Work intensification, workers wellbeing and labour compensation

Whether technological progress alleviates the burden of labour or instead intensifies it remains a central tension in political economy. This paper contributes to this debate along three interconnected axes. First, it examines whether automation is associated with higher work intensity, measured by exposure to high-speed work and tight deadlines. Second, it investigates whether such intensification translates into lower well-being, proxied by work-related stress. Third, it tests whether intensified working conditions are compensated through higher wages, coherent with the theory of equalising differences. Using representative data on the European working population, we combine non-linear models, multi-way fixed effects regressions, RIF-OLS estimations, RIF-Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions, and IPWRA techniques to analyse both average and distributional effects. We document three main findings. (1) Machine-paced work is systematically associated with higher work intensity. Workers whose pace is dictated by machines are significantly more likely to work at high speed and under tight deadlines. (2) Higher work intensity is strongly associated with greater work-related stress. Moreover, mediation analysis shows that the stress effect operates primarily through intensified work rhythms rather than through the use of automated machines per se. (3) We find limited support for compensating differentials hypothesis. Wage effects are concentrated at specific points of the income distribution and in selected occupations. For most workers, however, intensified work is not associated with a significant wage premium. Overall, the results suggest that contemporary machine-paced work intensifies labour and increases stress, while offering little systematic compensation through wages, challenging the notion that labour markets naturally price the disutility of intensified work.