At 309 units per 10,000 employees, the robot density in the German manufacturing industry ranks third in the world. At the same time, the number of people employed in Germany reached its highest level since reunification in 2017, at around 44 million. The rapid expansion of industrial robots has led to a positive job balance in companies: in addition to tasks that are now performed by machines, new jobs have been created for employees. These are the findings of the latest study conducted by the Center for European Economic Research (ZEW) on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

"The results of the ZEW study for the labor market confirm what we are seeing in the leading industrial nations worldwide in terms of automation with industrial robots," says Junji Tsuda, President of the International Federation of Robotics. "The modernization of production means that dangerous, unhealthy and monotonous work in particular is being taken over by machines. In the vast majority of cases, the new division of labor between humans and machines only affects individual activities in a workplace and not the entire range of work performed by an employee." However, if there are job cuts - according to the ZEW, five percent of employees have been replaced within five years - these are offset in the overall balance by new jobs.

In Germany, the increased use of machinery has led to an overall increase in the number of jobs of one percent. This trend is likely to continue in the future: Based on the information provided by the companies surveyed, the ZEW estimates that further automation and digitalization in companies will trigger processes that will lead to a 1.8 per cent increase in employment by 2021.

This development is in line with the historical experience gained from the 1990s onwards with the triumph of the computer. Although the mass use of IT in companies has made traditional clerical jobs redundant, according to ZEW calculations, employment rose by just under 0.2 percent per year between 1995 and 2011.

Robots at Work" study

The London School of Economics (LSE) recently examined the use of industrial robots in 17 developed economies between 1993 and 2007 in its "Robots at Work" study. At a press conference at Automatica 2018 at Messe München, LSE research director Guy Michaels summarized the most important results: "The use of industrial robots has improved the productivity of work by around 15 percent. At the same time, the proportion of low-skilled employment has fallen and wages have risen slightly. The use of industrial robots had no significant effect on the total number of employees," said Guy Michaels. as