As “routine” jobs—often middle-class work based on a narrow set of repeated tasks, such as welding-machine operators or bank tellers—disappear, many workers who would typically have held them have taken on lower-paying, low-skill manual work or dropped out of the labor force, according to new research from a trio of economists.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, the economists’ paper, called “Disappearing Routine Jobs,” provides more evidence that the transformation of work in the U.S. is contributing to the shrinking labor-force participation rate, according to co-author Henry Siu, a University of British Columbia professor.
The U.S. is transforming from an industrial economy to a digital one where routine work is automated or outsourced and the remaining jobs are concentrated in low-paid service work or high-skilled knowledge work. According to the paper, the share of Americans working in routine jobs has fallen from 40.5% in 1979 to 31.2% in 2014.
Meanwhile, the federal government’s official measure of Americans age 16 and over who are working or seeking work has fallen from a recent high of 67.3% in 2000 to 62.7% in November 2016.
The authors, who include Guido Cortes at the University of Manchester in England and Nir Jaimovich at the University of Southern California, also found that the impact of the loss of routine jobs fell mostly on male high-school dropouts of all ages as well as men under age 50 with high-school diplomas.
These groups have failed to move into high-paying, nonroutine jobs that require skills in areas like critical thinking and problem-solving.
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