The job has gotten a bad rap lately. We have had the trend of “big resignations”, the “anti-labor” movement, “silent layoffs” and a wave of strikes. It all seems to add up to the feeling that work is getting worse and people are fed up with it. Last year I was even asked to participate in a podcast discussion called “Is This the End of Labor as We Know It?”
But that’s not necessarily what the data says, at least in the UK. When Alan Felstead and Rhys Davies at Cardiff University took an online quiz in 2018/19 and again in 2022, they garnered around 100,000 responses from people across the country who answered detailed questions about their work. Academics found that in 2022, people reported greater ability to decide when to start and stop work, more room to take a break in an emergency, more supportive managers, less pressure at work, more say in related decisions at work, better promotion prospects and greater job security. On the negative side, they had less discretion over their work activities.
It pays to treat online quiz data with some caution, as the authors readily admit. The sample size was huge, but respondents were self-selecting and skewed somewhat towards women, people working in the public sector, and professional jobs (although academics have tried to explain this by weightings).
But a separate investigation of UK job quality managed annually by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development also leans on the idea that work has deteriorated on average: most metrics have remained fairly stable, with some improvement in work-life balance private.
If the quality of work has improved slightly, why could it be? The tight job market has helped people feel less insecure and may have prompted employers to make other changes to hiring and retaining staff. Then there’s the pandemic-induced shift to remote or hybrid work, which Felstead calls “a sea change, a bright moment, a break in history.” Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University in the US, told me that levels of home working had doubled roughly every 15 years until the pandemic. Then we had “40 years of acceleration in the space of three years”.
Felstead and Davies found that job quality improved the most in those occupations that were most likely to involve working from home at least one day a week. And, notably, these winners weren’t just well-paid professionals who had the best working conditions to begin with. This puts a question mark on the idea that hybrid work has widened the gap between “lovely” and “gross” jobs.
“Before the pandemic, those who worked from home were among the top ranks, but that advantage has diminished,” Felsted told me. People like call center workers, administrative staff, housing consultants and paralegals are now much more likely to be able to work from home at least one day a week than they were before the pandemic. And this seems to have improved the quality of their work: more flexible; less under pressure.
Of course, many people can never work remotely. I think it’s no surprise that these workers are more likely to quit their jobs or go on strike. CIPD surveys suggest that people in care jobs, leisure jobs and factory jobs are among those who have actually experienced a decline in work-life balance since the start of the pandemic. Compensation has certainly been the main reason for industrial conflict at a time of falling real wages, but Bloom says the ability to do hybrid work equates to a wage increase of about 7-8%, based on surveys of how much people appreciate it. This is a lead that has fallen very unevenly.
Is hybrid work here to stay? Research by Bloom and his colleagues, who used a large language model that used artificial intelligence to analyze 250 million job postings in five English-speaking countries, shows that the share of posts that explicitly offer jobs completely remote or hybrid has increased from less than 5% before the pandemic to around 10% or more across all countries (over 15% in the UK) in 2023. But it is worth remembering that the ‘new normal’ has not been still tested in a labor market where unemployment is high and workers compete for employers, rather than the other way around.
I hope employers don’t try to turn back the clock, even if they find they can. Hybrid work appears to have improved working lives, not for everyone, but not just for the elite either. Many jobs are still crappy, but if some are less crappy or better looking, that’s progress we shouldn’t throw away.
—————————————————-
Source link