Falling wages caused more by trade union decline than robots | Apolitical - 0 views
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The pair said that the influence of new technology was much less noticeable. “While we also find evidence for a negative impact of technological change,” they said, “the effect seems to be less significant since the mid-1990s.”
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The writers looked at how three factors — technological change, the process of globalisation, and shifts in worker bargaining power — influenced the slump in wage share. “Our results indicate that the decline… can be attributed to globalisation and a decline in bargaining power of labour,” Guschanski and Onaran wrote.
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The pair pointed out that middle-skilled workers they studied had suffered worst from the impact of technological change, meaning that responding to new technology simply by boosting skills training, rather than bolstering unions, might not help in the long term.
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"Are lacklustre wages an inevitable consequence of globalisation and technological change? Or has policy had a role to play? Technology, according to new research presented at the annual conference of the UK's Royal Economic Society, is not in itself the problem. Instead, a mix of globalisation and the decline of worker bargaining power have been responsible for employees' woes. And, the paper suggests, bolstering trade unions would be a better way to shore up workers in the future than skills training."