Technodiversity Glossary

Depending on local economy, underemployment can be an issue of societal compatibility. In that case, forestry may offer an opportunity to unskilled workers and therefore it represents an asset for the local society. For that reason, decision makers may favor labour-intensive logging systems that do not require specialized workers as mechanized systems do.

A good attribute to measure this is the degree of mechanization:

As a tendency, fully manual methods achieve very low productivities but offer employment to workers with low qualifications.

Partly motor-manual methods demand for better skills but achieve a relatively low productivity, too.

Fully motor-manual and partly mechanized methods need well educated and skilled workers, so that not every job-seeker is viable.

Fully mechanized work has the lowest employment potential, since it relies on very few but highly educated operators.