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123 Int'l Lab. Rev. 127 (1984)
The Notion of Technological Unemployment

handle is hein.journals/intlr123 and id is 141 raw text is: International Labour Review, Vol. 123, No. 2, March-April 1984 The notion of technological unemployment Guy STANDING * I. Introduction Every depression produces its sages who point to technological change as a fundamental cause of the malaise or as the means of escape. The present depression is no exception.' The optimists see automation, information technology and micro-chips as freeing us from the drudgery of work, creating leisure, earlier retirement and a return to vernacular values. The pessimists see new machines and organisations accelerating de-skilling, reducing work creativity, creating mass unemployment and standardising consumption.2 Even union leaders are claiming that never again can industrialised countries achieve full employment.3 Technological unemployment is a widely used, if elusive, concept; it is often coupled with other forms of unemployment no easier to define, notably frictional, voluntary and structural.' Unravelling the links would help in formulating macro-economic policy, but conceptual oversimplification has contributed to the inability to integrate technological change into labour market analyses. Concern over technological unemployment is usually traced to the Luddite riots of early nineteenth-century Britain. But Ludditism can be interpreted in three ways. Usually, it is seen as a protest against the destruction of jobs, against capital-labour substitution. A second interpreta- tion is that it reflected the resistance of skilled workers to the substitution of semi-skilled and unskilled machine operators. A third view sees technology as a threat to the workers' way of living, changing the pattern of consumer and producer demand so as to provoke a shift to less job-creating goods or imports. All three views reveal genuine fears that are scarcely assuaged by those who cite the necessity of technological progress for economic growth in a competitive world or who glibly claim that such fears are based on the lump of labour fallacy. This article, after briefly defining technological change, examines forms of technological unemployment found in economic literature, bearing in mind that the term has often been subsumed under structural unemploy- ment. It then reviews cyclical links and long-wave theories in which * International Labour Office. The author wishes to thank Michael Hopkins and Rolph Van Der Hoeven for their helpful comments. Copyright © International Labour Organisation 1984

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