Technological change and work

This doctoral thesis examines the impact of innovation on jobs using the first historical index of job quality and international comparative case studies of sectors in Great Britain and the United States. It makes four principal contributions. First, it constructs a new indicator of living standards that measures work-related wellbeing in the past. Second, it shows that macroinventions increased the division of labor and thereby raised the inequality of work-related wellbeing. Third, it demonstrates that firms’ push to reduce unit labor costs produced a race between job quality and productivity. Managers adopted microinventions that could have reduced work intensity or improved safety, but to raise productivity they demanded higher effort levels and increased throughput, which mitigated improvements to safety and conditions. Fourth, it shows that some instances of technological change produced widespread unemployment and provided opportunities to reorganize the workforce. Higher-status workers used the dislocation of innovation to claim or retain the best jobs. These findings contribute to historical scholarship on the development of living standards and provide perspective for debates about job polarization and the future of work.