Illustration: Glen Le Lievre (Next time you hear someone telling you exactly how many jobs robots will have destroyed by 2020, or how many jobs or occupations you'll have in the next 40 years, ask yourself this question: How – would – they – know?) But if there's no evidence this frightening future has got going yet, there's no way it can explain why wage growth has been so weak for the past three or four years. For once, let's take a close look at what we actually know has been happening. It is true that, as we saw in this column two weeks ago, the structure of occupations in the workforce is changing. Research by Dr Alexandra Heath, of the Reserve Bank, shows the share of routine jobs has fallen by 14 percentage points, while the share of non-routine jobs has risen by 14 points.

Employment leapt 54,200, the biggest jump since October 2015. Credit:Erin Jonasson Similarly, the share of manual jobs has fallen by 5 percentage points, while the share of cognitive jobs has risen to the same extent. But this is a long-term trend. These figures are for the change over the 30 years to 2016, and there's no sign of the trend accelerating over recent years. Professor Jeff Borland's been searching for evidence that our jobs are being taken by robots – and failing to find it. Credit:Bloomberg A lot of detailed – and reassuring – research on the official statistics has been done by one of our leading labour-market economists, Professor Jeff Borland, of the University of Melbourne, and reported on his website, Labour Market Snapshots.

For one thing, Borland's been searching for evidence that our jobs are being taken by robots – and failing to find it. He breaks the issue into two parts. The proportion of men who don't expect to be with their present employer for the next 12 months has been steady at about 9 per cent between May 2001 and May this year. Credit:Louie Douvis So while computers may be having some impact on the Australian workplace, most claims about their impact are vastly overstated. Professor Jeff Borland First, has computerisation reduced the total amount of work needing to be done by humans, as many people assume? No. The total amount of work available per head of population has bounced around with the ups and downs of the business cycle but, overall, has shown no downward trend. The latest figures show, if anything, a bit more hours of work per person than there were in the mid-1960s.

The proportion of female workers who've been in their job for 10 years or more has risen from 12 per cent to 25 per cent. Credit:Tamara Voninski Second, consistent with Heath's research, Borland finds evidence that the progressive introduction of computers, which began in the early 1990s, is probably changing the types of jobs being done by workers. But he, too, finds that the pace of change in the composition of employment "is no quicker today than in the period before computers". "So while computers may be having some impact on the Australian workplace, most claims about their impact are vastly overstated," Borland concludes.

Next, Borland shines his statistical spotlight on all the claims about work becoming more insecure or "precarious". You don't have a proper, full-time permanent job. You get a bit of work here and a bit there. If you do have a job, it never lasts long. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has long published figures for job "tenure" – how long people have been with their current employer. If all the talk of growing instability was a genuine trend – as opposed to the experience of a relatively small number of individuals – you ought to be able to see it in the job tenure figures. But you can't. The reverse, in fact. Borland finds that, from the early 1980s to the present, the proportion of workers who've been in their job for 10 years or more has been steadily increasing. This is greatest for women, for whom it's gone from 12 per cent to 25 per cent.

At the same time, the proportion of all workers in their job for less than a year has been decreasing. Next, how insecure do workers feel? When the bureau asks employees whether they expect to be with their present employer for the next 12 months, the proportion of men who don't has been steady at about 9 per cent between May 2001 and May this year. Over the same period, the proportion for women has fallen steadily from 11 per cent to 9.5 per cent. From all the talk, you'd expect the proportion of employees working for labour hire companies and temporary agencies to be rising strongly. It ain't. Actually, between 2001 and 2015 it's fallen from a tiny 3.1 per cent to a tinier 2.2 per cent.