Working From Home Fuels Rise of The 'Secondary City': The Great Rebalancing

[appalachiablue]

'The great rebalancing: working from home fuels rise of the 'secondary city.' The Guardian, Oct. 26, 2020. - Ed:



A fall in commuting due to the pandemic is already prompting workers to move out of the major metropolises.

Amy Kaper has never met her colleagues. Though her employer is based in Wash. DC, she works from her apartment in Arizona. Kaper’s chronic health issues made an office job difficult, and working remotely – in IT in the healthcare industry – gives her more autonomy, & more time. “It was a huge adjustment – but I feel really lucky,” she says. This year, the proportion of Americans working from home like Kaper has skyrocketed – from 8% in February to 35% in May. Most countries have experienced a similar jump during the pandemic, as remote working has gone from a fringe benefit to a necessity.

Analysis suggests roughly 28% of jobs in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and the UK can be carried out remotely, and as many as 37% in the US.

The global trial forced by coronavirus suggests concerns about “shirking from home” were baseless. A recruitment company’s survey of 5,220 professionals in 31 countries working remotely during lockdown found 77% reported being equally or more effective, while 86% of employers said they intended to continue with it in some form post-pandemic. If it proves a permanent change, however, it will have far-reaching repercussions – for the communities now accommodating workers midweek, and for the inner cities they have abruptly vacated.

Two groups of remote workers will emerge post-pandemic, predicts Michel Serafinelli, an economics lecturer at the University of Essex: those who commute into the office once or twice a week, and those who do so for one week each month for intensive brainstorming or conference-style meet-ups. This latter group in particular may decide to move further away from cities, in search of cheaper housing, more space or proximity to nature..

Serafinelli says the shift could mean an eventual reduction of 40-60% in the time skilled workers would spend working in their office in central Munich, Seattle, Amsterdam and other “innovation clusters”..Private rents in London have already started falling as renters flee the inner city for more space. But, in contrast to the British business lobby’s stark warning of “ghost towns”, Serafinelli says: “This could be win-win.”.. Pre-pandemic, remote working was offered as an employee benefit, & it remains overwhelmingly an option in well-paid professional industries, dominated by educated white people.

Left alone, the switch to remote working will exacerbate inequality in the US. For example, 1/5th of Black & Hispanic men work in the service sector, where just one in 100 jobs can be done from home. “During the pandemic, there’s the double whammy of being more exposed to a deadly virus”...

More,
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/oct/26/the-great-rebalancing-working-from-home-fuels-rise-of-the-secondary-city

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. This vastly increased work from home by those whose jobs

make that possible, will probably result in an even greater divide between those kinds of workers and those who actually have to show up at the work place.

[appalachiablue]

3. This change could be major & really shift things around.

Right now it looks to heavily favor white professional workers and not people of color as noted in the article.

Office space in city skyscrapers with dozens of floors and elevators, along with residential properties could take a real hit.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. I know two young professionals working remote from home due to Covid who are relocating from an expensive major urban area to a smaller city with much lower cost of living.

A very wise move for them, economically and in terms of a healthier lifetyle. No long hell commute which is terrifc. They deserve it given all the negatives their generation has and will face.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. Right. Good for them. But no change, or maybe even worse

conditions for the janitors, the fast food workers, the retail employees. Plus, if public transportation gets cut way back, then the employees I just named may be left with no way whatsoever to get to and from the job.

The real problem is that a lot of attention is paid to the plight of white collar workers, and almost none to the blue collar ones. And there are far more of them than people realize, because, again, no one pays attention to them.

He (Michael Zweig) defines a working class job as one where you do not manage others but are subject to the control of management, and the job is a manual job where you do not have the kind of autonomy that “professionals” have.

His conclusion is that the manual working class, thus defined, are 62 percent of the economically active population.

This is where I found that quote: https://www.quora.com/How-many-blue-collar-workers-and-white-collar-workers-are-there-in-the-United-States

[appalachiablue]

5. The loss of public transportation would be a real problem

Although they're not often thought of or compensated fairly, service workers are essential as we know.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

6. Exactly.

Notice that on TV we have a Nightly Business Report, but no Nightly Labor Report.

Those who are not white collar office workers are largely invisible. That's partly why I get a bit exercised every time the suggestion is made that Election Day should be a National Holiday. Clearly those who suggest that have only ever worked office jobs, 8am to 5pm with weekends and holidays off. They haven't a clue what it's like for a lot of others.

Let me tell you about my years as an airline ticket agent at National Airport in Washington DC. We did not get holidays off. Which means we worked (to put it in white collar terms) 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year. NEVER an extra day off. And in reality, we worked weekends and holidays and lots of extra hours when the flights were late or cancelled. Think about it, those of you who have weekends and holidays off. Five days a week, fifty weeks a year. More than once we night shift people, who were supposed to go home no later than 11pm, called up morning shift at 3am and asked if they'd please come in a couple of hours early so we could finally go home. Yeah, imagine not really knowing when you can go home.

Only for us, it was more than that. It was coming in early and working late. The night before Thanksgiving? Oh, yeah. One year our ten pm flight to Elmira, Ithaca, and Utica was cancelled because of weather in NYState. I worked the evening shift, got off, I dunno, at 11pm, maybe later, closer to midnight. I was back at the airport at 6:30 the next day. Because of the previous cancellation, we had two flights leaving at more or less the same time to those three cities. They were all full. Along with the three other flights scheduled that morning. I recall that we (myself and Judy, the agent working with me) filled up our trash bins with the excess pieces of paper generated by the tickets within the first two hours. So we just tossed them on the floor. I am not exaggerating when I say we were more than ankle deep in papers by the time our wonderful cleaning lady showed up.

Sometimes there were compensations. Another year I was working Thanksgiving. I pre-cooked a couple of Cornish game hens with stuffing and some sort of vegetable, cooled it down and brought it to work. I told my co-workers that I and my friend Don would take the latest possible lunch break. I heated up the game hens in the small toaster oven in our break room, as well as the side dishes, and opened the bottle of wine I'd brought along. It was a wonderful feast. I will say that by this time we had maybe one more flight leaving and it wasn't even remotely full, but boy, that was a great Thanksgiving dinner!

[appalachiablue]

8. Sounds like a grueling schedule many times, and

frequent long hrs. At least you had camaraderie which is more than I can say at most of my white collar jobs. Nice people, but most got through the workday and then bailed for the long trip home via car or subway. No time at lunch or after work to socialize. Evenings were domestic work and some downtime until the next day for most. The way it is.

I often took work home, mostly research and also went in to help out on weekends for special events. I enjoyed it and the home life wasn't so great at times.

How fun that you added to TG holiday spirit by making poultry dinners, yum.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

11. Yes, the camaraderie was very strong.

In fact, we always said we worked "for the airlines", not necessarily one specific airline. And to this day I'll say that.

At DCA, where I worked, there were, I forget exactly how many airlines, but let me try to name them: American, Northwest, TWA, Mohawk, Eastern, Allegheny, Piedmont, Delta, National, and probably several others. I started in January, 1969. Up until maybe two years earlier, all of the airlines were crammed into the Main terminal at DCA. American Airlines opened their terminal around then, and the North Terminal opened not long after. The Main Terminal could breathe a sigh of relief, with enough room for all.

In no small part because not long before all of the airlines had been crowded together in the Main Terminal, the sense of belonging remained strong when I started. I could call down to the North Terminal for whatever favors I needed, and always got them. And even away from my own airport, that sense of belonging was strong. Airline people looked after each other. Years later, when I told someone checking me in for a flight that I used to work for the airlines, I more than once got an upgrade to first class. I was always appreciative.

Meanwhile, back in the day, we all looked out for each other. There were countless times when I helped out some other airline employee, or they helped me (or a coworker) out. It was what we did for each other.

I don't know if it really made up for never having an extra day off, but perhaps it did.

Some years later, at a conference totally unrelated to the airline biz, I learned that a woman there was a Delta ticket agent in Atlanta. We spent the next two hours sharing stories, laughing hilariously, and totally confounding all the other conference attendees who had no idea.

[appalachiablue]

10. TV News should have a 'Labor Report' absolutely. Newspapers

used to publish a 'labor news' section as well.

Everything started to change with Reganomics, supply side, free market, anti labor and the demise of labor unions.

Tragic and we see the results.

[RazzleCat]

2. I think Covid has speeded up many changes that were coming

I sat and thought on this and here are some changes that were most likely going to happen, but are now happening at a much faster rate due to covid.

1. Work from home, prior to my retirement I had already switched to work from home, but I was the unicorn not the norm. Work from home has many potential effects. Less office space being leased (aka lower rents). Less commute time can flip two ways, either more usage of electric cars, and or small cars, or because you use it way less ever more and larger cars / suv etc. Both for the same reason, less time in a car, and less gasoline usage. Some will feel hey I can get anyplace on a single charge, others, I dive so much less I can afford to drive this gas hog.

2. Movie theaters. I can see way fewer of them, and the ones left being "more", so rather than the super 60 screen theater, a single screen one with a true large screen, maybe drinks etc. The other way is what we already have in many areas the smaller one that shows special releases not expected to draw huge crowds. I see this due to many persons having large screens at home even home theaters in a room, add in the Mulan release on Disney being a success and it's good by super cinema center.

3. More on line, self check out. I know we have all seen a huge increase in both, but again, people who did not do either or not much of either switched very quickly to both. Added on to this more people using services to shop for you. My local market has gone from 4 self check out, to 10 self check out. Everyone is now using Amazon for tons of stuff they used to purchase in person.

4. Dress, we are going to dress up less, but I can also see a more formal dress code for the few days your in office. A flip of the casual Friday, to the dress Monday with the rest of the week being pants optional aka work from home.

6. Food, we are all now cooking more, as in many people never did all the cooking at home, they ate out or did take out a lot. I can see restaurants coming back or making it, but maybe not the home style ones, so for me an exotic Indian one, that I will still go to, but the one that just offers chicken and steaks, not so much, I cook that. (This is already true for me, but then I already cooked most meals.). Second item on food, as people cook more they just might start to like food that tastes good, as in real food, fresh food etc, so maybe less fried to go?

7. A much bigger push for high speed internet. This is already what many want, but now it's becoming more and more important. When we moved 10 years ago this was one item on our home search that was a deal breaker, no broadband, don't even bother to show us the home, again I see this being a deal breaker for many more people now.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

7. Along with those changes will be profound ones in education.

I am not about to try to guess what they will be, but I think the standard model of school is going to change quite a bit.

I think the restaurant model may change to one with a lot more carry-out or delivery. Personally, I've always cooked about 80% of my meals. Now it's more like 95%, maybe even more than that. Fortunately, I am very fond of my own cooking, although I'll admit I miss certain aspects of eating out. I am aware that a lot of people do not like to cook for themselves and are not very good at it. While the stupid and inconsiderate part of me wants to say, "Learn to cook!" I actually get it, as there are a lot of things I don't want to learn to do, such as a lot of home repair or gardening. It's essentially the same thing. Maybe meal services will eventually take hold. An in-law is starting a catering business (she's a wonderful professional chef) and it will be interesting to see how that takes off.

[Thyla]

9. Nothing will change ultimately

The desire to go back to 'normal' is too strong.
My wife can do her job remotely full time but no, gotta get back to the work place now to have meetings via zoom in your fucking office.

The only change will come if you change yourself. And you should be rethinking your lifestyle after this shit show of a year. I'd be worried if you weren't.