The future of work practice questions.

A hospital installs an automated cabinet that counts and packs medicines. Pharmacists spend less time counting tablets and more time reviewing prescriptions with clinicians, and the job title is unchanged. Which description fits what has happened?

• The occupation has been eliminated and replaced by a robotic one
• The pharmacists have been reclassified as self-employed contractors
• The work has been offshored to a lower-wage country
• Automation has changed the mix of tasks inside the occupation

Answer: Automation has changed the mix of tasks inside the occupation

Automation acts on tasks and an occupation is a bundle of tasks, so the usual outcome is recomposition: what remains is the part hardest to specify in advance. Whether that counts as an improvement depends on which tasks carried the worker's discretion.

In February 2021 the United Kingdom Supreme Court held that Uber drivers are workers rather than independent contractors. Which feature of the arrangement weighed most heavily in that reasoning?

• The company set the fare and the terms and rated driver performance
• Passengers rather than drivers chose the route to the destination
• The application was written and maintained by the company's own engineers
• Drivers used their own vehicles and paid their own fuel costs

Answer: The company set the fare and the terms and rated driver performance

Control rather than ownership of the tools decided the classification: the platform fixed the price, set the terms and managed performance through ratings. Owning the vehicle is precisely the feature platforms cite for the opposite conclusion, which is why the reasoning matters more than the label.

From 2020 onwards many employers began recruiting for fully remote roles without requiring relocation, including candidates living in other countries. Which implication for a lower-income region is most often identified?

• Local internet infrastructure has to be rebuilt before anyone can apply
• Local employers must compete with foreign salaries for the same staff
• Workers become employees of the state in which they are resident
• The number of hours worked each week is set by the client's country

Answer: Local employers must compete with foreign salaries for the same staff

Remote hiring raises pay for those recruited and raises the wage that local firms, schools and clinics must match, so the same change reads as opportunity or as brain drain depending on which stakeholder is asked. Naming who gains and who bears the cost is what this question type requires.

Oregon introduced the first statewide predictive scheduling law in 2017, obliging large retail, hospitality and food employers to give employees a written work schedule a set period in advance. Which problem created by scheduling software does the rule address?

• The software assigns more hours than an employee is contracted to work
• The employer records how long each individual task takes to complete
• The software allocates shifts to the employees who cost the least
• Employees cannot plan childcare or study around unpredictable hours

Answer: Employees cannot plan childcare or study around unpredictable hours

Just-in-time scheduling moves the risk of variable demand from the employer onto the worker's week, so the remedy is advance notice rather than a ban on the software. The trade-off the law accepts is real: predictability is bought with less scope to add shifts at short notice.

A law firm finds that a drafting assistant now produces the first version of routine contracts, which is the work junior associates did in their first two years. Partners observe that those juniors learned to recognise a risky clause by producing those drafts. Which implication follows?

• The route by which the next generation of senior lawyers acquired judgement has been removed
• The firm will need fewer partners, because it is senior work that the assistant now performs
• Clients will be billed for the time the assistant spends drafting each of their contracts
• The assistant has to be trained on the firm's own past contracts before it can be used at all, which is a project of several months

Answer: The route by which the next generation of senior lawyers acquired judgement has been removed

Automating the bottom of a career ladder removes the rung on which the expertise above it was built, and the cost appears years later when nobody has served the apprenticeship. This is why questions about automation and work have to ask what a task was teaching, not only what it produced.

A courier who has worked four years on one platform, with a rating built from several thousand deliveries, moves to a competitor and begins at zero, receiving the least attractive jobs until a new rating accumulates. What does this show about platform work?

• That the competitor's rating system is less accurate than the one the courier has left
• That the record of a worker's own performance is an asset held by the platform rather than by the worker
• That couriers are legally prevented from working for more than one platform at a time
• That customer ratings are unreliable and should therefore not be used to allocate work at all

Answer: That the record of a worker's own performance is an asset held by the platform rather than by the worker

Non-portable reputation is a switching cost paid entirely by the worker, so competition between platforms does not translate into bargaining power for the people who work through them. Portability of the record is the intervention this observation argues for.