“Who are the Robots Coming For? The Evolving Task Content of Employment in South Africa”

A new SARChI Industrial Development working paper (WP 2023-06) has just been published. Titled: “Who are the Robots Coming For? The Evolving Task Content of Employment in South Africa”, Prof. Haroon Bhorat co-authored this research, with Mr Robert Hill, Mr Timothy Köhler, Ms Jabulile Monnakgotla and Dr François Steenkamp.

Concerns surrounding the labour market effects of technology and automation have regained prominence in recent years. However, given wide variation in the skills demanded across jobs, these effects are likely to be unevenly distributed across workers. By investigating the South African labour market’s evolving task content, they were able to assess whether there is evidence of increased utilisation of automation and other 4IR technologies, and found that the formal private sector has undergone a pattern of relative de-routinisation through a relative contraction in routine manual jobs and an expansion of non-routine cognitive analytical jobs. In absolute terms, although employment within all task content component groups grew over the period, non-routine jobs experienced far greater rates of jobs growth relative to routine jobs. Such analysis has notable policy implications, given the potential effects of automation on exacerbating the country’s already extreme levels of unemployment and inequality.