How technology shaped the world of work - FRIPRO grant to Benjamin Schneider
Former Young CAS PI Benjamin Schneider receives FRIPRO grant to examine technological change and working conditions across Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US.
How has working life developed over time, and what makes a job truly good? These questions lie at the heart of a new research project led by Benjamin Schneider, a previous Young CAS PI who has been awarded a 10 million kroner FRIPRO grant to investigate how technological changes have affected job security, wages, autonomy, and working conditions over 150 years.
The project, Technological Change, Labor Representation, and Job Quality: A Comparative Historical Analysis, c. 1830–1980 (TECHLABOR), will be based at the University of Oslo and examine job quality across four countries: Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Beyond the automation debate
"Discussions about the effects of new technologies on work focus on the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) or automation to replace workers, but technologies may also change job quality," Schneider explains. "Wages are not the only aspect of labor that matters for our wellbeing, and job quality incorporates working hours, safety, autonomy at work, intensity, and security alongside income."
While current debates about AI and automation frequently reference historical technological shifts such as the Industrial Revolution, Schneider notes that most discussions "only mention a few well-known examples and consider them in little depth."
TECHLABOR takes a more comprehensive approach, examining the effects of new technologies on job quality across multiple historical innovations to determine whether changes have been consistent across time and between different technologies.
The role of labour institutions
A key focus of the research is the role of labour relations systems and institutions such as unions and sectoral bargaining. "In TECHLABOR, we consider whether these institutions produced better job quality, which contributes to current discussions about the future of work and policymaking for the age of automation and AI," says Schneider.
By examining similar technologies across four countries with different labour regulations, the project will explore whether national institutional differences shaped how technology affected job quality. This comparative approach is particularly relevant given that Scandinavian countries currently have better job quality than other high-income nations. As Schneider notes, "our long-run perspective allows us to explore the origins of this divergence."
Building on Young CAS foundations
TECHLABOR builds directly on Schneider's Young CAS project, Work and Wellbeing in History. The new project will use the Historical Job Quality Indicators (HJQI), refined through the CAS work, to analyze past employment conditions comprehensively.
"This system of indicators, presented in the CAS project article 'Job quality in history', allows researchers to provide a holistic view of work and to compare jobs between countries and across time," Schneider explains.
The CAS fellowship also enabled Schneider to expand his research networks significantly, including forming the Job Quality Network that connects scholars across multiple disciplines investigating this topic.
"I remain very grateful to CAS for the opportunity to develop this new, interdisciplinary area of historical job quality research that connects labor and social history, economic history, sociology of work, and economics," Schneider reflects.
As debates about AI and automation intensify, TECHLABOR provides an important historical perspective on how societies have navigated technological change in the past, and what that might mean for the future of work.
CAS congratulates Benjamin Schneider on this significant achievement and looks forward to seeing how the TECHLABOR project developes.