TEXT: The Impact of Computers on Employment

It's impossible to overstate the profound impact of computer technology on employment trends and
workforce structure in the modern economy. Computers impact employment by both creating and
destroying jobs, but, more than anything, by changing the nature of the jobs available.
Generally associated with increases in workplace productivity, computers allow each employee, using
quick technologies such as email and Internet fact-checking, to accomplish more with every hour of
work. While increases in productivity allow some employers to scale back on hiring, the reality is that
more productive workers are a better labor investment, and employers interested in growing their
businesses are actually more likely to hire new people and expand. As an industry in itself, computer
technology also creates jobs in new fields like programming, computer-aided design and animation,
Internet marketing and online publishing.
While computers have spawned entire new career fields, their introduction has also displaced many
workers, especially in low-skill jobs such as warehouse clerks and basic data processing that were among
the first to be replaced by automated computer technology. In sectors like manufacturing that grow
more slowly and require large capital investments to do so, improvements in productivity brought about
by computers can justify layoffs long before enough capital is available to invest in job-creating
improvements like new factories.
Looking at the workforce as a whole, one of the more contentious issues surrounding the effects of
computers on employment is that it creates and destroys jobs at different ends of the economy.
Computers tend to create high-paying, high-skill technical jobs and destroy low-paying, low-skill jobs.
From a social perspective, the problem is that low-skill workers don't tend to have the job training
necessary to seek the high-skill jobs created and, unless a society invests the gains from the top of the
economy in changing that situation, the workforce becomes increasingly polarized.
By Edward Mercer on www.itstillwork.com

A) – Answer by true or false

1. Computers impact employment by changing the nature of the available jobs.
2. Increases in productivity allow some employers to reduce hiring.
3. Computers have not changed workers as low-skill jobbers.
4. Computers create jobs without destroying any other.

B) – Answer these questions based on the text

1. How do computers impact employment?
2. Give four (4) examples of jobs created by computer in new fields.
3. Which workers were among the first to be replaced by automated computer technology?
4. What do computers tend to do?

C) – Find the opposites of the following words from the text

1. The ancient (paragraph 1)
2. Decreases (paragraph 2)
3. Quickly (paragraph 3)
4. Same (paragraph 4)