Negotiating the Future of Work: Automation and New Technology
… over the next decade, digital technologies will result in both job displacement and creation, but of even greater significance is its impact on how we experience work. Digital technologies can be used to augment skills and improve job quality, but they can also be used to deskill and eliminate jobs (Wales 4.0)
Up to a third of Welsh jobs could be lost and many others displaced
Think tank, Future Advocacy, found that automation could have a devastating impact on Wales with around a third of jobs at risk of disappearing altogether by the 2030s. It forecast that, by sector, 46.4% of jobs in manufacturing, 32.3% in finance and 44% in wholesale and retail could be lost in little over a decade. Less affected will be human health and social work (17%) and education (8.5%). The study also found Wales' top 10 private employers were in sectors where jobs are at a high risk of being lost to automation and that Alyn and Deeside was the most vulnerable constituency in Wales and the fourth in the whole of UK (see Figure 1).
However, whilst such studies are an important reminder of the scale of the potential threat to jobs, and the likely affected sectors, their accuracy cannot be relied upon. By focussing on ‘occupations’ and the feasibility of their wholesale replacement by technological innovation, they do not look at the factors driving technological change in the ‘real’ economy. Just because something can be automated, does not mean it will be automated.
It is also hard to accurately predict the risk that new technology poses to specific tasks within job roles rather than to whole occupations. Studies that focus on this aspect tend to foresee a lower percentage of jobs overall will be eliminated; with an OECD report predicting that only 10% of jobs in the UK are made up entirely of tasks that will be automated. However, how the process actually unfolds will depend on numerous factors, such as the cost-benefit to employers.
The Wales 4.0 report aimed to take a more nuanced view of what new technology means for the country. It agrees that there may well be a high risk to jobs, but that it depends on the sector: “the Welsh economy is dominated by businesses that are locked into peripheral parts of global value chains with their headquarters, research, design and business intelligence function located elsewhere. This means that functions located in Wales tend to be less secure, more portable and hence more at risk of automation.”
On the other hand, the relatively high proportion of the Welsh workforce (compared to the rest of the UK) in public services, may offer some degree of shelter from the threat of automation at least in the short term. Also “Employment growth in occupations including creative industries, hospitality, sports and fitness, may be offset by falls in workforce share for manufacturing and financial and professional services (resulting from a decline in customer service and administrative positions involved in Contact Centres)”.
There’s no guarantee that significant new jobs will be created
Several studies on the impact of new technology predict that despite large-scale displacement of jobs due to technological change, there will be an overall net gain. They maintain that the advances in technology will also bring opportunities to create new high-skilled jobs required to operate and manage any new systems. A PWC study predicts that while around 7 million existing jobs could be displaced in the UK, around 7.2 million could be created, a small net jobs boost of around 0.2 million, although the changes will be uneven by sector (PWC 2018).
However, the Wales 4.0 report challenges the optimism of this assumption. It says there are no guarantees that new, as yet, unknown jobs will be automatically created by new technology. The evidence does not easily show potential new areas of mass employment, and in fact points to most new employment in Wales being ‘replacement jobs’ in the short-to-medium term as well as to a worrying trend towards more low quality, non-standard forms of employment.
An opportunity to transform the Welsh economy
The Wales 4.0 report sets out a range of policy recommendations that could ensure new technology is both beneficial to the Welsh Economy and workers. The aim is to support the creation of Wales as a global hub of digital innovation. These recommendations require around £100m initial investment and co-ordination from the Welsh government, as well as providing opportunities for engagement from social partners. They include (amongst others):
- The creation of six Industrial Innovation Clusters (IICs) each with a designated lead body to develop Industrial Transformation Roadmaps (ITRs). The ITRs will identify current strengths and the potential for advancing digital innovation at a regional, national and international level.
- The creation of new institutions and policy groups such as:
- An AI Institute for the Future Economy to help position itself on the global map as a digital nation and facilitate a more integrated approach to the application of leading-edge research in AI across Wales.
- A Lab for Work@Wales4.0 which will act as a central resource for industry, government and social partners to gain insight on future trends concerning technology and its impact on the economy and work.
- A Future Economy Commission reporting to Welsh Ministers and with membership drawn from international business leaders and experts. The new Commission should have responsibility for advising on the coordination, oversight and delivery of Wales 4.0 and ensure that national considerations take account of global opportunities
- Integrated and financial support for the industrial transformation process.
- A focus on skills: including reforms aimed at building capacity within post-compulsory education so that it is able to deliver the step-change required in preparing for the future of work in an age of lifelong learning. the development of a new Skills Framework for Wales. A series of capacity building projects should also be supported and aimed at creating the multiversity institutions of the twenty-first century.
“The question now is whether Welsh Government and its key social partners are prepared to ‘will the means’ as well as ‘will the ends’ to make digital innovation and the future economy truly work for the people of Wales.” (Wales 4.0)
What unions can do
“The technologies themselves are not the problem; it is the logic driving their introduction, which tends to be to reduce labour costs and standards.” (IndustriALL report).
It’s clear if the introduction of new technology is left to be driven solely driven by the ‘logic of the market’ ,it will be used primarily by employers to make ‘efficiencies’, drive down labour costs, and reduce standards. Unions can act now to:
- Push for Wales 4.0 recommendations to be adopted,
- use social partnership seats to influence strategic policy on new technology (see box),
- Organise at workplace and employer level to negotiate agreements on new technology that both protect and benefit workers (see examples in rest of report).
Social partnership in Wales
Wales TUC is committed to working with government and employers in social partnership to achieve fairer and better policy outcomes for workers throughout Wales. The culmination of this is the Social Partnership and Public Procurement Bill, which will introduce a social partnership duty for many of Wales’s public bodies and a fair work duty which Welsh Government must comply with. It has also resulted in the Social Partnership Council, a cross-sector social partnership arrangement which has been meeting fortnightly during the pandemic and will be put on a statutory footing once the bill becomes law.
The Workforce Partnership Council (WPC) is the tripartite social partnership structure of the trade unions, employers and Welsh Government covering the devolved public services in Wales and the forum for cross-public services workforce matters.
The private sector has the Council for Economic Development. Meeting three times a year, it continues to be a useful forum to consider major policy decisions and economic trends. However, social partnership working in the private sector more generally is far more ad hoc and challenging in relation to certain policy areas. Often, the union density in a sector tends to reflect how much attention is paid to the workforce by government, when we would argue that the opposite should be the case – un-unionised workers are inherently more vulnerable.
Existing agreements are few but show what can be won
New technology has been increasingly on every UK union’s agenda, although it seems that, as yet, there is little actual collective bargaining taking place specifically on the issue in the UK. Exceptions include the CWU’s agreements with the Royal Mail Group, and the progress towards agreements being sought by Unite reps across a number of sectors, after the union’s push to get workers campaigning on the issue (see example below).
Outside of the UK, there are more examples of unions negotiating around new technology – a main example being the German transport union EVG’s Work 4.0 agreement it reached with the Deutsche-Bahn Group (DB AG) that will be used extensively as an example in this report. However, collective agreements are still few and far between. This is because it is still an evolving issue, on top of which unions have been busy dealing with the fallout from the pandemic.
Many UK unions have legacy agreements that could be evoked to deal with the impact of new technology, such as those that provide for consultation around any major workplace changes such as restructuring or the implementation of new equipment. For example, some local authorities still have clauses in their agreements around the introduction of computers that date from the 1980s. Some ‘organisational restructuring’ agreements may also have ‘no compulsory redundancy’ and/ or redeployment clauses which can safeguard workers to a certain extent from any technology-induced changes.
However, the scale and nature of the coming technological changes, and the fact that powerful interests are promoting their acceleration as we emerge into a post-pandemic ‘recovery’, mean that any agreements and/ or consultative committees in place already may not be detailed nor informed enough to adequately protect and/or provide for members’ interests as the pace of change increases.
The rest of this report looks at the agreements already in existence and pulls out the key themes that officers and reps will need to consider when preparing to enter negotiation or discussions with employers around new technology. They are:
- Starting a conversation with members
- Securing workers’ voice
- Setting standards around the quality of work
- Safeguarding jobs
- Redeployment and reskilling
- Better terms and conditions
- Protecting workers’ data
- Remote working