J. Pinto (2008) claims that automation has brought an end to long term employment contracts, arguing that “This kind of employment has little place in today’s workplace”. However, W. Amette (1998) points out that a new form of worker is needed, and that although long contracts for manual labour are at thing of the past, companies now need highly skilled and technically trained workers to look after the machines. In the office there is also a loss of menial jobs such as accounting and filing, and N. Kannan (2010) reports that this is not due to outsourcing, but more to do with automation. In contradiction to this D. Pelleteir (2008) claims that a lot of the job losses are down to outsourcing to customers, such as cashier-less checkouts and internet banking. Through automation and customer self-service, a lot of customer relations jobs are being lost. TIME (2010) points out that through automation in the chemical industriy, “the number of production jobs has fallen 3% since 1956 while output has soared 27%”. This shows that automation is not culling the job market as some have argued.
J. Pinto 2008 http://www.automationworld.com/columns-4345 [13.10.2010]
W. Amette 1998 http://www.willamette.edu/~fthompso/MgmtCon/Automation.html [15.10.2010]
N. Kannan 2010 http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/narikannan/is-the-loss-of-it-jobs-due-to-increasing-it-automation-or-outsourcing-39427 [15.10.2010]
D. Pelleter 2008 http://memebox.com/futureblogger/show/825-most-jobs-could-be-lost-to-automation-in-near-future [15.10.2010]
TIME Magazine 2010 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,828815,00.html [16.10.2010]
Excellent literature review.
ReplyDeleteA very interesting and valid topic in these times!
I will be interested to see the whole paper and how you have bought your research into your argument.Equally well i will be interested to see the conclusions.
John