The Final Report of the Pissarides Review

Our ground-breaking inquiry examines the impacts of automation on the labour market, who is benefiting and who is being hit hardest by the disruption caused. Through a new social and economic paradigm of Good Work, it proposes a new model of human-centred automation, a comprehensive socio-technical approach that understands technological transformation as highly interconnected, and interdependent with socio-economic change.

This report marks the culmination of the Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing, a collaboration between the Institute for the Future of Work, Imperial College London and Warwick Business School. The Pissarides Review has been a three-year programme of work, informed and supported by an expert Steering Group and funded by the Nuffield Foundation.

Our objective in this multi-year research project has been to study how workers in Britain are coping with transitions from one job to another, and how their job satisfaction and other aspects of their wellbeing are being impacted.
The theoretical basis – expanded further on in the report – is the work I pioneered at the turn of the millennium on the ‘frictions’ in the labour market that mean that it fails to respond perfectly to changes. When conditions change, workers can be slow to adapt, either because they need to move to exploit new opportunities, or need information about where these opportunities are, or new skills. AI and automation technologies have changed these frictions in many ways, and the aim of the Review has been to better understand how workers can respond to them.

We have been fortunate to gather an interdisciplinary group of experts to lead three major workstreams. The first has had a system-level focus, thinking about national and regional innovation systems, investment flows and changes in skills. The second has had a firm-level focus, exploring how firms are responding to the transformations in play, and how governance regimes are interacting with them. Finally, and most centrally, the third workstream has focused on the individual experiences of workers, and how AI and automation technologies are impacting their work and their wellbeing.

The report is structured as follows. It begins with a summary of our key findings, and follows that with a chapter focused on the implications of them, with this work led by Anna Thomas MBE from IFOW. Then, across three chapters, we summarise the research of the workstreams, and why this work matters. Full details of working papers released through the course of the Review – on which these summaries are based – can be found on our dedicated site at pissaridesreview.ifow.org.