Robots and risk of COVID-19 workplace contagion: Evidence from Italy

Abstract

This work investigates the cross-industry relationship between robot adoption and the risk of contracting COVID-19 in the workplace in Italy. Using a novel dataset on the risk of workplace contagion, we show that industries employing more robots tend to exhibit lower risks, thereby providing some empirical support for the widely held, but so far untested, hypothesis that robots can help mitigate the risk of contagion among workers by reducing the need for physical interactions. While we acknowledge the relevance of robots in the fight against COVID-19 and their possible role in enhancing the resilience of economic systems against future pandemics, we also thoroughly discuss a series of potential trade-offs between workplace safety and employment conditions that could arise (especially in the short run) due to a substantial increase in the rate of robot adoption.

Public Perception and Reception of Robotic Applications in Public Health Emergencies Based on a Questionnaire Survey Conducted during COVID-19

“…How does the population view the application of anti-pandemic robots? As mentioned earlier, although medical workers in Colombia and researchers in Italy were both positive about the usefulness of robots in reducing the risk of transmission during COVID-19 pandemic, they still showed negative views towards the issue of robots replacing humans [26,27], which indicates different characteristics from the Chinese population. However, another study with a small sample size found that American people's acceptance of hotel robot service has increased significantly since the pandemic [71].…”

“…However, in some of the most recent studies on the reception of the application of anti-pandemic robots, there is little research exploring this topic. Instead, these studies focus more on functionality [2,26,27].…”

“…In the long term, some jobs might be performed by inexpensive robots [41]. A study conducted in Italy demonstrated that the increased robot use in factories did reduce the risk of workers contracting the virus during the COVID-19 pandemic, but researchers still believe that "its effects on employment rate and income risk bringing with them unintended and unpleasant re-distributional consequences that must be monitored and counterbalanced" [27].…”

Robots and labor regulation: a cross-country/cross-industry analysis

“…First, high levels of labor protection can spur both employees and employers to make complementary investments in human and physical capital, potentially resulting in technological lock-ins that can increase the costs of robot adoption (Milgrom and Roberts, 1990;Aoki, 2001;Antonelli, 2012). Second, to complicate things further, unions can push for robot adoption to increase the safety of the working environment and to ease the physical effort on the part of employees (for the case of blue-collar workers, see Gihleb et al, 2020;Belloc et al, 2020;Caselli et al, 2021). However, if robots displace unskilled and routinary occupations, the increased productivity gap between skilled and unskilled workers may undermine their coalition, reduce the level of unionization, and increase the costs of coordination (Iversen and Soskice, 2020).…”

Epidemics and policy: the dismal trade-offs

“… 2 I assume that the contagion probability on the job does not depend on occupation and on the firm characteristics, even if there is evidence of variation (Caselli et al 2021 ). …”