"The literature on labour market segmentation traditionally looks at servitisation as the main structural driver behind the rise of employment precariousness, overlooking another crucial engine of the knowledge-economy transition: the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) revolution. This paper proposes a task-based approach to complement the skill-biased framework usually applied to labour market segmentation, investigating the correlation between occupational exposure to the risk of automation and low-quality employment. The empirical analysis, based on 14 countries sampled from ESS (2002–2018), shows a strong correlation between technological replaceability and low income across all of Western Europe, especially after the Great Recession, while its association with atypical employment is mainly driven by fixed-term contracts in Central and Southern Europe and by part-time arrangements in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries. Overall, a “recalibrated” dualisation emerges in Western European labour markets, characterised by the diffusion of low labour earnings and atypical contracts among mid-skill routine workers, besides the low-skill service precariat."

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