Learning From Covid About Work In A Modern Economy

A surprisingly central issue in the recent Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was the?sidewalk restaurant sheds ?that sprung up overnight during the Covid crisis.?Lots of people liked how necessity had caused life to spill out onto the street from indoors.?They did not mind less room for cars either.?Because of the crisis a long-term?goal of urban planners ?was abruptly realized.

Another story we will remember from the crisis was the one about the investment banker who found herself in her childhood bedroom working at midnight.?On her birthday.?She was confronted with how the magical technologies we have embraced not only amplify unhealthy aspects of work culture but enable them twenty-four hours a day.

We knew these things before Covid.?But during Covid it was harder to ignore the ways we had accommodated ourselves to routines that shortchanged the things we value.?The pandemic was an accelerant in making clear that so many things—brutal commutes, low wages for suddenly “essential” workers, poor childcare options , and all kinds of imbalances—were not serving us.?Nor were they serving society nor a modern economy.

We all speculate about which Covid-related changes will stick with us once Covid is subdued.?A good place to begin is by asking, What gets us excited collectively?

?The fruits of calamity

Changes in the way we live often seem inevitable in retrospect.?We forget that it often took calamity on an epic scale for those changes to happen.?The end of the feudal system, for example, is often traced to the Black Death of the 14th Century, which led to labor shortages that empowered individuals to seek a better deal for themselves.?Calamity loosened the restraints on society’s imagination, bending the arc of history toward greater respect for human dignity.

Perhaps we are at such a moment now.

The virus compelled us to reframe everything.?We found ourselves asking if the way our working lives were organized was succeeding for us—for?all?of us.?The zeitgeist seems to want to move us someplace more humane than we were before Covid.

An often-heard remark during the pandemic was that the shared stress made us kinder to one another, more willing to acknowledge a collective humanity in our transactions.?The common experience of working at home while simultaneously raising children, for example, allowed us to experience each other on a more fully human dimension than before, and we kind of liked it.

The response of employers to the stresses on their employees seemed genuinely empathetic, not like a feel-good PR gesture.?And it worked, challenging previous ideas of maximizing human productivity.

1B.C. and after

Think of the ways conversations about working remotely have changed from what they were before the pandemic.

B.C.—Before Covid—remote work was considered a kind of perk—if you were lucky enough to get it.?During Covid we had to learn how to make working from home serve the missions of organizations?and?for the people working in those organizations.?Now we talk with more candor about working from home in terms of how it supports childcare priorities—particularly given the continued cultural stress to be both employees and caregivers.?We see the effects on unhealthy work routines on families with much more clarity now.?It is harder now to overlook that long commutes are usually a time waste, environmentally damaging and, in short, a pain.

If you need evidence, remember the uproar when Morgan Stanley CEO?James Gorman said in June ?that he expected the firm’s employees to be back in the office after Labor Day, threatening consequences if they were not.?Before Covid this expectation would not have merited a comment.?Soon Gorman had to walk it back.?That said a good deal about resistance to returning to the old imbalances.

The possibility of change does not just apply to the professional class.

Before Covid low-wage workers struggled to feel individual agency.?During the pandemic we came face to face with this when we acknowledged that so many of the people we cheered as essential workers were barely making a living, indeed were treated as disposable.?After Covid amid labor shortages employers are compelled to?address issues like a living wage ,?working conditions ?and?predictable shifts .

Like the sidewalk restaurant bubbles, previous resistance to change has weakened because it has to.?Wages are rising, for example, and the world keeps turning.

The things we value are often in tension with each other.?The world is like that.?But change once is institutionalized it is hard to undo.

What Covid made vivid for us is that a stable, balanced society and economy needs to be more than an aspiration.?We cannot unsee nor unfeel what we saw and felt in the past 18 months.?To return to our old ways now would demonstrate an historic lack of imagination.

This essay was written in collaboration with Andrew Green. To read the original on Medium?click here ?.