Still room for us too Jan Woitas/Epa/REX/Shutterstock

Robots might not be stealing our jobs after all – at least, not if you’re German. An analysis of more than 20 years of labour automation in Germany found no evidence that robots caused job losses in the country as a whole.

Automation has changed the kinds of work people do, but hasn’t taken jobs away permanently, says Jens Südekum at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Although there are plenty of reports that predict future job losses caused by automation, Südekum’s study is only the second to look at how many jobs robots have already taken from us.

The first – a US study published earlier this year – painted a much gloomier picture. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University found that workplace automation squeezes wages and takes away between three and six jobs per robot.


Given that Germany has about eight robots for every thousand workers – four times as many as in the US – Südekum and his colleagues expected to see more job losses there. “Our initial impulse was that it should be much worse in Germany,” he says. So their finding that the country’s workforces have actually faced less of an impact from the worst effects of automation was a surprise.

One reason for this is that while robots have stopped companies creating new jobs in manufacturing – Südekum estimates that 275,000 fewer jobs were created between 1994 and 2014 because of automation – this has been offset by new posts created in other sectors, particularly the service industry.

People that already worked in industries prone to automation, such as the automotive industry, were also more likely to stay employed after robots were introduced into their workplaces. “We don’t see people getting fired,” says Südekum.

It’s not all good news, however. Robots have tended to lead to lower wages in lower and medium-skilled manufacturing jobs, the study found. “Some of the workers do have to swallow wage cuts because of robots,” says Südekum. But for more highly skilled workers and those outside manufacturing, robots had no impact on wages.

Shielding the impact

Germany’s unions might be to thank for reducing the impact of automation on jobs, says Südekum, explaining that they are generally more willing to accept wage cuts for workers if it means people keep their jobs.

But Manuel Cebrian at Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that might not be enough to keep people in work in the long run. “We know the only way to ameliorate the problem is through continuing education,” he says. Cebrian co-authored a study that found smaller cities – which tend to have higher proportions of low-skilled workers – will be hit by automation much harder than big ones.

“The major cities are disproportionately attracting the types of jobs that are more resilient to automation,” he says. But he thinks it’s still too early to know whether enough of those jobs are being created to make up for losses in other industries.

Another option, Südekum says, would be to make sure that the benefits of automation – which saves manufacturers money that would otherwise be spent on wages – are shared with all workers. Earlier this week, Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the UK’s Labour party, joined Bill Gates in calling for higher taxes on companies that replace human workers with robots.

But Südekum thinks that talk of robots stealing all of jobs is a touch hyperbolic. If the automotive industry is anything to go by, we’re more likely to see a gradual shift in the kinds of jobs that people move into rather than permanent losses, he says. “I just don’t believe the horror stories.”

Read more: Automation will have a bigger impact on jobs in smaller cities