Predictions
The COVID crisis appears poised to reshape labor markets, argue Autor and Reynolds. They point out:
- If telepresence displaces a meaningful fraction of professional office time and business travel, the accompanying reductions in office occupancy, daily commuting trips, and business excursions will mean steep declines in demand for a large number of low-skill workers such as building cleaning, security, and maintenance service; hotel workers and restaurant staff; taxi and ride-hailing drivers; and myriad other workers who feed, transport, clothe, entertain, and shelter people when they are not in their own homes. This is significant because these services make up a large and rising share of employment among workers without postsecondary credentials;
- Those displaced may suffer significant hardship as they seek new work, potentially in occupations where they have no experience or training. Paradoxically, having too few low-wage, economically insecure jobs is actually worse than having too many.
- Tight labor markets no longer appear inevitable due to demographics and certainly their return is some years off. This raises greater concerns about the trajectory of the polarized U.S. labor market.
- Spurred by social distancing requirements and stay-at-home orders that generated a severe temporary labor shortage, firms have discovered new ways to harness emerging technologies to accomplish their core tasks with less human labor.
The Nature of Work after the COVID Crisis: Too Few Low-Wage Jobs
By: David Autor, Elisabeth Reynolds – MIT
A more optimistic take
Post Covid-19, Venkat Venkatraman sees several trends converging to create a new workplace.
- Reimagine work: Since the onset of the pandemic there has been a massive set of experiments to test out the limits of work carried out away from offices and in some cases even factories or oil rigs or transportation networks;
- Expand the Talent Base: As a direct outcome of working remotely, companies can tap into workers that are not geographically close-by;
- Experiment with Next-Generation Tools. Current productivity tools are woefully inadequate. Companies are working to develop next-generation tools for personal productivity and collaboration within and across organizations.
COVID-19 was unprecedented, so will be the future of work
By: Venkat Venkatraman – Boston University
