Deskilling among Manufacturing Production Workers

Abstract

I use new occupational wage and employment data from more than 160 countries to document a global decline in the demand for skilled production workers in manufacturing since the 1950s. They tended to work in craftsman occupations, and their declining relative wages and employment have been associated with increasing capital intensities of production. My findings reconcile conflicting characterizations of technological change throughout the 20th century as either 'skill biased' or 'deskilling', and point to a globally decreasing number of manufacturing jobs in which workers with little formal education can acquire significant marketable skills.

Premature Deindustrialization through The Lens of Occupations: Which Jobs, Why, and Where?

“…The notion of a convergence of manufacturing production technologies is consistent with China, a middle income country, being the largest buyer of high-tech industrial robots in 2017, accounting for more than a third of global robot sales (International Federation of Robotics, 2018). It is also consistent with the ndings of a companion paper (Kunst, 2019), which documents that capital intensities in manufacturing have increased substantially over recent decades also in developing countrieswith profound impacts on the structure of occupational employment and wages within manufacturing. Finally, it is in line with both stylized facts emerging from the historical account of technology adoption by Comin and Hobijn (2010):…”

“…21 In summary, the evidence suggests that premature industrialization is characterized by job losses in occupations that appear particularly vulnerable to ICT. This is consistent with evidence of increasing technology adoption in developing countries in recent decades: capital intensities in manufacturing have increased signicantly in countries of all income levels (Kunst, 2019), and Jaumotte et al (2013) show that also in developing countries, the share of ICT capital in the capital stock has increased rapidly after 1990. Also the World Bank's 2008 report on technology diusion in developing countries concludes that the speed at which developing countries adopt new technologies has increased since 1990.…”

“…task intensity. One explanation is that manufacturing craftsmen have been vulnerable to automation even before the advent of ICTas argued already by Jerome (1934) for the US, and documented for a wide range of countries since the 1950s by Kunst (2019). 20 Hence, while craftsmen jobs continue to disappear with increasing automation already at low levels of income (as is apparent in Figure 3), there has not been a sharp reduction in the demand for craftsmen, conditional on income, after 1990.…”

“…The occupations from the printing & publishing industry include the clerical occupation`oce clerk', and occupations from the chemical industry include the`chemical engineer'. See Kunst (2019) for more examples at the level of more disaggregated occupations and industries, including detailed task descriptions. 8 For an alternative perspective, Appendix Figure C.1 plots the corresponding occupational employment shares after normalizing total manufacturing employment to 100 for every country-year, which facilitates answering the question which of the occupations is most important within manufacturing.…”

“…At the upper end of observed income levels, professionals are the most important group of manufacturing workers, and the employment share of the other occupations within manufacturing increases most strongly at low and intermediate income levels. See Kunst (2019) for an analysis of labor demand changes within manufacturing since the 1950s. 5 for elementary occupations, 6.9 to 3.9 percent for machine operators, and 2 to 1.3 percent for clerks.…”