NEWS
An Untangled researcher’s paper on the impact of robot adoption on the use of flexible work contracts was just published in Industry and Innovation Journal.
Fabrizio Pompei, Mirella Damiani and Alfred Kleinknecht’s paper, “Robots, skills and temporary jobs: evidence from six European countries” shows that in a “high knowledge cumulativeness” innovation regime, robot adoption reduces the probability of high-skilled workers being offered temporary job contracts. At the same time, automatisation did not significantly impact the situation of low- and medium-skilled workers.
The situation is different in “low-cumulativeness” regimes, where companies primarily use externally acquired knowledge in their innovation process. This makes workers more easily interchangeable, and robot adoption increases the probability of temporary contracts for both medium- and high-skilled workers, but leaves low-skilled workers unaffected.
These findings contribute to understanding the increasing share in Europe of temporary workers with tertiary education working as technicians and professionals, as observed by Eurofound.
Mirella Damiani, Fabrizio Pompei & Alfred Kleinknecht (2022): “Robots, skills and temporary jobs: evidence from six European countries”, Industry and Innovation.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13662716.2022.2156851
