Work 4.0 - Digitalisation and its Impact on the Working Place
Digitalisation will not only lead to the disappearance of jobs, the creation of new jobs and changing skill requirements in many existing jobs. It also leads to fundamental challenges for existing qualification systems as well as labour law and labour relations. New digital technologies pervasively change the content and organisation of work.
They may have an impact on the actual weekly working time hours and the adoption of self-managed working time systems. The consequences, however, may differ for each worker. Accordingly, economic and policy conclusions cannot be derived for the labour market as a whole. Workers‘qualifications need not only to be adapted to changing occupational tasks. Work intensification and increasing communication flows have to be addressed as well. Furthermore, adequate human resources policies can foster the proper use of new flexible work arrangements. Crowdworking as a specific form of flexible work, however, has to be primarily integrated in existing labour legislation.
That is one opinion, another author considers the forecasts doomsday prophecies that call for political action or amending the regulative framework. And he suggests that the characteristics of the digital transformation of work may mainly be firm-specific. In a social-scientific perspective there is no deterministic relationship between technology and work but the development of work has to be regarded as a strategic and political design project.
