Manufacturing Employment: Engineers on Automation, Crisis and Structural Change in the Austrian Automotive Supplier Industry

Résumé:

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,
complementing or augmenting human labour). There is limited research, however, on when, which
strategy is pursued and why, in particular in the course of restructuring, such as through electrification.
The conceptions of engineers, how they envision the desired changes to the labour-process and
human-machine interaction are central to this. By investigating those working on the technological
logic of production, it will be possible to ground more aggregate developments, problematize them,
extend or confirm them. Labour-Process Theory, while famously and more recently concerned with
questions of control and the skill level of work, also has a foundation in such analysis of engineering
rationales and how they shape the labour-process (see originally Braverman’s work on Taylor).
Automation and structural change are thus not fixed outcomes, but processes which must be achieved.
How they are achieved, how a labour process comes to be replaced by machines, or changed through
different products and process of production, and what its outcomes are for labour, are not fixed.
Many contributions within LPT and the critical sociology of work have so far focused on the contextual
conditions shaping the implementation of automation, for example through international comparisons
(Lloyd and Payne, 2019, 2021; Krzywindzski, 2017 and 2020) or the position of firms in commodity
chains and the difference between small and large firms (Da Roit and Ianuzzi, 2022, Krzywdinski, 2017),
or the role that different managerial strategies have in technology implementation (Mokudai et al,
2021, Moro and Rinaldini, 2020). Less attention has been paid to the role of engineers in the
automation of production as well as to comparisons of different actors within the same sector. The
goal of this paper is to address both aspects.
To this end 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted with company engineers, external systems
integrators and technology suppliers. This number also includes auxiliary interviews with worker
council representatives, management without engineering positions and representations of interest.
The sample of firms includes a variation between types of products, type of ownership and
employment numbers. Using Burawoy’s extended case method (2009), these interviews, together with
descriptive statics and observations from nine factory site visits, are drawn upon to arrive at more
general conclusions about automation and continuing employment in the automotive industry in
Austria.
The preliminary results of the analysis show that logics of production and their technological
organization in the Austrian automotive supplier industry differ significantly from an assumed notion
of “competitiveness”. The role of crisis, in particular of ongoing electrification, was a contentious
subject among respondents, who are faced with significant changes to their sites, while not believing
that the production of combustion engines will end.
The results of this paper have bearing on many dimensions of structural changes in the automotive
industry and their consequences for employment and work. Extrapolating from the special case of
Austria is not a straightforward but worthwhile endeavor, as it represents a curious nexus between
the “core” countries of Central and Western Europe, as well as the “periphery” of the East and South.

Texte complet:

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,
complementing or augmenting human labour). There is limited research, however, on when, which
strategy is pursued and why, in particular in the course of restructuring, such as through electrification.
The conceptions of engineers, how they envision the desired changes to the labour-process and
human-machine interaction are central to this. By investigating those working on the technological
logic of production, it will be possible to ground more aggregate developments, problematize them,
extend or confirm them. Labour-Process Theory, while famously and more recently concerned with
questions of control and the skill level of work, also has a foundation in such analysis of engineering
rationales and how they shape the labour-process (see originally Braverman’s work on Taylor).
Automation and structural change are thus not fixed outcomes, but processes which must be achieved.
How they are achieved, how a labour process comes to be replaced by machines, or changed through
different products and process of production, and what its outcomes are for labour, are not fixed.
Many contributions within LPT and the critical sociology of work have so far focused on the contextual
conditions shaping the implementation of automation, for example through international comparisons
(Lloyd and Payne, 2019, 2021; Krzywindzski, 2017 and 2020) or the position of firms in commodity
chains and the difference between small and large firms (Da Roit and Ianuzzi, 2022, Krzywdinski, 2017),
or the role that different managerial strategies have in technology implementation (Mokudai et al,
2021, Moro and Rinaldini, 2020). Less attention has been paid to the role of engineers in the
automation of production as well as to comparisons of different actors within the same sector. The
goal of this paper is to address both aspects.
To this end 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted with company engineers, external systems
integrators and technology suppliers. This number also includes auxiliary interviews with worker
council representatives, management without engineering positions and representations of interest.
The sample of firms includes a variation between types of products, type of ownership and
employment numbers. Using Burawoy’s extended case method (2009), these interviews, together with
descriptive statics and observations from nine factory site visits, are drawn upon to arrive at more
general conclusions about automation and continuing employment in the automotive industry in
Austria.
The preliminary results of the analysis show that logics of production and their technological
organization in the Austrian automotive supplier industry differ significantly from an assumed notion
of “competitiveness”. The role of crisis, in particular of ongoing electrification, was a contentious
subject among respondents, who are faced with significant changes to their sites, while not believing
that the production of combustion engines will end.
The results of this paper have bearing on many dimensions of structural changes in the automotive
industry and their consequences for employment and work. Extrapolating from the special case of
Austria is not a straightforward but worthwhile endeavor, as it represents a curious nexus between
the “core” countries of Central and Western Europe, as well as the “periphery” of the East and South.