about as much as occupations that were among the most demanding at the start of the study.
The trick is that jobs don’t necessarily stay the same over time. They change with technical progress. Just because someone is in the same job today as they were forty years ago doesn’t mean they’re doing the same things.
The different wage developments depend on precisely this distinction. Occupations that changed benefited from rising real wages. This included, for example, secretaries, explains Ronald Bachmann. They used to be busy typing texts. Today they are, so to speak, office managers with a wide range of tasks.
More advice instead of routine
It is similar in the financial sector. Bank clerks spent a lot of time in the 1980s paying customers their money and issuing receipts. Then came the introduction of ATMs. Nevertheless, according to Bachmann, the number of bank employees has not fallen. Instead, her job profile has changed towards more customer advice.
At the other end of the spectrum are the professions that are still very routine even after decades. According to Bachmann, these include jobs in food processing and mining. You are the losers in this story. Those routine jobs that changed significantly benefited from a real wage increase that was 27 percentage points higher than in those jobs that did not change.
The economists conclude that there may well be room for growth in today’s routine jobs – if the activities change. For employees, this can mean that it is more lucrative for them not to switch to another industry, even if their job is currently still heavily dominated by routine tasks.
However, all this only works if employees have the opportunity to further their education. The economists have also examined this: it is not enough to sit back and wait for the world of work to change. Real wage gains depended very decisively on the professional training of those affected. The number of further training courses in formerly less demanding occupations rose sharply in Germany in the 1990s – exactly at the time when routine activities were losing much of their importance. These courses were often paid for by employers. That too is a hopeful message: both sides are aware of the challenge and will not give up without a fight.
