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THREAD: Does home working represent a work revolution?
Is it reinforcing existing inequalities? Does it favour the public sector and higher income workers? Do we have a unhealthy religious attachment to work?
What is the future of work in Wales? 1/10 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/09/magazine/remote-work-covid.html
Is it reinforcing existing inequalities? Does it favour the public sector and higher income workers? Do we have a unhealthy religious attachment to work?
What is the future of work in Wales? 1/10 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/09/magazine/remote-work-covid.html
The IFS found that the ability to work in lockdown & work safely is distributed very unevenly by gender, ethnicity, education and earnings. It is making existing inequalities more pronounced. The Resolution Foundation found that 42% of workers simply cannot work from home 2/10
For many key workers it is not an option. Those in retail, delivery, front line health, social care etc. Many of these are the lowest paid and are also vulnerable to increasing automation. Key workers are disproportionally represented across BAME communities. 3/10
Equally for some home working can be an alienating lonely experience that often saps creativity and collapses the narrow distance between labour and downtime. It can result in lost inspiration and companionship. 4/10 https://allwork.space/2020/05/future-of-work-the-office-isnt-dead-and-never-will-be/
BUT it can be a massive boon. The IFS argue that “an increase in remote working could be especially helpful for mothers’ careers, and the increase in the time that fathers are spending with their children during the crisis might help to accelerate changes in gender norms”. 5/10
What about the myriad issues of productivity, accommodation costs and organisational effectiveness. Is there a Zoom, Skype or Teams fatigue emerging? Is the ideal solution splitting time between home and the workplace? 6/10 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/12/twitter-coronavirus-covid19-work-from-home
More people working at home could be a win for work-life balance, happiness, & the biosphere. No more hellish commutes, never-ending meetings, air pollution, traffic jams. A signal to the end of the Religious Attachment to work itself? 7/10 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/26/the-office-covid-coronavirus-obsolete
It raises the question of keys concerns of @ResetCymru. Back in 1930, J.M. Keynes predicted that the working week would be drastically cut, to perhaps 15 hours a week, with people choosing to have far more leisure as their material needs were satisfied. Need for #UBI. 8/10
What occurs in the next period will shape a future of work that might have been inevitable with the onset of automation. But it has been massively accelerated by a huge public-health crisis & the threat of unemployment. What about job share and new forms of working? 9/10
What does this mean for Wales’s workforce across all sectors? Is it inevitable that a digital divide turns into a social divide? 10/10
