Research On The Impact Of "Machine Substitution" On The Labor Market Structure

With the technological revolution triggered by industrial intelligentization and digital informatization in full swing,an important part industrial intelligence has not only attracted the attention of countries all over the world,but also become a necessary tool for China to build a manufacturing power.However,the structural unemployment caused by the imbalance of the employment structure in the global labor market is getting worse.The development and popularization of industrial intelligence represented by artificial intelligence and industrial Internet in the whole society is one of the important reasons for the employment structural changes impacting the labor market.This paper studies how the development of industrial intelligence in China affects the employment structure of the labor force.Based on the literature review,this paper sorts out and explains the connotation of industrial intelligentization,labor employment structure and job polarization,and thus concludes the fundamental mechanism that how industrial intelligence affects the employment structure of labor force.Under a certain level of regional development,this paper further analyzes the way that industrial intelligence affects the employment structure of labor force,resulting in "work polarization".Based on theoretical analysis,this paper adopts the panel data of 30 provinces in China’s mainland(except Tibet)from2002 to 2015 as a sample,building a multiple linear regression model to study industrial intelligentization and the employment proportion of labors with different levels of skills.The results show that industrial intelligentization has a significant impact on the employment structure of the labor force.Specific industrial intelligence helps to create and absorb high-skilled labor and low-skilled labor,but substitute middle-skilled labor.On the basis of the benchmark model,the result of the regional heterogeneity test shows that impacts of industrial intelligentization on the employment structure of the labor force in the eastern,central and western regions are different.From the perspective of international division of labor,further regional heterogeneity analysis is conducted on the manufacturing-intensive areas in the southeast coastal areas.The result shows that the trend of labor employment structure in the southeast coastal areas is that the proportion of middle-skilled laborers increases while the proportion of low-skilled and high-skilled laborers decreases.In order to explore other factors,the threshold model with different affluence,urbanization and industrial structure is used to further study the reasons for the various trends of employment structure resulted by regional differences.The result shows that under the influence of affluence,urbanization and industrial structure,industrial intelligentization has a obvious threshold effect on labor employment structure.The relative improvement of urbanization and economic development may upgrade the employment structure of labor force to a "unipolar" employment structure,and further into "polarization".Finally,a policy is suggested to increase personnel training and improve the labor market protection mechanism.