Automation, Creativity, and the Future of Work in Europe: A Comparison between the Old and New Member States with a Special Focus on Hungary

Makó, Csaba and Illéssy, Miklós (2020) Automation, Creativity, and the Future of Work in Europe: A Comparison between the Old and New Member States with a Special Focus on Hungary. INTERSECTIONS: EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIETY AND POLITICS, 6 (2). pp. 112-129. ISSN 2416-089X

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Abstract

Fear of job losses due to labor-saving technological change is not a new phenomenon, but dates back to the nineteenth-century Luddites in Britain. Recently, similar concerns have reawakened due to the rapid expansion of increasingly inexpensive and capable computers (digitization) and the automatization of some of the tasks that were formerly undertaken by workers. According to the empirical findings of European Working Condition Surveys (EWCS, 2005; 2015), every second workplace involves a form of ‘creative work,’ which is less threatened by automation, while every fourth worker carries out ‘routine’ tasks that will be easily replaced by computers. However, important country-group-level differences exist: creative jobs are found at rates above the EU-27 average in the Nordic, Continental, and Anglo-Saxon countries, while Mediterranean and Central and Eastern European countries are characterized by the highest proportion of jobs involving routine tasks. Among the post-socialist countries, Hungary lags behind the European average, and job loss trends suggest that concerns about the impacts of automatization on the job market for unskilled workers are valid.

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