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The future of work is a context that is rapidly being shaped by powerful forces; the growing adoption of artificial intelligence in the workplace, the increasing casualisation of the workforce, and the decentralised nature of where and how work is being performed. This report centres on research and case studies that speculate the issues facing all workers in the workplaces of tomorrow, and poses a series of questions: What is next for the workplace and workforce, what forces will shape the nature of work? What are the implications for our productivity, effectiveness, but also broader safeness? What is the role of design and innovation in addressing the growing complexity and unforeseen impact on the safety, welfare, and wellbeing of workers in our future realities?

This is a collaborative research and design project between RMIT University's Safeness by Design initiative and the Innovation Centre of WorkSafe Victoria. Though the lens of 'safeness', the project speculates our work futures through supporting emerging designers to imagine detailed scenarios and reveal potential areas of concern. The research indicates that issues of safeness persist across certain industry contexts due to workplace cultures, practices, and predominant behaviours that inform unhealthy work actions and activities and encourage economic and time pressures alongside poor risk literacy, training and awareness. The report examines techno centric narratives, environmental forecast and the theatrics of work more broadly to address research-identified issues across the following industry sectors and workplace contexts: (1) enhancing the safety of future aged care workers; (2) reducing future hazards in a retail environment; (3) supporting and training urbanised agricultural communities; (4) supporting knowledge workers' wellbeing in office culture; (5) reducing the health effects of stress and fatigue on decentralised workers; and (6) understanding the complexities of automating work in a transport context.

This research also reveals insights into how a 'safeness by design' lens can enable a more critical and contextual understanding of the future facing the Australian workforce. As we see an emerging re-distribution of roles and responsibilities, approaches to safety need to balance pre-emptive and reactive measures to better address the realities of labour forces and the needs of people in accelerating conditions. Primarily, the authors emphasise the fundamental need to create safe and supportive working environments for all workers and implement measures that protect individuals and communities from unsafe workplace behaviours.

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The integration of new technologies into the process of production has recently resuscitated the question of world-without-work. Accounts that regard a workless future as a strong possibility often base their arguments on a body of work that upholds that new machines already tend to eliminate the category of work, including knowledge work. This article challenges this view by revisiting Marx's Fragment on Machines through the lens of autonomist Marxist writings. It offers an answer to the research question, inscribed in the title, that in contemporary capitalism the principal source of value and wealth lies in the general intellect embodied in living labour, living-knowledge-as-metis, that cannot be crystallized in and reproduced by the system of machinery and organizational tools in any meaningful way. The political implications of this argument will be discussed in the conclusion.

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Even before the onset of [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19, Australian businesses were grappling with rapidly changing skills needs. Advances in technology (alongside increasingly service focused industries) were driving a spike in demand for soft skills and other skills that are difficult to automate, such as communication and leadership, while repetitive, manual tasks were increasingly being automated. This report, a collaboration of DeakinCo. and Deloitte, draws on data from a range of sources including a bespoke survey of 206 businesses in Australia, publicly available data such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), and a broad literature review, to understand the following: (1) what the current state of [learning and development] L&D is in Australia, including classifying businesses based on their learning maturity; (2) what the value of investing in L&D is for business performance; and (3) what actions businesses can take to improve their L&D activities and unlock the associated benefits, by comparing what advanced learning organisations are doing, compared to the broader business sample.

Specifically, the report explores major trends influencing the world of work, including the shift to hybrid work, digitalisation, and COVID-19 and the impacts on L&D in Australia. It develops a framework which has been applied to the survey results to understand the key features of learning organisations, based on 13 unique indicators. The report discusses business investment in L&D, including the perceived benefits and impact on business performance, drawing on econometric modelling to explore how the value of L&D can be quantified for businesses. It concludes with an examination of the future state of skills in Australia and the role of L&D in helping to fill skills gaps.

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This publication examines the degree to which Canadians' views about the impact of automation on net job creation in 1989 materialized three decades later. The analysis uses the General Social Survey of 1989. The study shows that in 1989, Canadians had varying opinions about the impact of automation on future employment. Although many were optimistic about how automation would affect net job creation, considerably more held less optimistic views. This fact is a reminder that predictions regarding future employment levels carry a considerable degree of uncertainty. This is true not only in the short term, as can be seen in the wake of [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19, but also (and especially) in the longer term.

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Whereas there are recent papers on the effect of robot adoption on employment and wages, there is no evidence on how robots affect non-monetary working conditions. We explore the impact of robot adoption on several domains of non-monetary working conditions in Europe over the period 1995-2005 combining information from the World Robotics Survey and the European Working Conditions Survey. In order to deal with the possible endogeneity of robot deployment, we employ an instrumental variables strategy, using the robot exposure by sector in other developed countries as an instrument. Our results indicate that robotization has a negative impact on the quality of work in the dimension of work intensity and no relevant impact on the domains of physical environment or skills and discretion.

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We study the age- and gender-specific labour market effects of two key modern technologies, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and robots, in 14 European countries between 2010 and 2018. To identify the causal effects of technology adoption, we utilise the variation in technology adoption between industries and apply the instrumental variables strategy proposed by Acemoglu and Restrepo (2020).

We find that the exposure to ICT and robots increased the shares of young and prime-aged women in employment and the wage bills of particular sectors, but reduced the shares of older women and prime-aged men. The adverse effects were particularly pronounced for older women in cognitive occupations, who had relatively low ICT-related skills; and for young men in routine manual occupations, who experienced substitutions by robots. Between 2010 and 2018, the growth in ICT capital played a much larger role than robot adoption in the changes in the labour market outcomes of demographic groups.

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The impact of robots on employment and trade is a highly discussed topic in the academic and public debates. Particularly, there are concerns that automation may threat jobs in emerging countries given the erosion of the labour cost advantage. We provide evidence on the effects of robots on worldwide employment, including emerging economies. To instrument the use of robots, we introduce an index of technical progress, defined as the ability of robots to carry out different tasks. Robots turn out to have a statistically significant negative impact on worldwide employment. While it is small in developed countries, for emerging economies it amounts to -14 per cent between 2005 and 2014. Furthermore, we assess cross-country effects, finding that robots in developed countries decrease off-shoring just as employment in emerging economies.

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This paper assesses the impact of technological change on Canada's labour market over the past 30 years and highlights its implications for the near future. The authors suggest that, if the past is any guide, a continuation of gradual changes can be expected in the demand for skills in the labour force. This is a natural market reaction to technological change. There is unlikely to be a drastic shift in employment due to automation in the near future, although some industries and types of occupations will be more disrupted than others. Here, public policy could both encourage automation and prepare the workforce for the transition.

Key findings are as follows: (1) it is very unlikely that employment in occupations highly susceptible to automation (35 per cent of Canada's employment) will be completely replaced by smart machines over the next few years; (2) Canadian employment is concentrated in industries that have a low risk of automation, with industries where less than a quarter of the jobs are susceptible to automation accounting for 27.5 per cent of total employment (4.9 million jobs) - industries where more than three-quarters of the jobs are at high risk of automation account for only 1.7 per cent of employment (310,000 jobs); this implies that Canada's diversified economy and labour force are well positioned to adapt to rapid technological change; (3) occupations high in abstract, complex-decision-making skills with a strong focus on creativity, critical thinking and interpersonal social skills have a relatively low risk of being automated - an increase in demand for these skills is likely over the near and medium term; and (4) as the rate of technological progress increases and digitization permeates different occupations and industries, technical job-specific skills might become obsolete relatively quickly - this indicates a need to increase opportunities for continuous education and lifelong learning, and educational institutions such as colleges, technical schools and apprenticeship programs likely will have an expanded role over the lifecycle of employment as people learn to adapt to changing conditions.

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Before the onset of the [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 pandemic, rapid advances in automation and artificial intelligence were often featured in discussions around the changing nature of work. The concern, which is still present today, centred around the possibility that machines and robots could perform certain tasks more efficiently than humans, possibly resulting in rapid job transformation and potential disruptions. At the same time, increased globalization and industrial shifts may have further altered the type of tasks performed in the workplace. Previous work found that while the workforce was moving away from jobs involving routine, manual tasks and moving toward those involving non-routine, cognitive tasks, changes were moderate and very steady between 1987 and 2018 (Frank et al. 2021). This pace could have allowed workers time to adjust to the slowly evolving realities of the changing workplace, either by retraining or through demographic forces (i.e., attrition of routine, manual jobs as older workers retire).

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns may have accelerated these trends for several reasons. On the supply (worker) side, the lockdowns created many economic and health concerns for affected workers, primarily those who had close contact with the public or co-workers. This may have encouraged some workers to seek employment with less human contact. On the demand (employer) side, some businesses may have sought to make their production and delivery processes more resilient to future lockdowns by investing in automation technology, while entire industries may have expanded or contracted to match new market conditions.

This article finds that some of the long-term trends in the nature of work present before the onset of the pandemic not only continued during the pandemic, but they also accelerated. In particular, the increase in the share of employed individuals in managerial, professional and technical occupations (non-routine, cognitive tasks) registered during the pandemic was higher than in the previous three decades. While the increases in non-routine, cognitive jobs registered during the pandemic were similar for men and women, the corresponding declines in other types of jobs were not.

For men, most of the increase in managerial, professional and technical occupations was accompanied by important declines in production, craft, repair and operative occupations (routine, manual tasks) and service occupations (non-routine, manual tasks). For women, most of the increase in managerial, professional and technical occupations was accompanied by a decline in service occupations. For men and women, the decline in service occupations was particularly notable, especially given that the share of service jobs actually increased moderately during the three decades prior to the pandemic. For men, the decline in production, craft, repair and operative occupations represented a modest acceleration of the long-term gradual decline established before the pandemic.

Finally, the increase in managerial, professional and technical occupations and the decline in service occupations were considerably more pronounced among younger workers (aged 25 to 34 years) compared with older workers (aged 45 to 54 years). Changing occupations may have required training in certain cases, and government supports were available to help displaced workers pursue this route if they chose.

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Over the past century, the United States workforce has undergone a massive structural shift. Technological change has moved the economy toward skilled labor and away from unskilled labor - a phenomenon known as skill-biased technical change. This structural shift has increased the relative demand for educated and skilled labor, leading to commensurate increases in the relative wages of skilled workers, and changes in the nature of work itself. The demand for skilled workers has increased sharply over the past 50 years, along with the need for greater educational attainment.

This report presents the results of a projection of educational demand within the US economy from 2021 through 2031 by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. In the 1970s, about 28 per cent of jobs required education and/or training beyond high school. Today, close to 68 per cent of all jobs require some form of postsecondary education and/or training beyond high school. By 2031, 72 per cent of all jobs nationally will require postsecondary education and/or training.

The national report includes a national overview of job projections by 13 major industries and their educational requirements across industries, nine major occupational clusters, and a total of 22 detailed occupational groups. This report also accounts for the increasing role of technology in American society, particularly in the world of work. The state report provides a state-by-state analysis of education demand and compares job outlooks for individual states to national estimates from 2021 through 2031. The technical appendix documents the methodology used by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce to project educational demand within the US economy.

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