I definitely logged my time living and working in large cities, and I've always worked in
offices, whether it was in New York or elsewhere. That's Heather May in the US there. She recently
swapped her workplace in a big city for a more rural location without changing jobs.
She could do that because everyone these days is working from home and well,
home can be anywhere. The idea of working remotely was really exciting to me because
of the amount of time you spend commuting, and just the stress. And I just loved the
idea of working more autonomously and was really keen to get out of the city and find
a quieter lifestyle. Heather's one of many, many office workers
has welcomed the global shift to home working in the US. 97% of office workers have been
working from home during the pandemic 82% say they want to continue to do so at least
once a week and future. That's according to a survey of nearly 3000 respondents done by
global workplace analytics in the US. The winners from all of this may well be some
smaller cities in America. They're luring office workers like heavily away from the
Big Smoke. Heather spoke to my colleague Edwin Lane.
Florence, Alabama is part of the shoals and if listeners are familiar with
Muscle Shoals it's the home of fame recording Muscle Shoals recording. Etta James. Aretha
Franklin's of Rolling Stones all recorded. And it's right off the Tennessee River. They
call it the singing River. And there's a reason for that, because I mean, you really feel
and hear the music just in the air. It's a very energising and also really peaceful area.
Heather works for a fashion tech company based in San Francisco. For most of her career,
she's worked in offices in major cities, including 12 years in New York, but now she's part of
a program that pays remote workers thousands of dollars to base themselves in the northwest
corner of Alabama. It definitely was different and a lot of people
were like, what are you doing? You're moving to where, you know. And so, I'm having to
explain to folks that Yeah, I'm moving to this area, but it's got so much value to it.
They will give you up to $10,000 to relocate to the shoals which is a lot of money. But
then when I looked online at the housing cost, it was so affordable that I could actually
afford to purchase my first home. And that was just really exciting for me. And also,
you don't just get a grant and that's it. Built into this. You are part of a community.
The shoals is just a really friendly, welcoming place.
Heather moved to Alabama before the coronavirus pandemic struck the US. But since then she
says there's been a big increase in interest from her friends and colleagues in working
remotely and escaping the major cities. They've been trying to course all of my colleagues,
at least the ones I'd like to relocate. But uh, but yeah, I definitely see an uptick.
And when I talk to friends in New York and San Francisco, they're for sure looking for
other options. I had a few discussions with colleagues in San Francisco last week, who
were looking at housing outside of San Francisco for the first Time, you know, up to this point,
they were really happy living in the big city. They got what they needed from there. But
with everything going on, it's just become really stressful. And so people are looking
for different options, whether it's, you know, moving away moving to smaller homes, buying
RVs. You know, there's there's a huge uptick in RV sales right now like, yeah, people are
looking for alternatives and working remotely is the way that people are making that happen.
The remote shoals program that Heather signed up to is one of a handful of similar schemes
set up in the last two years by small US cities and regions to attract remote workers. It's
seen as a way to revitalise parts of the country that have seen talented workers drift away
to the major coastal cities as someone who's lived on both coasts. I spent
a large percentage of my time telling people that Tulsa was far cooler city than they potentially
expected. Aaron Bolzle is the executive director of
Tulsa remote, the program for the city of Tulsa in Oklahoma, since it launched its head
More than 20,000 applications from remote workers across the country. He says the boom
in remote working in the pandemic is reinforcing an existing trend. I
think it's important to realise that individuals were looking to leave the major cities for
a long time even before COVID. The strain and stress of day to day life in a major city
is real and it continues to grow. Our goal was to identify those individuals who had
already been thinking about moving away from major cities show them that Tulsa was not
only an option, but a really amazing place that they potentially have never considered,
and help them get integrated into the community in hopes that over time, we can dramatically
diversify the industry representation within our community, ensuring that this city is
extremely resilient in the future. So what kinds of workers are you looking to
attract? What kinds of jobs are those people doing?
Well, what's really great about remote work is that every industry is taking advantage
of it even before COVID it was an aspect of our company To me that was dramatically on
the rise. We have artists and musicians and famous actresses and sports players and and
technologists and lawyers and doctors who have come through our program. The only real
requirement is that the individuals who come to the program have the ability to work for
a company based outside of Oklahoma and want to make a positive impact in the community
in which they live. Does that limit it in a way though, because
the types of industries that are already employing remote work might be you know, the tech companies
in San Francisco springs to mind you know, Twitter and Facebook have talked a lot about
remote working, does that mean that you end up attracting a lot of the young and trendy
tech firms? I would say that the young and trendy tech
firms are definitely represented within our program. But to narrow the scope only to those
individuals creates an ecosystem that I honestly didn't want to be a part of. After a while.
I lived in Silicon Valley for 10 years and I honestly got exhausted by everybody working
for a large tech company and everybody having the same kind of lifestyle and I really yearned
to have more diversity in that and and I think that's what we're creating here in Tulsa remote.
Have you seen an uptick in interest in your program
since the coronavirus pandemic started? Absolutely. We've seen twice as many applications.
So I absolutely believe that this is a tipping point. Historically, talent went where the
jobs were. And now jobs go where the talent is. And in the past, we built our life around
our job. And in the future. remote work allows us to build our jobs around our lives. And
I think that companies that adopt remote work in a sustainable way now are going to have
a competitive advantage in the future. Aaron Bolzle from Tulsa, Oklahoma, they're
speaking to the BBC's Edwin Lane. So homeworking could help smooth out some of the inequalities
between urban and rural areas in the US, but other kinds of inequalities may actually worsen.
So says Nicholas Bloom. He's an economics professor at Stanford University, where he
studied the benefits and pitfalls of homework If you look at folks working in, you know,
retail, gardeners, truck drivers, hardly any of them are working on home. They're either
almost all working basically on business premises or they're actually not working.
So there's a real cost divide there isn't that?
Yes, it's a horrible issue that working from home in some senses is fantastic. It's been
one of our greatest weapons against COVID, in the sense that we've been able to have
a lockdown. And you know, the economy has staggered onwards. It's obviously not great,
but it's a lot better than if we couldn't work from home. But as you say, it's been
awful in terms of the class divide. So basically, those that you know, previously already earning
pretty well have been able to shift home relatively easily, and low earning and typically less
educated people have struggled to do that. And it's not just an issue, obviously, about
being able to work now but there's also long run issues about health. So if you can work
from home it's much easier to self isolate, and also experience so even if the government
say is giving a cutting your stimulus Back each month to replace what you would have
earned. Of course, once the pandemic ends, if you've been, you know, not working for
nine months, you've missed out on a lot of work experience, and it makes it harder to
get a job and things recover. You've spoken about this as generating a time
bomb for inequality. Yeah, I'm generally concerned about an inequality
was already at astronomical level, just horrible levels before the pandemic started, you know,
to make it even worse, actually, the stock market done quite well. So the wealthy, even
their investments have actually not done too badly. And those that are earning less have
struggled because they often can't work at home, and their money's more tied up in you
know, they don't have much money and you know, to extent it is it hasn't done as well in
physical assets like housing, it's not so obvious that's going to do as well. So yeah,
it's generated a real worry, for me in terms of rising inequality, you know, both now but
also, you know, post pandemic, is there anything that can be done to address
that though, there is something you can do about it. It's
not straightforward that may not even be popular. I I think it's one of the areas where honestly,
the government needs to step into the tax system. I'm a big believer of free market
economics. But there are certainly limits on what the free market can do. And in this
case, I don't see any easy market based solution. So my advice would be, of course, post pandemic,
we're going to have an enormous, you know, tsunami of debt, we already see it government
borrowing huge amounts, and that's going to need to be paid back. And I think it's only
reasonable that higher earning people should pay the majority the increase in taxes, because
in large part, they're the ones that have actually probably suffered the least during
the lockdown and post because they can work from home.
I can't imagine that going down very well. No, you know, you know, it's worth pointing
out a couple of things. One is, we definitely wanted stimulus right now, without stimulus
we risk being back in the 1929 to 33 situation of the Great Depression. So actually, policy
has been very effective at preventing the economy completely collapsing, but that's
required a lot of expenditure which governments have borrowed.
What other impacts should we watch for in this transition to more remote work so long
as the pandemic loss? I think another huge phenomena is going to
be pushed back against cities, particularly the centre of cities. So if you look at the
history of really Europe in the US and including actually, you know, developing our printers
globally, cities have been beginning to boom from the 80s onward. So, you know, to tell
you a story from my childhood. I remember going to New York in the early 80s when my
parents is the first time ever traveled abroad. It was one of those I live I grew up in Britain,
it was a cheap for us, you know, cheap flight we managed to find, and I was shocked to find
a McDonald's on Time Square. They had two security guards with guns. We realised in
the early 80s, that the centre places like Manhattan were poor, low rent crime infested.
Now in 2020, or 2019, it's completely reverse. So central cities have boomed. Their pandemic
is just going to reverse a big chunk of that because a we are working from home much more
post pandemic. So of course, They'll be more time spent in the suburbs at home and be social
distancing, I think is obviously increased a lot now, but I think part of that is here
to stay. And for example, I polled two and a half thousand Americans actually this week,
and we find that the majority of them so 75% say that still feel nervous after a vaccine
comes out getting in a crowded elevator or subway.
That doesn't make any sense. Why would people be afraid if there's a vaccine? Surely a vaccine,
you know, means immunity? Is it that they're worried about other pandemics? Is it just
that the seed has been planted now in people's brain that pandemics are a real threat?
Yeah, I mean, there's two related things. One is you're much more conscious of infection.
And then the second issue as you point out, is a longer an issue about could there be
another pandemic? So just to be concrete if you're a large US Bank say you really probably
don't want to put your entire firm at the top of a 50 storey skyscraper in case one
of these pandemics happens again? Yeah, what you're painting there is a pretty
bleak picture when it comes to the future of work. It's a future where everyone's isolated
in their own homes, tapping away at their computers in a very solitary way.
No, not at all. Okay, I totally disagree. So I don't think it's bleak at all. Actually,
I think it's very positive. So just to be clear, I'm not advocating for entirely working
from home, I see us in future, for the roughly 40 to 50% of us that can in the developed
world work from home. And I know, it's slightly lower share saying, you know, Asia, Africa,
South America, but there's still a large group of us that can work from home, we'll be doing
that two to three days a week, and the other two to three days a week will be in the office.
So post COVID, Ruby, this kind of mix. And then secondly, I think we're going to be working
much more in the suburbs out of city centres, and it's going to actually rebalance a lot
of our society. So there's been a huge issue in Europe in the us about the you know, again,
I'll go a lot to Mumbai. I was in Tokyo recently about the affordability crisis in the centre
of big cities, and it's gonna push back and it's gonna make society more back In many
ways, it's going to reinvigorate rural communities. So actually, in many parts of the world, we're
really dying. So, no, I think it's one of the few good things to come out of COVID is
that we're, you know, move people out of the centre of cities and allow a more moderate
balance between work and home.
Stanford University's Nicholas Bloom. But is the scenario he paints necessarily going
to be replicated around the world. A question for Sarah Bana. She, together with researchers
at MIT wrote a recent report on how ready different countries are to adapt to mass remote
working. So we find very big variation between workers
conditions in terms of working from home in terms of internet access and quality demographic
structure, so households that have children under 15. In a lot of countries, there are
less than a quarter of the households that have children under 15. In some countries
like Nigeria and Pakistan, more than 70% of households have children under 15. And so
that just puts a different amount of responsibility on parents who might be working from home.
And then finally, previous experience with working from home. So there are some countries,
for example, Sweden, almost 30% of people were working from home sometimes prior to
the pandemic. And so that just implies differences in infrastructure and culture related to working
from home that had already been established pre COVID-19. Potentially these workers have
been provided a work laptop, and also been taught how to tunnel in via remote desktop.
I think that's something that a lot of companies in tight their workers to do at the beginning
of the pandemic, but still isn't necessarily extremely widespread. Which countries are
not well placed on this front. So our bottom five countries are Nigeria,
Pakistan, South Africa, Italy and Brazil. The first two countries, Nigeria and Pakistan.
Like I said, There a lot of households with children under the age of 15. And these countries
also have much slower internet than a lot of other countries around the world. It's
not just speed, but I also think it's access and that relates to this rural urban divide,
or the economic consequences for those countries less able to work from home.
Yeah, so I think the ability to work from home makes it substantially easier to comply
with social distancing measures while maintaining economic activity. And so if we think about
regions where working from home is harder, those regions may be more susceptible to layoffs,
depressed economic activity, and lower demand for products. If you don't get your haircut,
then that hairdresser has less money to spend on everything else. But working from home
helps change that right. Maybe not for the hairdresser. But if the radio program can
still happen virtually, then you've allowed some workers to continue working. And that's
valuable because those people's wages can continue. You buy goods and services that
support other people's jobs. And that's why it's my economic duty to get
lots of haircuts and manicures in my neighbourhood while I still have a job that allows me to
work from home. Digital Economy Researcher Sarah Bana that ending this edition from Edwin
Lane and me Manuela Saragosa signing off from home. Join us again on Business Daily at the
same time tomorrow.