WORK-LIFE Post Corona Outbreak
The cholera epidemic has given way to the corona pandemic. The virus has hit our planet like a meteor, threatening to disrupt life, and one of the major human activities that it is reshaping is work. For years now, there’s been talk about the “future of work" (FoW), or how technology, demographic changes and lifestyle choices will transform the way we work. We have been slowly but inexorably heading towards a new construct of work. However, sometimes life-changing events greatly accelerate the future to suddenly make it the present: work in the time of Covid-19. The current pandemic will turn the future into the present. To understand that, let us look at the nine key tenets of FoW, and how Covid-19 is fast-forwarding them to the present.
Where will we be in six months, a year, ten years from now? I
lie awake at night wondering what the future holds for my loved ones. My
vulnerable friends and relatives. I wonder what will happen to my work, even
though I’m luckier than many: I've got work and can work remotely. I am writing
this from India, where I still have self-employed friends who are staring down
the barrel of months without pay, friends who have already lost jobs. The
contract that pays 80% of their salary runs out in December. Coronavirus is
hitting the economy badly. Will anyone be hiring when I need work?I think we
can understand our situation – and what might lie in our future – by looking at
the political economy of other crises. My research focuses on the fundamentals
of the modern economy: global supply chains, wages,
and productivity. I look at the way that economic dynamics contribute to
challenges like climate change and low levels of mental and physical
health among workers. I have argued that we need a very different kind of
economics if we are to build socially just and ecologically sound futures.
In the face of COVID-19, this has never been more obvious.
The
responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are simply the amplification of the dynamic
that drives other social and ecological crises: the prioritisation of one type
of value over others. This dynamic has played a large part in driving global
responses to COVID-19. So as responses to the virus evolve, how might our
economic futures develop?
From an
economic perspective, there are four possible futures: a descent into
barbarism, a robust state capitalism, a radical state socialism, and a
transformation into a big society built on mutual aid. Versions of all of these
futures are perfectly possible, if not equally desirable.
Small
changes don’t cut it
Coronavirus,
like climate change, is partly a problem of our economic structure. Although
both appear to be “environmental” or “natural” problems, they are socially
driven.
Yes,
climate change is caused by certain gases absorbing heat. But that’s a very
shallow explanation. To really understand climate change, we need to understand
the social reasons that keep us emitting greenhouse gases. Likewise with
COVID-19. Yes, the direct cause is the virus. But managing its effects requires
us to understand human behaviour and its wider economic context.
Tackling
both COVID-19 and climate change is much easier if you reduce nonessential
economic activity. For climate change this is because if you produce less
stuff, you use less energy, and emit fewer greenhouse gases. The epidemiology
of COVID-19 is rapidly evolving. But the core logic is similarly simple. People
mix together and spread infections. This happens in households, and in
workplaces, and on the journeys people make. Reducing this mixing is likely to
reduce person-to-person transmission and lead to fewer cases overall.
Reducing
contact between people probably also helps with other control strategies. One
common control strategy for infectious disease outbreaks is contact tracing and
isolation, where an infected person’s contacts are identified, then isolated to
prevent further disease spread. This is most effective when you trace
a high percentage of contacts. The fewer contacts a person has, the fewer
you have to trace to get to that higher percentage.
We can
see from Wuhan that social distancing and lockdown measures like this are
effective. Political economy is useful in helping us understand why they
weren’t introduced earlier in European countries and the US.
A fragile economy
Lockdown
is placing pressure on the global economy. We face a serious recession. This
pressure has led some world leaders to call for an easing of lockdown measures.
Even as
19 countries sat in a state of lockdown, the US president, Donald Trump, and
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro called for roll backs in mitigation
measures. Trump called for the American economy to get back to normal in three
weeks (he has now accepted that social distancing will need to be maintained
for much longer). Bolsonaro said: “Our lives have to go on. Jobs must be kept …
We must, yes, get back to normal.”
In the UK
meanwhile, four days before calling for a three-week lockdown, Prime Minister
Boris Johnson was only marginally less optimistic, saying that the UK could
turn the tide within 12 weeks. Yet even if Johnson is correct, it remains the
case that we are living with an economic system that will threaten collapse at
the next sign of pandemic.
The
economics of collapse are fairly straightforward. Businesses exist to make a
profit. If they can’t produce, they can’t sell things. This means they won’t
make profits, which means they are less able to employ you. Businesses can and
do (over short time periods) hold on to workers that they don’t need
immediately: they want to be able to meet demand when the economy picks back up
again. But, if things start to look really bad, then they won’t. So, more
people lose their jobs or fear losing their jobs. So they buy less. And the
whole cycle starts again, and we spiral into an economic depression.
In a normal crisis the prescription for solving
this is simple. The government spends, and it spends until people start
consuming and working again. (This prescription is what the economist John
Maynard Keynes is famous for).
But normal
interventions won’t work here because we don’t want the economy to recover (at
least, not immediately). The whole point of the lockdown is to stop people
going to work, where they spread the disease. One recent study suggested
that lifting lockdown measures in Wuhan (including workplace closures) too soon
could see China experience a second peak of cases later in 2020.
As the
economist James Meadway wrote, the correct COVID-19 response isn’t a
wartime economy – with massive upscaling of production. Rather, we need an
“anti-wartime” economy and a massive scaling back of production. And if we want
to be more resilient to pandemics in the future (and to avoid the worst of
climate change) we need a system capable of scaling back production in a way
that doesn’t mean loss of livelihood.
So what we
need is a different economic mindset. We tend to think of the economy as the
way we buy and sell things, mainly consumer goods. But this is not what an
economy is or needs to be. At its core, the economy is the way we take our
resources and turn them into the things we need to live. Looked at this
way, we can start to see more opportunities for living differently that allow
us to produce less stuff without increasing misery.
I and other
ecological economists have long been concerned with the question of how you
produce less in a socially just way, because the challenge of producing less is
also central to tackling climate change. All else equal, the more we produce
the more greenhouse gases we emit. So how do you reduce the amount of
stuff you make while keeping people in work?
Proposals
include reducing the length of the working week, or, as some of my
recent work has looked at, you could allow people to work more slowly and
with less pressure. Neither of these is directly applicable to COVID-19, where
the aim is reducing contact rather than output, but the core of the proposals
is the same. You have to reduce people’s dependence on a wage to be able to
live.
What is the economy for?
The key to
understanding responses to COVID-19 is the question of what the economy is for.
Currently, the primary aim of the global economy is to facilitate exchanges of
money. This is what economists call “exchange value”.
The dominant
idea of the current system we live in is that exchange value is the same thing
as use value. Basically, people will spend money on the things that they want
or need, and this act of spending money tells us something about how much they
value its “use”. This is why markets are seen as the best way to run society.
They allow you to adapt, and are flexible enough to match up productive
capacity with use value.
What
COVID-19 is throwing into sharp relief is just how false our beliefs about
markets are. Around the world, governments fear that critical systems will be
disrupted or overloaded: supply chains, social care, but principally
healthcare. There are lots of contributing factors to this. But let’s take two.
First, it is
quite hard to make money from many of the most essential societal services.
This is in part because a major driver of profits is labour productivity
growth: doing more with fewer people. People are a big cost factor in many
businesses, especially those that rely on personal interactions, like
healthcare. Consequently, productivity growth in the healthcare sector tends to
be lower than the rest of the economy, so its costs go up faster than
average.
Second, jobs
in many critical services aren’t those that tend to be highest valued in
society. Many of the best paid jobs only exist to facilitate exchanges; to make
money. They serve no wider purpose to society: they are what the anthropologist
David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”. Yet because they make lots of money we
have lots of consultants, a huge advertising industry and a massive financial
sector. Meanwhile, we have a crisis in health and social care, where people are
often forced out of useful jobs they enjoy, because these jobs don’t pay them enough
to live.
Pointless jobs
The fact
that so many people work pointless jobs is partly why we are so ill prepared to
respond to COVID-19. The pandemic is highlighting that many jobs are not
essential, yet we lack sufficient key workers to respond when things go bad.
People are
compelled to work pointless jobs because in a society where exchange value is
the guiding principle of the economy, the basic goods of life are mainly
available through markets. This means you have to buy them, and to buy them you
need an income, which comes from a job.
The other
side of this coin is that the most radical (and effective) responses that we
are seeing to the COVID-19 outbreak challenge the dominance of markets and
exchange value. Around the world governments are taking actions that three
months ago looked impossible. In Spain, private hospitals have been
nationalised. In the UK, the prospect of nationalising various modes of
transport has become very real. And France has stated its readiness to
nationalise large businesses.
Likewise, we
are seeing the breakdown of labour markets. Countries like Denmark and the
UK are providing people with an income in order to stop them from going to
work. This is an essential part of a successful lockdown. These measures are far
from perfect. Nonetheless, it is a shift from the principle that people have to
work in order to earn their income, and a move towards the idea that people
deserve to be able to live even if they cannot work.
This
reverses the dominant trends of the last 40 years. Over this time, markets and
exchange values have been seen as the best way of running an economy.
Consequently, public systems have come under increasing pressures to marketise,
to be run as though they were businesses who have to make money. Likewise,
workers have become more and more exposed to the market – zero-hours contracts
and the gig economy have removed the layer of protection from market
fluctuations that long term, stable, employment used to offer.
These
changes give me hope. They give us the chance to save many lives. They even
hint at the possibility of longer term change that makes us happier and helps
us tackle climate change. But why did it take us so long to get here? Why
were many countries so ill-prepared to slowdown production? The answer lies in
a recent World Health Organisation report: they did not have the right “mindset”.
Our economic imaginations
There has
been a broad economic consensus for 40 years. This has limited the ability of
politicians and their advisers to see cracks in the system, or imagine
alternatives. This mindset is driven by two linked beliefs:
·
The
market is what delivers a good quality of life, so it must be protected
·
The
market will always return to normal after short periods of crisis
These views
are common to many Western countries. But they are strongest in the UK and the
US, both of which have appeared to be badly prepared to respond to
COVID-19.
In the UK,
attendees at a private engagement reportedly summarised the Prime
Minister’s most senior aide’s approach to COVID-19 as “herd immunity, protect
the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”. The government
has denied this, but if real, it’s not surprising. At a government event early
in the pandemic, a senior civil servant said to me: “Is it worth the economic
disruption? If you look at the treasury valuation of a life, probably not.”
This kind of
view is endemic in a particular elite class. It is well represented by a Texas
official who argued that many elderly people would gladly die rather than see
the US sink into economic depression. This view endangers many vulnerable
people (and not all vulnerable people are elderly), and, as I have tried to lay
out here, it is a false choice.
One of the
things the COVID-19 crisis could be doing, is expanding that economic
imagination. As governments and citizens take steps that three months ago
seemed impossible, our ideas about how the world works could change rapidly.
Let us look at where this re-imagining could take us.
Four futures
To help us
visit the future, I’m going to use a technique from the field of
futures studies. You take two factors you think will be important in driving
the future, and you imagine what will happen under different combinations of
those factors.
The factors
I want to take are value and centralisation. Value refers to whatever is the
guiding principle of our economy. Do we use our resources to maximise exchanges
and money, or do we use them to maximise life? Centralisation refers to the
ways that things are organised, either by of lots of small units or by one big
commanding force. We can organise these factors into a grid, which can then be
populated with scenarios. So we can think about what might happen if we try to
respond to the coronavirus with the four extreme combinations:
1) State
capitalism: centralised response, prioritising exchange value
2) Barbarism: decentralised response prioritising exchange value
3) State socialism: centralised response, prioritising the protection of life
4) Mutual aid: decentralised response prioritising the protection of life.
2) Barbarism: decentralised response prioritising exchange value
3) State socialism: centralised response, prioritising the protection of life
4) Mutual aid: decentralised response prioritising the protection of life.
A new kind of patriotism
The world has long equated patriotism with the
armed forces. But you can’t shoot a virus. Those on the frontlines against
coronavirus aren’t conscripts, mercenaries or enlisted men; they are our
doctors, nurses, pharmacists, teachers, caregivers, store clerks, utility
workers, small-business owners and employees. Like Li Wenliang and the doctors
of Wuhan, many are suddenly saddled with unfathomable tasks, compounded by an
increased risk of contamination and death they never signed up for.
When all is said and done, perhaps we will recognize their sacrifice as true patriotism, saluting our doctors and nurses, genuflecting and saying, “Thank you for your service,” as we now do for military veterans. We will give them guaranteed health benefits and corporate discounts, and build statues and have holidays for this new class of people who sacrifice their health and their lives for ours. Perhaps, too, we will finally start to understand patriotism more as cultivating the health and life of your community, rather than blowing up someone else’s community. Maybe the de-militarization of American patriotism and love of community will be one of the benefits to come out of this whole awful mess.
Less
individualism
The coronavirus pandemic marks the end of our
romance with market society and hyper-individualism. We could turn toward
authoritarianism. Imagine President Donald Trump(USA) trying to suspend the
November election. But I believe we will go in the other direction. We’re now
seeing the market-based models for social organization fail, catastrophically,
as self-seeking behavior makes this crisis so much more dangerous than it
needed to be.
When this ends, we will reorient our politics and make substantial new investments in public goods—for health, especially—and public services. I don’t think we will become less communal. Instead, we will be better able to see how our fates are linked. The cheap breakfast I eat from a restaurant that denies paid sick leave to its cashiers and kitchen staff makes me more vulnerable to illness, as does the neighbour who refuses to stay home in a pandemic because our public school failed to teach him science or critical thinking skills. The economy—and the social order it helps support—will collapse if the government doesn’t guarantee income for the millions of workers who will lose their jobs in a major recession or depression. Young adults will fail to launch if government doesn’t help reduce or cancel their student debt. The coronavirus pandemic is going to cause immense pain and suffering. But it will force us to reconsider who we are and what we value, and, in the long run, it could help us rediscover the better version of ourselves.
Religious
worship will look different
All faiths have dealt with the challenge of
keeping faith alive under the adverse conditions of war or diaspora or
persecution—but never all faiths at the same time. Religion in the time of
quarantine will challenge conceptions of what it means to minister and to
fellowship. But it will also expand the opportunities for those who have no
local congregation to sample sermons from afar. Contemplative practices may
gain popularity. And maybe—just maybe—the culture war that has branded those
who preach about the common good with the epithet “Social Justice Warriors” may
ease amid the very present reminder of our interconnected humanity. We
all go to temples for to find home but when all poor needed them they were all
closed, whose money has built it? Humans’!
New forms
of reform
The epidemic also revealed deadly flaws in the
health care system, and it awakened us to the need for the protection of
marriage—revelations which led to landmark reforms. I wouldn’t be surprised to
see some analogous changes in the wake of coronavirus. People are finding new
ways to connect and support each other in adversity; they are sure to demand
major changes in the health-care system and maybe also the government; and
they’ll become newly conscious of interdependency and community. I can’t
predict the precise effects, but I’m sure we'll be seeing them for years.
TECH
Regulatory
barriers to online tools will fallCOVID-19 will sweep away many of the artificial barriers to moving more of our lives online. Not everything can become virtual, of course. But in many areas of our lives, uptake on genuinely useful online tools has been slowed by powerful legacy players, often working in collaboration with overcautious bureaucrats. Medicare allowing billing for telemedicine was a long-overdue change, for instance, as was revisiting HIPAA to permit more medical providers to use the same tools the rest of us use every day to communicate, such as Skype, Facetime and email. The regulatory bureaucracy might well have dragged its feet on this for many more years if not for this crisis. The resistance—led by teachers’ unions and the politicians beholden to them—to allowing partial homeschooling or online learning for K-12 kids has been swept away by necessity. It will be near-impossible to put that genie back in the bottle in the fall, with many families finding that they prefer full or partial homeschooling or online homework. For many college students, returning to an expensive dorm room on a depopulated campus will not be appealing, forcing massive changes in a sector that has been ripe for innovation for a long time. And while not every job can be done remotely, many people are learning that the difference between having to put on a tie and commute for an hour or working efficiently at home was always just the ability to download one or two apps plus permission from their boss. Once companies sort out their remote work dance steps, it will be harder—and more expensive—to deny employees those options. In other words, it turns out, an awful lot of meetings (and doctors’ appointments and classes) really could have been an email. And now they will be.
A healthier digital lifestyle
Perhaps we can use our time with our devices to rethink the kinds of community we can create through them. If, moving forward, we apply our most human instincts to our devices,that will have been a powerful COVID-19 legacy. Not only alone together, but together alone.
A boon to virtual reality
VR allows us to have the experiences we want even if we have to be isolated, quarantined or alone. Maybe that will be how we adapt and stay safe in the next outbreak. I would like to see a VR program that helped with the socialization and mental health of people who had to self-isolate. Imagine putting on glasses, and suddenly you are in a classroom or another communal setting, or even a positive psychology intervention.
HEALTH/SCIENCE
The pandemic will shift the paradigm of where our healthcare delivery takes place. For years, telemedicine has lingered on the sidelines as a cost-controlling, high convenience system. Out of necessity, remote office visits could skyrocket in popularity as traditional-care settings are overwhelmed by the pandemic. There would also be containment-related benefits to this shift; staying home for a video call keeps you out of the transit system, out of the waiting room and, most importantly, away from patients who need critical care.
An opening for stronger family care
The coronavirus pandemic has revealed gaping holes in our care infrastructure. With loved ones sick and children suddenly home from school indefinitely, they’ve been forced to make impossible choices among their families, their health and financial ruin. After all, meaningful child care assistance is extremely limited, access to long-term care is piecemeal at best, and too few workers have access to paid family and medical leave, which means that missed work means missed pay. This crisis should unleash widespread political support for Universal Family Care—a single public federal fund that we all contribute to, that we all benefit from, that helps us take care of our families while we work, from child care and elder care to support for people with disabilities and paid family leave. Coronavirus has put a particular national spotlight on unmet needs of the growing older population in our country, and the tens of millions of overstretched family and professional caregivers they rely on. Care is and always has been a shared responsibility. Yet, our policy has never fully supported it. This moment, challenging as it is, should jolt us into changing that.
Science reigns again
Truth and its most popular emissary, science, have been declining in credibility for more than a generation. Unlike with tobacco use or climate change, science doubters will be able to see the impacts of the coronavirus immediately. At least for the next 35 years, I think we can expect that public respect for expertise in public health and epidemics to be at least partially restored.
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