Power, Structure and Technology - Opportunities and Challenges for the Labour Market (PST)

In this reporting period, we got the bad news that SSB had made mistakes when creating the person identifying numbers, effectively randomly linking workers to firms. The error was discovered in February and new revised and corrected data were received in August. Focus has been on sub-projects 2.2.1, 2.2.2 and 2.2.3. The paper "Creative disruption - Technological innovation, labour demand, and the pandemic" by Erling Barth, Alex Bryson and Harald Dale-Olsen, has been revised and updated, and presented at EEA-ESEM 2023 in Barcelona. In this paper they utilize a new survey on Norwegian firms’ digitalization and technology investments, linked to population-wide register data, to show that the pandemic massively disrupted the technology investment plans of firms, not only postponing investments, but also introducing new technologies. More productive firms innovated, while less productive firms postponed investments. The new technologies are associated with increased labour demand for skilled workers, and reduced demand for unskilled workers. This is true for both realised short-term employment changes (to 2021) and for long-term expected labour demand (until 2025). The changed labour demand and technology changes yield economic benefits in the form of higher wages for skilled labour, but not unskilled labour. In the paper The Impact of New Free Trade Agreements on Incumbent Firms and Workers by Harald Dale-Olsen, whic been presented at EEA-ESEM2023 in Barcelona, shows Dale-Olsen that free-trade agreements increase exports and return-on-assets for Norwegian incumbent exporters, but their mark-ups decline reflecting reduced market power. On average, workers in these established firms benefit from free-trade agreements, but this depends on occupations, union strength and labour market tightness. in Doellgast, V., Wagner, I., & O’Brady, S. (2023). Negotiating limits on algorithmic management in digitalised services: cases from Germany and Norway. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 29(1), 105-120. https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589221143044, Doellgast et al ask how worker representatives adapt traditional collective voice institutions to regulate the adoption and use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithms used to monitor employees and to automate management decisions. On data from Germany and Norway, worker representatives mobilised collective voice institutions to protect worker privacy and discretion associated with remote monitoring and workforce management technologies, but they relied on different sources of institutional power, connected to co-determination rights, enforcement of data protection laws, and labour cooperation structures.

Technological changes, e.g. within the fields of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and robotics, and public policies alters the choice set of employers, and influence their decisions on how, where, when and what to produce. In many countries, such decisions are made in interplay with worker organisations. Our proposed project, entitled Power, Structure and technology - Opportunities and Challenges for the labour market (hereafter, PST), focuses on how technology changes the meaning of the firm and the workplace. Drawing on insights from economics, political science, sociology and industrial relations, the PST research projects provides a detailed empirical assessment on how and to what extent digitalisation affects the shifting boundaries and structure of the firm and on the shifts in the balance of power between employers and workers. First, we address how technological change such as digitalisation may affect firms and their structure, and areas within the workplace, depending not only on the type of the firm, but also on the type of union presence within the sector or firm, a key institution in the Norwegian labour market (sub-projects 2.2.1-3). Technology, investments, super-firms, and the interplay with unions and negotiations are keywords. Second, we address boundary shifts and changes in structure within the nation state (sub-projects 2.2.4-5), temporary work legislation and domestic outsourcing, influencing inequality in the workplace and in the labour market with important implications for ethnic and gendered class based divisions. Third, we address boundary shifts and structure change outside the nation state (sub-projects 2.2.6-7), so-called product and service offshoring, affect workplace inequality within the nation state.