Industrial employment in Austria has increased over the past 15 years. This is particularly true for the
Austrian automotive industry, where more than anything, labour-shortages have been the main
concern of producers amid turbulent changes in the course of electrification and digitalisation. This
paper asks how these trends have recently interrelated in the Austrian automotive industry and how
its increasing employment numbers can be made sense of. In order to do so, the paper focuses on the
socio-economic group of those performing the work of “technological restructuring” (company
engineers, system-integrators, and technology suppliers) as privileged point of access, in order to
understand limits and logics of the ongoing changes and the persistence of manufacturing
employment. The corresponding guiding research question is: How do limits and barriers to the
ongoing automation of production using robots and AI, as well as restructuring in the course of
electrification, explain the persistence of industrial employment, to the point of labour-shortages, in
the Austrian automotive supplier industry?
Recent contributions on industrial employment dynamics have focused on the role
automation/digitalization technology has played. They have identified different uses (substituting, read more
