Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Minimum Wage Increases Could Speed Up Robot Adoption in the U.K.

January 4, 2018

British government policies to boost income for poorly paying jobs could actually incentivize firms to automate instead.

Economics 101: When human labor costs more, robots look appealing. Higher minimum wages make more businesses consider investment in machines that cost less in the long run. In U.S. manufacturing, a $1 increase in minimum wage drove employment in automatable jobs down a percentage point.

New stats: A report by Britain’s Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says that by 2020, government increases in minimum wage for workers will mean 12 percent of U.K. employees benefit from the policy. That’s triple the number covered by the minimum wage in 2015.

The labor hit: The additional folks receiving minimum wage have jobs highly susceptible to automation, like receptionists and cashiers. The IFS warns that if minimum wages rise further, so 25 percent of workers receive them, many jobs currently too expensive to automate—think office workers—could be taken by machines.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.