This article analyses the employment impacts of the latest generation of digital technologies, with attention to the applications referred to the Industry 4.0. The idea that automation technologies and digital platforms replace work is as intuitive as it is wrong. Indeed, it is not the demand for work to be lacking, but the labour supply capacity to adapt to technological changes and to face the organizational transformations and social imbalances that these changes entail. First of all, we review the recent literature that has investigated the relationship between technological innovation and labour, then we discuss the results of an original research carried out on a large sample of Venetian companies. The aim of the research is the understanding of the employment impacts of Industry 4.0 technologies. The results show the companies that adopt these technologies express a higher demand for jobs, explaining 75% of the employment increases that occurred during the period.
Keywords: Digital Technology, Industry 4.0, Labour Transformation
Jel Code: J2, J5, O2