Routine Tasks were Demanded from Workers during an Energy Boom

Energy booms are most often associated with large increases in employment and earnings, as well as positive local labor market spillovers from energy to non-energy industries. In this study, the large, localized, and positive labor demand shock from an energy price boom in Western Canada was also found to increase the routine and manual task content of employment across the occupational distribution. Both occupation groups involving routine manual tasks (operators, fabricators and laborers; and production, craft, and repair), as well as one occupational group involving non-routine cognitive tasks (technicians), significantly increased their employment shares during this boom. However, these results show that only the routinization of employment had a significant impact on wages; not manualization. This conventional boom evidence illustrates how an energy boom can impact labor, beyond the traditional changes in employment and earnings, and serves as a counterexample to the documented occupational polarization often attributed to technological change.