Digi­ti­sa­tion: a real threat to the fu­ture of jobs or just a dis­torted per­cep­tion?

Ro­bots and com­put­ers tak­ing over the labour mar­ket is what most see when asked how mod­ern tech­nol­ogy will im­pact their jobs. And it is the same fear that is cur­rently play­ing an im­por­tant role in the de­bate re­gard­ing dig­i­ti­za­tion. Ac­cord­ing to a sur­vey done by Edel­man 54% of the em­ploy­ees who par­tic­i­pated said that they are afraid that au­tom­a­ti­za­tion will re­place them sooner or later.

The fact that new tech­nolo­gies can change en­tire in­dus­tries of the econ­omy is hardly dis­puted. Such changes in the world of work trans­late into a grow­ing sense of in­se­cu­rity among peo­ple. Quite nat­u­rally, the idea of an im­mi­nent loss of jobs raises ex­is­ten­tial fears. A look at his­tory shows that fears of mass un­em­ploy­ment caused by tech­no­log­i­cal progress are not new at all. At the be­gin­ning of the nine­teenth cen­tury, Eng­lish work­ers, fear­ing for their jobs, showed their dis­plea­sure by de­stroy­ing ma­chines in fac­to­ries.

How­ever, look­ing at the de­vel­op­ments in the labuor mar­ket we can say, that the fear of un­em­ploy­ment re­sult­ing from tech­no­log­i­cal progress is un­jus­ti­fied. Since the end of the 19th cen­tury, the num­ber of em­ployed peo­ple in Switzer­land has in­creased five­fold, de­spite im­por­tant tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ments. There is no ev­i­dence for sig­nif­i­cant dis­place­ment nei­ther in the un­em­ploy­ment rate nor in the labour force par­tic­i­pa­tion rate.

Ex­treme dy­namic job mar­ket

The re­cent economiesu­isse study shows that in 2015, an av­er­age of 1,350 jobs were cre­ated each day in Switzer­land. As a re­sult, the Swiss labour mar­ket posted a gain of 40,000 new jobs per month and nearly half a mil­lion an­nu­ally. This means that about 10% of all work­ers start a new job each year in a newly cre­ated or ex­pand­ing busi­ness. In con­trast, an av­er­age of 1250 jobs were lost each day in 2015. That made in total an ad­di­tional 30'000 jobs. Al­though the Swiss econ­omy was hit hard in 2015 by the strong ap­pre­ci­a­tion of the Swiss franc, the pri­vate sec­tor posted an in­crease in jobs. An in­ter­est­ing find­ing of the the study is that in­dus­tries with many busi­ness clo­sures also cre­ated more jobs on the bal­ance sheet.

Dis­torted pic­ture of re­al­ity

The above fig­ures show that job cuts were al­ways over­com­pen­sated by job cre­ation. Why does the fear of tech­no­log­i­cal un­em­ploy­ment still pre­vail in the minds? In order to de­ter­mine the role of the media cov­er­age in the ex­ces­sive per­cep­tion of un­em­ploy­ment, economiesu­isse eval­u­ated the re­port­ing on job de­struc­tion and cre­ation in five swiss news­pa­pers. The eval­u­a­tion shows that the se­lected news­pa­pers re­port twice as often and three times as promi­nently about job de­struc­tion than about job cre­ation, al­though in the pe­riod of the analy­sis an ad­di­tional 30’000 jobs were cre­ated in total. This ex­plains an im­por­tant part of the per­cep­tion. This ex­ag­ger­ated re­port­ing is prob­a­bly caused by the fact, that the cre­ation of jobs does not hap­pen in big “waves” as it hap­pens with job cuts and sec­ond, com­pa­nies do not com­mu­ni­cate job cre­ations as di­rectly as when they an­nounce the clos­ing down of their busi­ness. Nev­er­the­less, this leads to a dis­torted per­cep­tion in the pub­lic.

Out­look

Dig­i­ti­za­tion is likely to fur­ther ac­cel­er­ate the struc­tural change we have to face. In order for the econ­omy to be able to still cre­ate many jobs in the fu­ture, good frame­work con­di­tions are in­dis­pens­able. The dis­torted per­cep­tion of job losses leads to un­cer­tainty in the pop­u­la­tion. This un­cer­tainty, in turn, leads to un­rea­son­able­ness and de­mands to reg­u­late the labour mar­ket and take pro­tec­tion­ist mea­sures. How­ever, this poses a real threat for the econ­omy as well as the so­ci­ety. In con­clu­sion, Switzer­land is char­ac­ter­ized by open­ness and di­ver­sity, a strong tra­di­tion of in­di­vid­ual re­spon­si­bil­ity, a sense of com­mu­nity and a cul­ture of con­sen­sus. These fac­tors con­sti­tute the foun­da­tions that al­lowed us to cope with the pre­vi­ous struc­tural trans­for­ma­tions. We must con­tinue to build on these val­ues. Progress can­not be stopped or de­creed, and that is fine. How­ever, there is a need for frame­work con­di­tions that pro­mote both spaces of free­dom and ap­pro­pri­ate bound­aries.