newswire: 6/19/20
- According to a new study, older workers are more likely than younger workers to be able to work from home. Fully 47% of workers age 65+ have jobs that can be done remotely; among 16- to 24-year-olds, this share is only 27%. (Center for Retirement Research at Boston College)
- NH: Since the pandemic lockdown in March, a big workforce divide has emerged--between those who can work at home and those who can't. If you belong to the second group, you are at a disadvantage. During the lockdown, working at your job may be illegal. Even after the lockdown, either you or your customers may not want to risk infection--or your employer may not want to reopen. In any event, you are much more likely to be unemployed.
- As we have explained elsewhere (see "Lives Changed in a Major Way Due to COVID-19"), job losses since February have been heaviest among workers who are the youngest, the least paid, the least educated--and among nonwhites rather than whites. See the following Pew chart. At least part of this strongly regressive skew in unemployment is due to the fact that these workers are more likely to be unable to do their work from their homes. In other words, the very nature of their work requires them to be at their workplace.
- Also, women have most more jobs than men. This differs from previous recessions, in which men (working in more cyclical sectors like manufacturing) suffer the biggest initial brunt, and women often move back into the labor market to make up for lost household income. Not this time. From February to May, employment has declined more for women than men in every age bracket.
- Why? Probably, again, because women need to be at their workplace more than men. And that, in turn, is because they are more likely to choose jobs that involve working with other people. Men, as a group, prefer more to work with things or systems. (See "Why Are Occupations Still Segregated by Gender?") Economist Stefania Albanesi at the University of Pittsburgh has calculated that women account for about 77% of workers in occupations that require close personal contact and cannot easily be done remotely, such as food preparation, health-care support and personal service. (See also "The Spread of the Pink-Collar Economy.")
- All this is mostly inference. It would be nice to know exactly how these must-be-at-work jobs sort out by demographic group. That's what Alicia Munnell's researchers at Boston College have done. They started with a BLS questionnaire asking workers about their jobs, and then they crosswalked each job to the types of workers who do that job.
- The results aren't perfect because many of the BLS questions have to do with risking injury, physical lifting, wearing protective gear, supervising machinery, and the like. They don't identify many jobs dominated by women involving close personal contact. According to the chosen questions, women are judged to be more capable of working from home than men. This is erroneous, I think, especially if we add the caveat that these jobs also cannot involve direct contact with other people.
- Otherwise, the results are mostly what we would expect. By earnings, workers in the second-lowest quintile are half as likely (31%) to be able to work from home as those in the highest quintile (62%). There's an even larger education gap. In all age brackets, less than 25% of workers with high school or less can work remotely--versus over 60% of workers with college or more.
- The remote-able share of workers also rises by age, though less dramatically. This may seem counter-intuitive since computer skills are deemed essential to most home work--and older Americans are widely regarded as less computer literate. But as the authors rightly point out, this skill gap has largely disappeared. First-wave Xers and Boomers, who today dominate the 55+ worker population, are no less able to use computers than younger workers.
- Over the last twenty years, moreover, the rapid expansion of the senior workforce has been disproportionately driven by higher-earning workers. As recently as 1999, the average weekly earnings of workers 70+ were well below that of every age bracket over 25. By 2017, it was higher than any younger age bracket.
- While it is true that many low-income Boomers today have no choice but to work beyond retirement age (see "Why are Senior Flipping Burgers?"), most low-income Boomers do not make this choice--or cannot due to disability. The biggest delayers of retirement today are healthy professionals at the higher end of the earnings spectrum (see "Are Retiring Boomers Suppressing Wage Growth?"). And correlated with higher earnings, again, is the ability to work from home.
