Re‐examining technology's destruction of blue‐collar work

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Darryn Snell,Victor Gekara
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12259

Received: 22 November 2021

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Accepted: 30 September 2022

DOI: 10.1111/ntwe.12259

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Re‐examining technology's destruction

of blue‐collar work

Darryn Snell

1

|Victor Gekara

2

1

School of Management, RMIT

University, Melbourne, Australia

2

Department of System and Supply

Chain, RMIT University, Melbourne,

Australia

Correspondence

Victor Gekara, Department of System

and Supply Chain, RMIT University,

445 Swanston St, Melbourne, Australia.

Email: Victor.gekara@rmit.edu.au

Abstract

Despite research suggesting certain death of blue‐collar

work due to technological advancements, blue‐collar

jobs continue to be in demand. Through a study of the

blue‐collar dominant Transport and Logistics sector in

Australia, we apply a Critical Realist framework to

consider the tendencies contributing to, and limiting,

technological uptake and worker displacement. Our

analysis of interviews with sector managers demon-

strate how technological uptake decisions to enact

labour saving technologies are often constrained by

other causal mechanisms and associated (counter)

tendencies. Causal mechanisms related to geographical

artifacts, industry structure and established business

models, along with class structure, mitigate against ‘big

bang’technological transformation and the demise of

blue‐collar work. We conclude that tracking the future

of work is important, but it cannot be done solely on

the basis of technological capacities to displace labour

or without consideration of the complex interplay of

causal mechanisms and tendencies shaping employer

decisions about technology.

KEYWORDS

blue‐collar work, employer decisions, future of work, technology

uptake, transport and logistics

New Technol Work Employ. 2023;38:415–433. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ntwe

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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits

use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or

adaptations are made.

© 2022 The Authors. New Technology, Work and Employment published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

Throughout the long history of technology and employment debates, blue‐collar jobs have been

widely predicted to be one of the biggest losers to technological change. Blue‐collar jobs are

commonly defined as those requiring significant manual labour, often involving mechanical

skills to operate machines, but the term has acquired several connotations over time, including

a worker's social‐economic status, level of training and qualifications, and types of work (see

Wickman, 2012). Blue‐collar work, therefore, varies from unskilled manual tasks requiring no

formal education to highly skilled and trade qualified ones (Mittal et al., 2019; Rayner, 2018).

They include production (e.g., machine operators), craft (e.g., trade occupations), repair (e.g.,

maintenance occupations) and cleaning (e.g., labourer) occupations. In this respect,

Wroblewski (2019) divides blue‐collar work into those requiring non or basic skills and those

requiring extensive training and higher skills.

According to the literature, the vulnerability of blue‐collar jobs to technological change

stems from, first, the competitive pressure to reduce the labour costs associated with labour‐

intensive industries through advances in robotics, automation, and AI technologies. Secondl the

supposed superiority of technology to labour in performance efficiency, and reliability in

noncognitive and routinised blue‐collar work (e.g., Acemoglu & Autor, 2011; Arntz et al., 2016;

Autor, 2015; Eurofound, 2018; Fernández‐Macías, 2017; Frey & Osborne, 2013). These

arguments, and predictions of imminent technological decimation of blue‐collar jobs, go back

many decades. Jeremy Rifkin, for example, argued in his seminal book, The End of Work, that

‘by the mid‐21st Century, the blue‐collar worker will have passed from history, a casualty of the

Third Industrial Revolution’(1995, p. 140). Such views are still common among more recent

studies of Industry 4.0 and advanced manufacturing but are also found among studies of future

of work in other traditional blue‐collar industries including transport and logistics (T&L).

According to the 2020 World Economic Forum (WEF) Report on the Future of Work, for

example, the key future jobs in T&L include AI and machine learning specialists, digital

analysts and scientists, software and applications developers and supply chain and logistics

specialists rather than the'traditional’occupations such as transport drivers, forklift operators

and postal service clerks (WEF, 2020, p. 148). Despite these predictions many traditional blue‐

collar jobs, including those in T&L, are in strong demand across many countries with

employers struggling to find workers willing to perform this study (see Cohen, 2021).

Research predicting the demise of blue‐collar work has been criticised for its overly

technological determinist theoretical orientation. As noted by Wyatt (2008), there is a long

history of science and technology scholars and labour process theorists writing for this journal

pointing out the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of such reductionist thinking yet

‘technological determinism is still here and unlikely to disappear’(175). Those that advocate for

a more socially and politically informed theorisation about technology's evolution and impact

on jobs consider how technology is ‘socially shaped’(Mackenzie & Wajcman, 1999)by

institutional and organisational influences and the dynamics of power and the forces of

resistance (Fleming, 2019; Spencer, 2017; 2018; Edwards & Ramirez, 2016). They question the

notion that increasing availability of certain operationally desirable technologies will, on its

own, lead to rapid and extensive adoption by firms as, there are many, and more complex,

social‐organisational determinants of technology uptake (Roupas, 2008). Fleming (2019), for

example, adopts the notion of ‘bounded automation’to describe how technological innovations

are often constrained by socioeconomic forces (e.g., high capital costs, workforce and skills

adjustment requirements, organisational change and adjustments, worker resistance, etc.).

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