As Australia surveys the labour market wreckage of almost two months of pandemic-inspired physical isolation, several orthodoxies have emerged about the way we will work when the restrictions are eventually lifted.
One, based partly on a history that illustrates many jobs lost in big downturns never reappear, is that Australia faces entrenched unemployment upwards of 10% for at least half a decade. Another is that some sort of “new normal” will emerge whereby vast sections of workers will continue to carry out employment from home.
Nobody can accurately predict how many people will become long-term unemployed. But already evident is that many thousands of businesses – in retail, hospitality, transport, manufacturing, financial services, marketing and advertising, to name a few sectors – will never operate profitably again. Many will die. And thousands of people employed by them – largely those with no capacity for home work – will not possess skills or experience to be employed in the post-pandemic economy.
Aside from the enormous social and economic inequities of who can work from home, it may be wrong to assume that even those whose skills now allow them to will want this to be their new work normal.
The economist Jim Stanford has been working from home for two months. It is, he says, driving him crazy.
He says: “You know I’m very fortunate – I’ve a comfortable apartment, I have a desk that I can use as a kind of quasi office and I’m in a safe and loving family environment. And despite all that, to tell you the truth, it’s driving me crazy.
“I miss the human interaction and I find it stressful to be working in close quarters with the people that I love and live with who are also going about their business in different ways.
“The level of flexibility can be helpful and it is a privilege – but I wouldn’t want this to be my permanent work arrangement. No offence to the people I live with.”
Given he’s director of the Centre for Future Work, Stanford seems like a good person to ask about how employment might look in post-iso Australia.
Research conducted by Stanford’s centre indicates about 30% of Australia workers (4 million) have capacity to work from home.
“That means 70% of people can’t do their work from home ... By and large the people who can work from home worked in offices and did most of their work on a computer ... and not exclusively but largely, they are professionals, managers and other specialist white-collar occupations who were already earning above average income to start with.
“It seems doubly unfair that the people who had the most secure starting point are the ones who are able to keep their jobs and their income during the pandemic.
“The people who can’t work from home have faced a devil’s choice – do their jobs despite the risk of infection [and spreading it to others] or they have to leave their jobs.”
Those who can’t work from home include, among others, more highly paid and educated health professionals and first responders – people admired and respected during, as before, the pandemic. But there are also also hundreds of thousands of low-wage, poorly educated and often casually employed people – cleaners and delivery drivers, supermarket workers and those on factory lines producing essential items like toilet paper and hand sanitiser – whose work has been afforded little social capital and whose very presence and contributions had often gone unnoticed.
Stanford says: “What’s striking is the shift in attitudes about some of the so-called menial, low-wage often casualised jobs, who, it turns out, are also changing our lives and allowing us to get through this pandemic ... occupations that have been treated like crap for decades and we assumed that they were menial, low-skilled, easily replaceable positions and we allowed the economy and businesses to cheapen and degrade and outsource that work into almost oblivion.
“Recognising the importance of those so-called menial jobs and the risks associated with doing them and putting in place adequate protections and supports for them I think is a very urgent priority.”
Non-risky business
For many whose businesses are now in hibernation, the post-pandemic future looks bleak. Rebooting without government support (many are ineligible for jobkeeper or jobseeker benefits) and with only remote prospects of attaining pre-pandemic turnover, will be too daunting. Some will cut losses and take their skills elsewhere. Some will retire. Others will become permanently unemployed.
Hilary Wardhaugh has run a successful commercial photography business in Canberra for 25 years. She was very busy over summer. But business slowed towards the end of February as the viral threat captivated the world.
“That’s when I lost all my work ... I’ve done only three headshots since then,” says Wardhaugh, 56, a single parent who, with her 16-year-old son, had moved in with her elderly mother before the pandemic so she might pay down the mortgage on her own house. Her tenants are now unable to meet the rent.
“I’ve been in Canberra for a long time and the business is well-established. I think when this [isolation] is over the work will come back in dribs and drabs. But I don’t think the business will get back to where it was – I think companies who spent on corporate photography may start doing their own to save money because everyone will be looking for savings wherever they can.”
“I need new equipment. But now I’m thinking seriously about whether to invest in the business with new gear, if I want to retire at 60 or 65. I’m not sure I want to take that risk. I’m actually thinking about trying to get a full-time permanent job – of working for someone else instead of reinvesting in my own business with new gear.”
Reflecting Wardhaugh’s caution about her future, Steve Koukoulas, managing director of Market Economics and an economic adviser to the former prime minister Julia Gillard, says the pandemic aftermath could see “a crushing of entrepreneurship and economic risk-taking” because “opportunity for gains has been swamped by an illustration of how bad things can get personally when things so wrong”.
“Many small business owners and sole traders have had financial catastrophe thrust on them,” Koukoulas says. “In hospitalities in particular, revenue has fallen to near zero which feeds into their own salary in the first instance, and then into unmanageable problems with servicing debt. The fallout in many instances means that in future many may shun debt or overdraft on their business – the exposure to a shock is not worth it.”
“Another more life-altering lesson is not to use your house as collateral against your small business loan. Unless there is the proverbial economic ‘snapback’ and the economy returns to full employment very soon, small business owners are likely to be forced to sell their houses to cover their business losses.”
It’s problematic and emotionally fraught looking for silver linings in times of such misery and economic distress. But the reality is that some businesses are more likely than others to prosper and attract the dollars of cautious investors wary of sinking money into the stock market, real estate (risky given residential and commercial rents can’t be guaranteed) or high-risk e-startups.
The bioenergy consultant Dylan Nichols has been busier than before the pandemic because the crisis has created increased demand on essential services like waste management.
“My industry is relatively pandemic-proof, so it has been interesting to see the increased level of [investor] interest in these services,” he says. “While these industries aren’t the most glamorous, it’s been an interesting reminder of what we want as a society and what we need.
“Unemployment is up and people are watching their shadows – whole industries have disappeared. Essential services will do well at this time and for [at least] the short term. I’d be hoping that many essential services use this time to innovate, creating new industries and jobs. Many businesses simply won’t recover. Investors are looking at businesses that are pandemic proof, which brings a whole new level of due diligence. The days of raising US$120m for a juicer are over for some time. Unless people need it to live, you’re going to struggle to sell it.”
From stigma to saviour
I’ve long been conversant with the challenges of working in the place where I live. The upsides (flexibility, no commuting, no workplace politics, spending days with dogs instead of people) are considerable. I’m privileged and beyond fortunate, especially at a time when so many people are trying to carve out a workspace in overcrowded or unsafe domestic situations. I have a dedicated, private home office, an ergonomic set-up in an inner-city house in the country’s biggest city.
The occasional negatives invariably relate to the flipside of the flexibility – usually the situational requirement to fill domestic gaps. Ill children can play particular havoc with deadlines. But when you work from home, sometimes practicalities mean you often pick up the care and try to make up the working time on weekends. This can undermine routine, if that is important to you.
I sympathise with couples – and especially singles – who are trying to work from home while overseeing kids’ primary school education. One thing I have learnt is that it’s very difficult to get much meaningful work done at home, regardless of your setup, if you are caring for ill or very small children.
Difficult. But not impossible.
Among the revelations of the great Covid-19 disruption of 2020, will be the surprising levels of productivity and the capacity for multitasking of some employees working at home while overseeing the education of children. Many employees have long sought the flexibility to work part- or full-time from home. While some employers have resisted this (even stigmatised it as being for “slackers” or people not serious about career progression), they have had to accede to it for their businesses to survive isolation.
Jennifer Petriglieri, an organisational behaviour academic, says post-isolation society will need to “deliberately work to bake this new capacity into the employment market permanently”.
“Before the forced confinement, home working was generally seen as a choice for people who are not particularly serious about their careers, and employees who took advantage of flexible working policies were sidelined when it came to promotions and pay increases,” Petriglieri says. “This stigmatisation went against the research, which shows that flexible working (typically a mix of home and office working) is more productive than being in the office every day.
“Now, the bosses … who sidelined flexible workers previously, are themselves experiencing how productive home working can be and seeing that the technology exists such that we don’t need to be in the office all the time, nor need to travel for work so much. I also think there will be pressure from workers to keep some of the flexibility they have now once the self-isolation has ended. So, I’m hopeful, and I also believe that deliberate steps will need to switch the trend away from ‘facetime’ in the office to more flexible working.”
Employers will already be noting upsides of having more staff working from home, not least the massive cost transferral to the employee. The savings on city office-space and communications systems, for example, on utilities and data, will be significant.
As one major lobbyist for employers says: “We have realised in this crisis that we don’t need an elaborate traditional telephone comms system, for example, where everyone has a phone on their desk – a computer and a mobile phone for internal and external comms is obviously enough. We’ve also learnt that Zoom meetings can be incredibly efficient and the cost-saving is massive, especially when the price of air travel will go through the roof.”
Employer organisations and unions have been attentive to the loud government message that it is time – despite the obvious health risks to those most vulnerable – to start cranking up the economy. Leading government figures are united in the message that this will require some people to return to their actual workplaces. But the office is unlikely to ever look like it did before the Covid-19 outbreak.
Starting times will be staggered to avoid crowding into lifts and foyers. Work-at-home rosters are likely to be implemented by some companies so employees only attend the office on alternate days. The communal lunchroom will be best avoided, large in-person meetings will go the same way as hotdesking in favour of in-house video conferencing.
The office partition or cubicle – Perspex, perhaps, in place of felt covered chipboard – could become a fixture as employers attempt to pandemic-proof their offices.
Other companies will opt for savings on office space, insisting most staff who want to can and should work from home.
Employers looking for savings through cost transferral (to the employee but, perhaps, through tax deductions that are ultimately shifted to the state) have much else to consider too. Not least that in Australia employers still have a clear duty of care to employees working at home.
If someone working at home trips and injures themselves while on a bathroom break or gets a repetitive strain injury, for example, the employer can still be liable.
Stand by for a rash of work from home insurance claims.
Stanford, self-avowedly going “crazy” in iso, will not be the only one eager to get back to the office.
“I think there are a lot of Australian employers drooling at the cost benefits arising from getting their staff to work at home. But they should stop and think carefully about their duty of care. And it could just be that after the pandemic we are going to have to actually fight to go back to an actual defined formal workplace ...
“I think for many workers in many jobs it will not be a healthy or sustainable practice to keep doing your job from home.”
