Are New Technologies a Benefit to Employees?
The dizzying rapid development of technology has become even stronger with the removal of national borders by the phenomenon of globalization and has begun to have significant effects on the entire social system. Undoubtedly, the working force is one of the areas most affected by these developments. Unfortunately, you can’t make a living using the casino bonus Canada offers alone. You have to become part of the workforce eventually. However, this may be harder or easier than you think due to emerging technology – technological advancements can impact the workforce in both positive and negative ways. In this article, we’ll talk about how technology affects employees.
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Is Technology Good for Workers?
The answer to this question depends on how you look at the subject. On the one hand, there are academics who argue that technological advances are causing workers to lose their jobs. There is also evidence to support their claims. For example, in a study conducted by Riccardo Campa in Italy that covers the years 2001-2011, it is emphasized that there is just a 3% increase of the total workforce used in production but an 11% increase in technological machinery and equipment. This research states that technology is an obstacle to the formation of long-term employment in Italy, and in this context, enterprises mainly demand a seasonal labour force. In other words, because of technology, employers are now only hiring trained people for important positions and prefer to use part-time workers for all other positions.
This research also shows that the use of technology predominantly creates a demand for skilled labour, thus leading to the unemployment of low-skilled labour. New technologies used in production increase the efficiency and profitability of companies but also cause significant difficulties in creating new employment areas. As a matter of fact, Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief states that technology has an employment-destroying effect of approximately 50% in business areas where white-collar workers are employed and 77% in areas where blue-collar employees are employed.
Technology Can Also Create New Jobs
However, there are also studies that claim the opposite and approach the subject from a different perspective. For example, Peter Cressy, in his book named “New Technology and the Role of Employee Involvement,” mentions that new technologies create more jobs than the unemployment they create. So technological advances are causing unemployment in existing business sectors, yes, but they are also creating new business sectors. Likewise, there are studies that show that working part-time is not a bad thing for workers too. For example, academics named Irene Hau-siu Chow and Irene Chew Keng-Howe conducted a study in Japan in 2006 and found that part-time workers were much more successful in adjusting their work-life balance; they can spend more time with their families, and as a result, they can increase their individual motivation and performance to much higher levels. They are confident that this increase in individual performance will positively affect the overall productivity of the company they work for too.
Likewise, academic Nancy Bogucki Duncan states that technology forces businesses to adapt to new conditions and to enter a restructuring process. This adaptation creates a significant employment gap mainly in the field of “information technology” and creates new job opportunities. Businesses with a high capacity to adapt to technological developments can also integrate into the labour market faster, which enables them to create job opportunities for more people.
We Cannot “Stop” New Technologies
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter which of these views you adopt. Because it is impossible to stop technological developments. Even if we know for sure that people are losing their jobs due to technology, is there anything we can do? Is it possible to tell businesses not to use new technologies? Since it is not possible to prevent this, we need to prepare ourselves for a new life. If you have a specialization that machines can easily do, you are very likely to be unemployed, yes. However, you can prevent this by improving yourself in a different field, for example, in information technologies. When the train and the automobile were invented, carriage drivers were also out of work. Among them, those who learned to drive automobiles continued to work as drivers, while others simply complained. The result did not change. Trains and automobiles entered our lives and changed our daily lives.
In other words, you are the one who will determine how useful (or harmful) new technologies can be for you, not the companies. If you are open to improving yourself and learning new things, you can be sure that new technologies will not leave you unemployed. But if you insist on doing the things you learned decades ago as they used to be, maybe it’s time to retire. We can’t stop technology and the way it’s changing the world, but we can adapt to it: it’s the only way to deal with this new world.
