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Worries that jobs will be lost to automation are not new but have been heightened since the release of Frey and Osborne's 2013 study [available in VOCEDplus at TD/TNC 123.687], which warned that nearly half of jobs in the US were at 'high risk' of automation. Nearly a decade on, this short briefing note looks at both the current and longer-term picture of the relationship between technology and jobs and pay.

The evidence suggests that automation doesn't just destroy jobs, it can also raise demand for other workers, and create the space for entirely new jobs. Consistent with this, there is evidence that exposure to automation has affected the cross-section of employment growth in the UK - both in the last decade but also in the longer-term. This is consistent with what is now a wide body of international evidence pointing to the importance of automation for wage determination. So automation is affecting jobs. But the fact that aggregate employment continues to grow alongside these effects suggests automation's job-destroying impact continues to be offset by positive indirect effects. The authors conclude that, overall, while we must remain vigilant to the impact of automation, especially since it affects some people and places more than others, the most pressing problems facing the UK economy are not too much automation, but low investment and low productivity growth. We should worry more about these and less about robots taking our jobs.

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This report is about the nature and speed of change in the UK's labour market, about how past periods of rapid change have happened, and about workers' experiences as they have lived through these changes. It is written with an eye to the upheaval we expect to see in the coming decade as the effects of Brexit, [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19, and the net zero transition work their way through the economy. It forms part of the Economy 2030 Inquiry, a joint research project between the Resolution Foundation and the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.

This report is structured as follows: Section 2 sets out basic facts about how the sectoral and occupational composition of employment in the UK has changed over the past half century, and how the pace of change has varied over time; Section 3 expands on how this change has taken place, with a focus on the contribution of workers moving jobs and sectors; Section 4 looks at what these changes have meant for workers living through these changes, in terms of both the benefits (as some workers experience stronger pay growth by changing jobs and sector) and the costs (as others are subject to involuntary job separations and the negative consequences which flow from that); and Section 5 concludes.

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The UK is on the brink of a decade of huge economic change - from the [Coronavirus Disease 2019] Covid-19 recovery, to exiting the EU and transitioning towards a Net Zero future. The Economy 2030 Inquiry will examine this decisive decade for Britain, and set out a plan for how it can be successfully navigated. The Inquiry is a collaboration between the Resolution Foundation and the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. It is funded by the Nuffield Foundation. This paper is the first to be published as part of the Lived Experience theme of the Inquiry. It explores the subjective experience of work to provide a rounded picture of the changing realities of employment as policy and the economy have evolved since the 1980s to the latter part of the 2010s.

Overall, the findings demonstrate that arguments that job quality has deteriorated significantly or that employees are trapped in jobs they consider worthless clearly fail to capture the reality of what is going on: the majority of employees remain satisfied with their job and falls in job satisfaction have been relatively modest over time. However, the picture is more concerning when it comes to lower earners. Across a range of indicators - from job satisfaction, to workplace stress, to feeling used up at the end of the day - the experience of work for low-earners has deteriorated at a faster rate than for those who earn more. In doing so, the experience of low earners is beginning to catch-up the experience of higher earners (who report the worst absolute level). This under-discussed shift should be a focus of attention for policy makers, and will inform the development of the Inquiry.

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The UK Government's commitment to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will mean investment, and change, across the economy: from the decarbonisation of buildings and surface transport, to shifts in diet, aviation and industry. These changes will affect the UK public, both as consumers and as workers. Green jobs are generally defined as those that contribute to preserving or restoring the environment whereas brown jobs are those contributing to pollution and exhaustion of natural resources.

This briefing note explores the impact that the net zero transition will have on the UK labour force, by setting out the types of 'green' and 'brown' jobs that are most likely to experience change, analysing core differences in the workers that are employed in these jobs, and in the type of tasks that they typically perform. We also examine how green and brown jobs have changed over time, and in particular consider the origins of green job workers today, including the share of workers that move from a brown job into a green job, and the key characteristics of those making such a move.

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[Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 has had a profound impact on the economic prospects of young people. This briefing note, which forms part of the Economy 2030 Inquiry, documents the unequal impact of economic shocks on the young and assesses what these mean for social mobility. Labour market conditions at the onset of one's career have persistent effects over the course of the life cycle. Those entering the labour market in recessions have lower earnings than similar cohorts graduating in more prosperous times, and those who lose their jobs early in their career face wage penalties that persist until middle-age. This note documents how the adverse labour market shock caused by COVID-19 has disproportionately hit the young and, in many cases, hit those from the least-affluent backgrounds the most. These changes are compounded by declines in general psychiatric health among the young. In addition, school-age children and teens from the least affluent backgrounds are also more likely to have seen a parent lose employment since March 2020. The findings highlight the need for policies that are targeted towards the young and particularly towards policies that encourage social mobility and prevent the strengthening of the already strong link between ones' economic origin and destination.

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Human capital and skills are important for improving the UK's labour market and economic performance. This note assesses how the skills needed in the UK labour market have changed over past decades, and how well placed our system of training - and particularly on-the-job training - is to help us adapt to these changes. Some of the most fundamental changes in the nature of work has been an increase in the need for social and abstract skills in the workplace, while the employment shares of occupations that are intensive in routine and manual skills have fallen. At the same time, the amount of training done by workers is in decline, with the proportion of workers who have received work-related training falling from 29 per cent in 2002 to 24 per cent in 2020. These low rates of training among the least educated are troubling, given international evidence showing that there are higher returns to adult education for these individuals.

In a world of stagnant productivity growth and with an increasing need for wages to keep pace with prices, improving the UK's system of training and skills provision could have an enormously beneficial impact. Fortunately, there is a wealth of international evidence that can be drawn upon to design a system that would make post-school training provision work for more of the UK's labour force. Phase 2 of the Economy 2030 project will advance policy recommendations in this field that can ultimately contribute to higher and more inclusive economic growth for the UK.

Key findings include: (1) Wages have grown particularly strongly for jobs that require a significant amount of abstract reasoning: occupations that use abstract skills intensively (i.e. at the 90th percentile of abstract-skill-intensity across all occupations) have seen average wage growth of 30 per cent since 1994, compared with wage growth of below 15 per cent for occupations that involve below-median levels of abstract skills; (2) These shifts are relatively good news for workers with high levels of education and those in high-paying occupations, as they are most likely to utilise social and abstract skills while in the workplace; (3) The most-educated workers train more, with an average of over 40 per cent reporting having received some form of training in the previous quarter, twice as high a rate as those with below secondary level education; (4) Among adults who are out-of-work, training rates are very low: only 13 per cent received any training (in a 12-month period), less than half the rate at which employees are trained; and (5) The UK has seen falling rates of job mobility in recent decades, with much of the changing patterns of occupational structure driven by entry and exit of workers as opposed to employed workers transitioning from declining to expanding sectors.

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After a decade and a half of relative economic decline, Britain needs a new economic strategy. And good work must be at its heart - an explicit goal, not a hoped-for by-product of growth. This is a necessary precondition for a strategy that offers a credible promise of shared prosperity in the years ahead, strengthening not just our economy but our society and democracy too. Why is good work so important? Because at the moment too many lower earners do not have it. Their job satisfaction has fallen (in stark contrast to higher earners), even as the minimum wage has risen. Too often they are not treated with dignity and respect, with little or no protection from unexpected changes to the shifts they work and the wages they take home. And they lack many of the things that higher earners take for granted: the lack of adequate sick pay, for example, means illness is bad for the financial, as well as physical, health of low-paid workers in a way most higher earners never experience.

This paper considers what it would mean to put good work centre stage. It requires us to go far beyond the narrow focus this century on a higher minimum wage, because although pay is crucial it is far from all that matters. It necessitates a radically different approach to the trade-offs that are inherent if real progress is to be made: better jobs for some will mean higher prices for others. And good work must be seen as part of a route to achieving wider economic policy objectives - an integral part of an economic strategy that engages with what the UK produces and consumes, alongside who benefits from it doing so. This Low Pay Britain report is the 13th in an annual series, where we take stock of the state of low-paid work. This edition also forms part of our Economy 2030 Inquiry, which seeks to set out what a plausible economic strategy that tackles the UK's twin problems of high inequality and low growth might be. It is an argument for putting good work centre stage, and a policy agenda for doing so.

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This edition of Low Pay Britain is our twelfth annual report taking stock of the state of low pay. Recent editions have focused on the short-term impacts of the [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 crisis on low paid workers. Those have largely receded, and so here we take a longer view, and look at how low paid work has changed over the past two decades during the existence of the minimum wage in the UK.

Recent increases in the minimum wage have successfully driven down the incidence of low hourly pay to equal the record low last seen in 1975. But we find there has been much less progress elsewhere for low earners. Low pay is widespread among the self-employed, who do not benefit from the minimum wage and whose numbers have increased over the past 20 years. And there are several forms of work insecurity - including the risk of job loss, volatility in hours and pay, and not being able to find enough hours - which continue to make life difficult for too many low-paid workers but would be considered totally unacceptable for higher paid workers to experience. Having tackled low hourly pay with an ambitious minimum wage, a policy agenda for low-paid workers in the 2020s should seek to address these problems with similarly ambitious action.

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Recessions leave lasting impacts on our labour market. But different recessions leave different legacies: the 1980s downturn left us with stubbornly high unemployment, while the financial crisis led to years of stagnant pay. The scale of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis, its cause, and the speed at which it hit, have all been different from previous crises. The highly unequal impact on different sectors, the scale of behavioural change - with reduced travel and the shift of spending online - and the very unusual policy response - including the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (JRS) - also mark this out as not just any old recession. So a keen focus on emerging developments, rather than history, may be the best guide to the labour market legacy of this crisis.

Moreover, COVID-19 has brought new challenges for the labour market - many of which could outlast the pandemic. Rather than leaving us with high unemployment, the falls in employment (albeit smaller than previous crises) have shown up in rising economic inactivity as some workers leave the labour force entirely. From remote working to changes in the size of different sectors, COVID-19 has also changed the way that we work. In this report, part of the Economy 2030 Inquiry, we consider the nature of these labour market developments with an eye on the longer-term changes, and the resulting challenges for policy makers over the rest of this decade.

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Investing in human capital is a crucial aspect of building an economy that is both more productive and fairer, and any growth strategy must incorporate an agenda for increasing human capital and workforce skills within that. So how should we approach the task of developing a skills strategy that complements a broader economic strategy? In this report, we address this issue by focussing on a set of sectors - financial and business services, the creative and cultural sectors and life sciences industries - and technologies - clean technologies and artificial intelligence - that are of strategic importance for the UK. The strategic sectors are good places to work for everyone. It is striking - and very welcome - that wages are higher, and wage-experience trajectories steeper, for workers at every level of educational qualification in these strategic sectors than in the rest of the economy.

Supporting the expansion of these strategic sectors to boost growth and spread good jobs means ensuring that current and future workers across the country possess the right mix of skills to effectively perform the required tasks. Overall, our analysis points to the growing importance of both general and specific skills that are typically acquired with more formal education. It is thus unsurprising to see that workers employed in the strategic sectors are much more educated than average, with the proportion of workers holding a university degree almost twice as high as the rest of the economy and growing over the last years. However, there are worrying signals that the current skill mix of workers in the sector may not be adequate. The clearest indicator that demand exceeds supply for skills is the high wage premium associated with higher levels of education. This is clear throughout the educational distribution, and reflects the ongoing need for educational upgrading, such that more people leave the education system with higher education and skills. Without a sustained upgrading of the education and skills of workers, the economy will be unable to grow, especially in strategic sectors.

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