Global manufacturing through the lens of occupations My findings hence reconcile the conflicting characterisations of technological progress over the 20th century as skill-biased versus deskilling, and suggest that the deskilling of manufacturing production workers’ tasks has contributed to the disappearance of production jobs in which even workers with little formal education could acquire valuable skills. Over the 1970-2016 period, “almost all occupational change among non-college workers reflects a movement from the middle toward the bottom of the occupational distribution” (Autor 2019).2 In a recent paper, I show that there has been deskilling among manufacturing production workers also on a global scale for more than six decades, drawing on new occupational wage and employment data from more than 150 countries since the 1950s (Kunst 2019a). Autor (2019) shows that the picture for the US changes dramatically once the focus is on workers without a college degree, which is closer to the group Braverman was concerned about. While the recent literature on labour market polarisation in high-income countries has found more evidence of upskilling than of deskilling (Autor et al. From this perspective, rising income inequality and polarisation may be the result of declining just as much as of increasing returns to skill, and calling upon workers to make more human capital investments may not be sufficient to allow them to share in the fruits of technological progress. If he is right, the narrative of technological progress rewarding human capital investments fails to reflect the experience of many production workers: the market value of their skills, often acquired during apprenticeships of several years with low pay, may have declined rather than increased. 1994, 1998), Braverman’s claim is about deskilling within the large group of production workers. While the modern literature documents an increasing demand for skilled non-production, or ‘white-collar’, workers in manufacturing (Berman et al. In contrast, Braverman (1974) asserts in an influential book from the same year that “the capitalist mode of production systematically destroys all-around skills where they exist”.1Ī closer look reveals that both statements may be correct. The recent increase in inequality is then in part viewed as a consequence of increasing returns to skill. Dating back to at least Tinbergen (1974), the literature on skill demand has argued that technological progress is skill-biased in the sense that it requires increasing human capital investment on the part of workers.
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