Robots and Worker Voice: An Empirical Exploration

Conflict or cooperation? Exploring the relationship between cooperative institutions and robotisation

“…Institutions, such as centralized wage bargaining, allow social partners to keep wages in lockstep with productivity and demand, bi‐ and tripartite dialogue helps to align interests with policymakers, sectoral institutions (Rigini 1995) play an important role in coordinating specific skill and investment needs, while works councils structure coalitions at the firm level. Crucially, some existing country and firm‐level work suggests that this type of active employee involvement does not stifle investment (Jäger, 2021; Belloc et al., 2020), perhaps exactly because workers trade‐off automation for the security of strong contracts and richer, non‐automatable, jobs (Belloc et al., 2022). My first hypothesis (H1) posits that cooperative institutions predict rising levels of robot density.…”

“…At the same time, there exist similarly antagonistic accounts of industrial relations predicting an opposite effect: strong institutionalized labour power pushes employers to automate (Braverman, 1974; Marglin, 1974; Presidente, 2020) in an attempt to disorganize labour. Finally, a wide scholarship in comparative political economy and industrial relations has highlighted the potential of institutions to generate complementary interests between capital and labour, ultimately producing higher levels of, more inclusive, innovation (Dankbaar, 1988; Katzenstein, 1985; Olson, 1982; Kochan & Tamir, 1989; Hall & Soskice, 2001; Kraft et al., 2009; Genz et al., 2021; Belloc et al., 2020).…”

Robots and labor regulation: a cross-country/cross-industry analysis

“…In particular, they argued that, among other reasons, firms adopt industrial robots to make up for the relative scarcity of middle-aged workers. In another paper, Belloc et al (2020) used cross-country firm-level data from the European Company Survey to study the relationship between the presence of employee representation and the adoption of automation technologies, finding a positive association between the two. According to their interpretation, the presence of workers' representative bodies favours the introduction of technologies that are complementary to labor and whose adoption requires a "skill-improving" redesign of the job.…”

“…Importantly, beside the hold-up problem, other arguments have been advanced to support either a positive or negative relationship between robot adoption and the institutions that regulate the labor market. As a first example, robots can contribute to making the workplace safer and reducing the physical effort of workers (Gihleb et al, 2020) and, therefore, there may be circumstances in which employees use their bargaining powerwhich is influenced by labor laws -to push for robot adoption (Belloc et al, 2020). In this regard, Acemoglu and Restrepo (2019b) found that higher unionization is associated with higher robot adoption.…”

“…First, high levels of labor protection can spur both employees and employers to make complementary investments in human and physical capital, potentially resulting in technological lock-ins that can increase the costs of robot adoption (Milgrom and Roberts, 1990;Aoki, 2001;Antonelli, 2012). Second, to complicate things further, unions can push for robot adoption to increase the safety of the working environment and to ease the physical effort on the part of employees (for the case of blue-collar workers, see Gihleb et al, 2020;Belloc et al, 2020;Caselli et al, 2021). However, if robots displace unskilled and routinary occupations, the increased productivity gap between skilled and unskilled workers may undermine their coalition, reduce the level of unionization, and increase the costs of coordination (Iversen and Soskice, 2020).…”