Employment

Abstract

To say that technology affects employment seems almost a truism: as citizens of an industrial society, we intuitively expect technological changes to manifest themselves in movements both of the number of people employed and in the types of jobs that they do and the skills that these require. This is, of course, an expectation peculiar to our own historical era, the era of industrialism, which brought with it the social institution of an everchanging labor market. It is here that most of us endeavor to sell our only source of economic livelihood—our ability to work, whether by hand or brain. To do this we have to keep aware of what skills and trades are marketable and which ones are no longer in demand, and changes in technology run as an inevitable thread through these calculations.

The demand for commodities is not the demand for labour.

John Stuart Mill