COVID19 unraveled the workforce. Heres how to fix it Mary L. Gray
so right now the pandemic is throwing
many workers out of stable nine-to-five
office jobs into a dizzying world where
they are working on projects whenever
and wherever they can get a kid-free
moment to connect to the internet but
for many this is not really new nor as a
temporary instead the pandemic is
exposing and accelerating to structural
changes in our society that are 20 years
in the making
one is painfully obvious information and
service driven economies depend on
legions of workers food service daycare
creative and health care workers all
essential to our economy but whose
faiths rise and fall of consumer demand
the second transformation is much harder
the see despite the headlines of a
full-on robot takeover more and more
businesses are not using AI to fully
automate their combining algorithms
application programming interfaces and
the Internet to contract work out
letting computation schedule manage ship
and deliver bill tasks that can be
picked up by people surfing for work
online 24/7 around the globe encoded 19
is shown every business that it can meet
at least some of this labor needs
through these on-demand task based work
arrangements these are not niche jobs
that are going to go away when the
pandemic passes or with the advancement
of AI we are living through the tech
enabled unraveling of full-time
employment itself a recent study of job
skills and titles listed on LinkedIn
suggested that more than a hundred and
forty nine million new digital tech jobs
are going to come online in the next
five years alone and the bulk of these
are in information services online tasks
that are going to require
problem-solving and time-bound projects
that depend on bringing together
collaborative teams digitally connected
tasks like content review and moderation
telemedicine text based customer
support data analytics and last-mile
physical delivery of services from home
care to food delivery are all part of
this trend and all are technically hard
problems for full automation they
require keeping people in the loop to
push a I along or to take over when AI
falls short
now these open call task based labor
markets deliver two types of value to
both businesses and consumers
availability and abundance think about
the last time you used to share a
ride-sharing app like uber or lyft you
don’t want just somebody picking you up
you want the experience of opening the
app and seeing ten drivers nearby idling
waiting to pick you up when you’re
actually ready to walk out the door
businesses serving consumers of media to
meet the demands or organized around
finite projects are no longer able to
meet the needs finding the perfect
employee who must build up the skills
over the course of a twenty year to
deliver everything so arguably society
does not know how to value people who
are available in a moment’s notice
unless they have cachet as experts or
superstars where we also have a very bad
history of valuing people who put
themselves in the service of others
whether it’s teachers nurses custodians
foodservice or stage real parents but
now we increasingly don’t see or know
the people behind the services that we
take for granted which makes us even
more susceptible to ignoring their needs
in vertel a worsening their work
conditions so the information service
work that we studied can isolate workers
there’s no factory for no single
employer of that code no benefits no
base pay or they pay for being on-call
no workers are able to collectively
represent their interests and they don’t
share a sense of professional identity
that can build solidarity as it’s been
built in traditional labor movements for
example when I ask people to describe
their work some answer that they work
for themselves others said that they
work for a Silicon Valley startup and if
you proudly describes themselves as
business owners subcontracting
to create jobs for others people could
be doing the exact same task and spend
vastly different hours on the clock
motivated by different needs and
different interests yet this new form of
work depends on them all rallying when
called and leaving when their task is
done so citizens governments consumers
workers and businesses need to broker a
new social contract and safety net for
these workers we have to assume that
they don’t have a single employer or
work site that they will be constantly
learning task to task and they’ll bring
that knowledge to their next assignment
so the next business and consumer
benefits if the pandemic has taught us
anything it’s that our economy hinges on
equipping every working adult with a set
of essential benefits health care sick
leave employment insurance family leave
and continuing education for most of the
industrial era we’ve treated those
benefits as perks to recruit and retain
full-time employees we can’t afford to
do that anymore and the marketplace
alone can’t make the future of a I
enabled service work equitable or
sustainable that’s up to us thank you
thank you Mary that was great um so I
assume these ghost workers exist in
almost every community around the world
is there a typical demographic profile
for these workers no I mean they really
are just like you and me there are
people from the age of 18 to their late
70s doing this work the average age
among the people we talked with was the
early thirties really the beginning
usually the the prime of the first
couple of ladders on the wrong of going
up your career ladder there were as many
men and as men and women there was quite
a bit of gender diversity people who
identified as trans or non-binary or
trying to avoid discrimination in formal
employment so it really ran the gamut
the thing that really stuck out to us
most people were college-educated what
was significant was that there were many
who
first-generation college-goers so these
were people who hadn’t were just using
their education tool and stable
employment when the Great Recession hit
so many people had come into these jobs
because they were trying to stabilize
after the Great Recession it makes me
wonder how they’re faring during this
pandemic are they better off than some
are they continuing to work so the
workers I’m still in touch with are
really struggling in some ways they are
carrying on as they always have the
kinds of tasks they were doing have not
necessarily diminished many of them were
working subcontracting with other
businesses that still have contracts
they need to fulfill their working with
a mixture of full-time employees who are
trying to finish their jobs from home
but they’re also competing now with more
people who are furloughed or have lost
their jobs who are turning to this kind
of work to try and find economic means
so there are a lot of supports that
these workers need and other workers
need can you talk a bit about some of
those support and is there a way for
industries to share the costs and the
systems that need to be put in place
yeah I think what’s most notable from
our research is that because there isn’t
one kind of worker and because this is
really an open-call approach so think
about Facebook or Wikipedia that means
you have a range of people who are
coming to these task based jobs often on
contract because they’re trying to fill
a particular need and their lives so
there’s not one kind of worker here that
means that often there’s a core group
who called them always on who were doing
most of the work but there was a large
group of good percentage we called
regulars who had a set number of hours
or a set number of tasks certain kinds
of clashes they were doing who were
Justin as important to keep these labor
markets going and then a long tail of
people experimenting trying to figure
out if this was a place where they could
practice their graphic design skills or
be able to learn a new language all of
them were equally
important we call this the Pareto
distribution to these labor markets that
means that there are businesses that are
getting so much value out of people who
might be spending no more than a couple
of hours doing the tasks that they do
the approach we have to take and we saw
two businesses particularly who were
models for really approaching this labor
force to support it and make it
sustainable the approach is to see that
workers need colleagues they need
support they need businesses that are
responsive to them and they also need
businesses to be accountable no matter
whether they’re offering two minutes of
their time or 20 hours a week so so what
are the things that you imagine we
should we should install things like
portable health care and beyond those
sort of benefits the cultural things you
mentioned what do you imagine these
workers should should have as not
attached to they’re sort of a full-time
employer let me take the example of
actually a group that’s fairly familiar
to tedsters the open translation project
it is the backbone of translating many
TED Talks that is run by Amara it was
one of the groups that we studied and
several years ago they were able to move
from being an all-volunteer group five
hundred thousand large to being able to
offer their transcriptionists paid work
because companies were coming to them
asking them that they could quickly
translate and caption video so that’s a
really good example of a company that
took the approach of saying we have a
group of people who want to be able to
spend more time on the site and turn it
into paid work what do we need to do to
support their efforts the things that
Amara does they approach every project
as a collaborative team effectively a
cooperative of linguists and
transcribers coming together to work and
they make sure that their schedules are
the priority they do everything they can
to give people opportunities to choose
the
Jax that they wanted you and the third
thing that they’re thinking about is how
to get people that capacity to control
their schedules so that they can make
work work for their daily lives in many
cases people are juggling childcare
elder care so they need more control
over what they’re doing day to day now a
company like Amara can’t make the entire
environment the entire ecosystem of
captioning and translation equitable and
fair and sustainable we need policies
that basically recognize every company
needs to be able to provide training
every company should be providing some
opportunities that lead to committed
element we’re going to have to have some
way and we see plenty of examples what
plural benefits could look like where
you have every single company that’s
getting value out of the worker putting
in money not just for that worker but so
that some worker like them can show up
tomorrow that’s the approach that’s
going to look for this labor market that
relies on and will continue to need that
peretta distribution of participation I
mean it sounds like there’s opportunity
for exploitation but also a really
positive opportunity for both employees
and for companies yeah the exploitation
the exploitation is really coming from
the fact that we don’t have labor laws
that really approach labor as something
that can be contracted and contingent
and a good thing like we’ve literally
have written labor laws and lock them
into the equivalent of the assembly line
from the early 20th century we haven’t
updated our labor laws to think about
well how would I underwrite every worker
to be able to approach a job as though
it’s something they’re going to do and
then leave quickly as I described
earlier so there’s nothing inherently
bad about these jobs is that we don’t
value them we could make these
incredibly rich opportunities for the
globe to be able to tap in and provide
what it is that they want to do what
they excel at or what they want to
experiment with and provide
value to the businesses they’re serving
the consumers who benefit from what they
have to offer but ultimately from the
workers being able to move to the kinds
of projects that really excite them and
fit their lives like if we could give
workers control of their schedules
opportunities to control the kinds of
projects they work on and the ability to
connect with and collaborate with their
peers that would be a game-changer but I
imagine it also changes how companies
see their competitive advantages like
companies often look to hire the best
people and sort of lock them into their
ecosystem how does it change how
companies think about that so that
quality of abundance that I described
earlier that’s really critical to
understanding why companies don’t
benefit from investing deeply in one
employee trying to find the perfect
full-time worker and hoping that what
they learn will stay with that company
over the long haul there’s nothing about
service driven economies particularly
let’s use the example of health care or
medicine there’s nothing about that
world that doesn’t constantly need to
change and update and so the real
benefit for every business is to be able
to draw on the expertise of people to
now have the domain expertise that we
need to be able to deliver the new
service that I want to put out there the
worker doesn’t benefit from being stuck
in a job where they’re outdated or
they’re bored with what they have to
offer if they’re constantly being
challenged and given the opportunity to
learn what they need to keep learning
they’re going to be able to bring
something of value again to other
businesses we definitely describe this
as a Commons like if we were approaching
labor as a Commons where workers are
available to each other the primary goal
is that they’re really serving
themselves and enriching themselves to
bring what they can to market businesses
are going to benefit far more than
trying to hold on to that expert or that
superstar because odds are pretty good
that expert or superstar
is going to be outdated within a few
months of a project they won’t have the
capacities that you actually need on the
team for the speculate project where
you’re trying to figure out what does
the consumer want next okay I have one
more question before we take some
questions from the community you’ve also
written about the human elements behind
the new pandemic contact contact tracing
technology how does that relate to your
work well in the last few months I’ve
been working with colleagues at Duke
Health pandemic response Network and
idor to look at the very basic health
worker lore flows of doing contact
tracing because most of contact tracing
it actually involves teams working
together to identify someone who might
be sick and then from there talking with
them it’s a lot of emotional work and in
many cases what we’re missing
is the capacity to quickly assemble the
teams that are going to be best suited
for connecting with someone with the
right language with like cultural bat
and great cultural background to be able
to help support them in staying healthy
so we’ve been thinking how would you
take an on-demand approach to work trace
work so that the workers themselves can
work as teams to tap in and tap out to
be able to get the relief of not being
the only one who has to be providing
that support to imagine what it would
look like to have community based
contact tracing so that we really can
have the legions of people we need to be
able to support our efforts to keep
ourselves healthy yeah it sounds like an
important opportunity we’re gonna take
some questions from the community now
can you put up the first question from
Yvonne Akana how can government and
private institutions create a landing
space for the always-on workers that’s a
great question because in the most
important by that question is that it
really is about government policy and
business the private sector seeing
there’s common cause here
and listening to what workers have to
say about what they need and so that
landing pad is really starting from the
very beginning assuming that as a
business I want the worker I recruit to
my project to come in the door with the
basics with that those essential
benefits that means having the cost
sharing the businesses private sector
will need to do as well as government to
make sure every worker has health care
has sick leave has employment insurance
not unemployment insurance but
employment insurance that assumes that
people are always going to be between
tasks at some point and that’s a good
thing
so the landing pad is really about
finding a way to give workers downtime
that they aren’t absorbing the cost of
that downtime because the downtime is
going to benefit every worker every
consumer when they come back to a task
boy that’s super clear right now isn’t
it yeah we have another question from
Trevor how do you see this new world of
work affecting the non-productive
reasons people work social bonding sense
of identity contribution etc I love that
question because one of the things that
I found fascinating was when we were
doing this work even though it’s
designed literally to keep people fairly
separate and atomized to do tasks
the assumption by engineers is nobody
needs to talk here
we found workers very quickly forming
social connections building peer
relationships mentoring each other
helping each other literally texting
each other to keep each other animated
at work to keep to keep awake for
example we had a group that we studied
they call themselves team genius who
would hang out in Skype and basically
just chatter between projects that kind
of connection that kind of solidarity is
there workers create that for themselves
that is fundamental glue that doesn’t go
away we always bring our social selves
to the work that we do work is
incredibly social as much as it’s
productive and
nationalizing so what most workers are
really looking for is a way to manage
those relationships and not have them
controlled overly so by by a boss who
may not have their best interests it may
not necessarily know the best
connections that they need the
ever-present water-cooler whether we’re
in the office or not I mean this really
brings us to the idea that this is we
all relate to this right now right this
isn’t just a group of a particular group
of workers this is happening to all of
us exactly I mean for me the pandemic
really brought home how much the reality
of the lives of many people around the
globe who are effectively in informal
service relationships most of their
economic activity is helping somebody
design a shirt or get something
delivered that that exchanged and
particularly thinking about health care
how much of our population is aging and
how dependent we are on health care that
reality is not as you said futuristic
that’s that’s now and the pandemic
hopefully Prime’s all of us to see we
are in much better shape if we assume
there are some basics that need to be
there that cannot be nice to have they
can’t be the perk of landing the good
job mostly because we need people to be
able to find what works for them not
because they happened into you know a
good opportunity where they had the
social capital the cachet to get the
good job so the pandemic makes it really
obvious that we economically will be in
a better place if we provide that
baseline for everyone yeah certainly
let’s have one more question from the
community
from Jamie our current society favors
directing profits to shareholders and
senior management driven by quarterly
profit expectations workers are left out
of the equation how do we convince
companies of the short and long term
advantages of funneling benefits to the
base level workers and how do we shift
laws and regulations to protect workers
rights when the shift has been in the
opposite direction for the past few
decades I think that last part the
question is so importantly we have been
shifting to a reliance a deep reliance
on contract work for four reasons that
are now in businesses interest we could
argue to the day as long that the
dismantling of full-time employment was
never about particular needs in the
economy but we are a consumer driven
economy we depend on figuring out and
tapping into what is a consumer lot
dance that service-oriented experiential
way of creating value that that’s not
going away you know we don’t make a lot
of money off of manufacturing chairs we
make a lot of our economic lives out of
serving each other and so that reality
of realizing our employment laws are
part of a problem right now they’re
constraining businesses from offering a
suite of benefits precisely because
businesses in the United States feel
like they can’t afford to be employers
of record because in the United States
that means I’ll have to provide health
care I’ll have to provide sick leave
well wouldn’t it be amazing if those
were provided and an employer could
literally say okay I’ve got who I need
for this project and bringing them on
I’m responsible for putting in upfront
some resources so that I know tomorrow
I’m going to be able to find the next
person I need for the next project I’m
doing so it’s in our business interest
in these new markets to fully take in we
need to make sure our policies are
giving us workers who are equipped to
start today leave tomorrow and
after that I’m gonna be able to bring in
somebody who can start the next task
that means being interested in the long
term in some ways saying I am going to
have to give up quarterly profits but
the dividends down the road especially
look at what we’re learning right now it
doesn’t pay to have people without
support to be able to weather what is
effectively something that will pass we
are destroying our economy because we
didn’t think about the need for just a
little bit of upfront prep and a little
bit of a front investment in workers it
seems like we did a great job of
designing a system to react to companies
on and off needs whether because of
uncertainty or crisis or you know just
speed to market but we didn’t think
about the other side of it which is what
the workers need to be supportive in
that new reality so we all right I guess
questions are flooding in from the
community so we’ll take one more okay
from Steven is part of the problem that
these workers may not be American and
thus revisions in American labor law
could be problematic good question it’s
really I mean it’s a great question it’s
complicated because in some cases yes
for some some information services we’re
talking about localizing material for
other markets for emerging markets so
there’s no way to do that localization
the way to make sure a product or a
service is really tailored to say a
Brazilian audience without hiring
workers who really have that context
down but for a lot of this work it’s not
just a global question we have a supply
chain that’s dependent on many different
workers from around the globe
contributing but yet we in the United
States have set no marker that says this
is the baseline for how workers
participating a test based market should
be supported we could start today with
being able to say we’re going to have
expectations that every worker does have
health care we’re going to have
expectations that paid leave
is a part of employment in this setting
we will be paying more that will
eventually become the model for what the
rest of the globe sees as necessary for
supporting the workers who are
contributing to an information and
service economy so it the challenges is
not as complicated as we make it it’s
much more of our mental map for what’s
the good job it’s the full-time
employment position that’s no longer the
good job in fact those are really hard
to find in most of the world so it’s
thinking about what would make every job
dignified equitable sustainable what
does that look like and we have the
power to do that we have the means to do
that and we now have an entire economy
that needs that that’s the difference
Mary before I let you go just one more
question this has obviously been a huge
pause and a huge people to our economy
and businesses around the world do you
feel hopeful in this moment that
businesses are paying attention and may
be more interested in putting some of
these policies and plates or supporting
this kind of you know new regulation I
do I do because I think any of the
companies that are involved in on-demand
services any of the companies that know
that they’re as reliant as as much as
they need their full-time employees
there is reliant on contract workers
they know though that they need those
contract workers to be in the best
position to come and go as possible and
the way forward is precisely being able
to say gosh I actually want workers all
workers no matter where their work game
and matter how many hours they put in no
matter what projects they pick up I want
them to have this baseline you might
think of it as you know back in the day
we knew that we needed everybody to have
universal education there wasn’t a there
wasn’t a business out there that thought
gosh I don’t want my workers to have
some baseline of education well the
baseline has moved up but they
swine is now making sure that my workers
have higher education know how to learn
to learn like have that sense of being
able to pursue education that they do
have the health care they need because
they’re let they’re living longer they
have more to offer you know so these
these things that really didn’t make
sense when we first put labour laws in
place now are necessary to the
functioning of our economy and I do feel
incredibly hopeful because I think
that’s obvious to anybody listening to
me right now and to many of the
businesses that want new playing rules
they want to be told what are the ways
we can move forward together because
none of these companies can make this
new reality on their own the market is
not going to solve this this is this is
a social policy need and we’ve never had
companies define work conditions on
their own we’ve always needed society to
come together and say what’s our
baseline