Month: May 2022

As globalisation has led to the outsourcing of administrative functions away from headquarters to developing countries, Central and Eastern Europe, with its young, educated workforce and lower labour costs, has become a hub for business services. The sector has been growing rapidly in Poland, and now accounts for 5.6% of total private sector employment. Yet the intensification of automation poses a challenge for this business model, as a large number of tasks performed at such centres are routine ones that can easily be automated.

Kowalik and her colleagues, including Piotr Lewandowski, Tomasz Geodecki and Maciej Grodzicki, were interested in employees’ attitudes toward automation, including whether they are afraid of losing their jobs, as well as management’s response to the process: are they investing in upskilling and re-skilling, or rather looking toward layoffs and disinvestment?

The study found that employees welcome automation and are not afraid of it process that removes tedious work and frees up resources. Moreover, despite automation, new jobs are being created.

However, some threats remain. With rising labour costs and other macroeconomic headwinds, some processes may easily be relocated away from Poland.

Within UNTANGLED the results of the study will be compared to research on the business services sector in Ireland and South Africa and will feed into policy recommendations and scenarios in a later stage of the project.

https://socialboundariesofwork.pts.org.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/FINAL-SBOW22-program-and-book-of-abstracts-May2022.pdf

Photo courtesy of Vassil Kirov.

Here is what we have accomplished so far:

• Two papers published on our website
• Four papers receiving the finishing touches and soon to be published
• One stakeholder workshop organized by wiiw in Vienna.
• One webinar
• Two virtual expert cafés organized by ZSI.

The Virtual Expert Café series is an open format driven by participants’ contributions. During our informal online gatherings, experts, researchers and stakeholders from the fields of digitalisation, globalisation, migration, work, employment, skills etc. exchange thoughts and ideas. Participants can promote an ongoing project or research, tap into attendants’ collective intelligence for a specific question or simply enjoy a dynamic thematic discussion.

See here what we discussed last time!

If you want to present please send us one slide in advance at: untangled@zsi.at. You will be given 5 minutes to present.

Register here

The paper, The Impact of Robots on Labour Market Transitions in the EU, written jointly by Ronald Bachmann and Myrielle Gonschor from the RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research in Germany, and Piotr Lewandowski and Karol Madoń from Poland’s Institute for Structural Research (IBS), studied how the increase in robot installation influenced worker flows, i.e. layoffs and new hirings, and therefore employment and unemployment levels in European economies.

https://editorialexpress.com/conference/ESPE2021/program/ESPE2021.html

Myrielle Gonschor, Ronald Bachmann, Piotr Lewandowski and Karol Madoń presented their preliminary findings the at the 26th Annual Conference of the Society of Labour Economists and 34th Annual Conference of the European Society for Population Economics on 14 May 2021. The full paper will be available soon, and a sneak peek at some of their preliminary findings already shows interesting results:

• Robot adoption leads to a slight reduction of layoffs, and to a small increase in job finding rates
• There are large differences between countries: the effect on layoffs is stronger in countries with lower labour costs
• Generally, robot adoption increases labour demand and therefore raises employment.

https://sole.memberclicks.net/assets/FinalProgram.SOLE2021.v2.pdf