Job Quality and Technological Change: Evidence from Two Industrial Revolutions

Benjamin Schneider, Oslo Metropolitan University
Robin Philips, UC Louvain

The quality of jobs is a growing area of interest in policymaking and labor research (Green 2006; Clark 2010; Cazes et al 2015), and there are increasing concerns about the impacts of future technological change on job quality (Berg et al 2023). Although economic and labor historians have occasionally contributed to discussions about the future of work (i.a. Mokyr, Vickers & Ziebarth 2015; Lucassen 2021; Crafts 2022), research on job quality has almost exclusively focussed on recent decades. This systematic review provides a long-term perspective that contributes to current debates about the potential effects of technological change on the quality of employment, and offers a broad overview of historical research on job quality in major technological transformations. We systematically collect and analyze a large body of literature that examines two major historical technological waves: the First Industrial Revolution, which introduced centralized factory work, and the Second Industrial Revolution, with the adoption of Scientific Management. We examine this material using the seven job quality domains established in Green & Mostafa (2012) and code the literature for changes in job quality that correspond to the underlying questions in the European Working Conditions Survey. Our current results suggest that work in the factory was associated with lower job quality on several domains, including Working Time Quality and Skills & Discretion. Scientific management is associated with increased Earnings, but negative changes in Skills & Discretion and Work Intensity. We argue that these historical case-studies reveal how the extensive variation available in history, including different institutional settings and technological changes, could strengthen the comparative analysis of good work.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 9. Labor and Technology