To what extent are low-wage jobs in the United States being replaced by technology? Our research1 suggests that low-wage jobs that are intensive in routine cognitive tasks, such as cashier, were supplanted by automation during the 2000s. Moreover, since the Great Recession, jobs intensive in both routine manual and routine cognitive tasks have been negatively impacted by automation. Nevertheless, the overall effect on individual low-wage workers has been surprisingly small.

技术在多大程度上取代了美国的低薪工作？研究表明，日常认知任务密集的低薪工作，如收银员，在21世纪初已经被自动化所取代。此外，自大衰退以来，在日常体力和认知任务中，大量的工作受到自动化的负面影响。然而，整体而言，对低薪个人的影响却小得惊人。

One reason is that we also find that automation, while changing the composition of jobs, has not led to a net decline in the total number of jobs. Moreover, since low-wage jobs have few skill requirements and the minimum wage acts as a wage floor, individual low-wage workers displaced from low-wage employment have been able to transition into newly created jobs without much of a wage penalty. This stands in sharp contrast to the impact of automation on higher-wage jobs, including former manufacturing jobs. For those workers, other research has shown that the newly created jobs associated with automation tend to pay much lower wages.

其中一个原因是自动化虽然改变了工作的组成，但并没有导致工作总数的净下降。此外，由于低薪工作对技能的要求很少，而最低工资起着下限的作用，因此从低工资工作中转移出来的低工资工人个人能够过渡到新创造的工作岗位，而不需要付出多少工资罚款。这与自动化对高薪工作(包括以前的制造业工作)的影响形成了鲜明对比。其他研究表明，对于这些工人来说，与自动化相关的新创造的工作往往工资要低得多。

In this Chicago Fed Letter we discuss our research and the mechanisms that might be driving these results.

芝加哥联储近期发布的研究讨论了可能推动这些结果的机制。