Are more automatable jobs less satisfying?

We investigate whether the characteristics which render a job more likely to disappear due to automation also make that job less satisfying. The literature on automation offers convincing reasons infavour of this hypothesis, but it has not been empirically tested before. We use a widely-established, occupation-level measure of automatability and find that more automatable jobs are indeed significantly less satisfying using data from the European Working Conditions Survey. The effect is sizeableand robust to controlling for a wide range of individual-level variables and job-context variables. Our finding suggests that more automatable occupations are less satisfying because of their inherent nature (i.e. the nature of the tasks required for the performance of that occupation). We conduct a mediation analysis and find that the smaller creative intelligence requirement related to automatable occupations is the most important reason for their lower job satisfaction. We discuss to what extent these economy-wide findings translate to the level of the individual worker, in the context of a labor market segmented by education level.