Work post-pandemic: innovation or same old?

When I was a child, the traditional man goes to work, woman stays at home system was on its way out. My mother stayed home, some friends’ mothers didn’t, there were constant discussions about what "a woman’s place" was.

Once I got to university, I didn’t know a single woman who thought her future lay solely in staying at home and raising a family while her husband went out to work. We were all determined to have careers, and we were, of course, convinced that going out to work meant literally that: “going out to work”.

Even before Covid-19, new technology had started to change the traditional Monday to Friday 9 to 5, and the commute that so often went with it. But the pandemic has put rocket boosters under the process. We have all, like it or not, had to change the way we work quite dramatically. 

But who are the winners and losers in this? That’s the topic of this week’s Inside Geneva podcast, where I’m joined by Chidi King, head of gender diversity and inclusion at the International Labour Organisation, Cedric Dupont, professor of international law at Geneva’s Graduate Institute, and analyst Daniel Warner. 

The ILO, whose role it is to promote decent, safe work with fair wages and no workplace discrimination, has looked long and hard at the effects of Covid 19 on our working lives. For many of us it did just mean working from home, not seeing our colleagues face to face, meeting virtually, and so on.

For others, it meant losing their jobs completely. The entertainment and hospitality sectors basically shut down worldwide, and many people found themselves out of work over night.

Here, the ILO suggests, countries which already had strong social protection measures fared better – not only in supporting individual workers, but in the way their entire economies weathered the crisis. These countries, says Chidi King, “were able to better navigate the consequences of the pandemic”.

That might be a point worth taking on board in countries where governments still view short term or zero hour contracts as good for their economies. In fact when a crisis like Covid happens, a formal economy with a strong social safety net is the one best equipped to cope, and come out the other side still functioning.

Gender gap

But another ILO studyExternal link points to a worrying, though perhaps not unexpected effect of the pandemic on jobs: women have suffered more job losses than men, largely because more women than men work in the hospitality and non-essential retail sectors.

The ILO is urging governments to learn lessons from Covid-19; invest in social protection, address the gender gap, and above all value work which is essential, but traditionally low paid.

“Health and social care sectors, our retail sectors,” Chidi tells Inside Geneva. “Jobs which have never really been paid their true value. Re-examining what we deem as a true value of a job has to be one of the outcomes of this pandemic.”

Clapping isn’t enough

During the pandemic we regularly saw communities come out onto the streets to clap in support of those we expected to carry on going to work despite the health risks; the nurses, care home staff, supermarket and public transport workers.

Dupont of Geneva’s Graduate Institute believes the lonely lockdowns we all endured made us appreciate some of these workers more. “We discovered, each of us, going to the supermarket, and having the ability to speak to a cashier, you suddenly feel less alone.”

But, a year and a half later, have we rewarded these workers, many of them on low salaries, with anything more than applause? Sadly the answer is largely no. And Dupont, although he tells Inside Geneva that he would like to be optimistic, points out that Switzerland’s big supermarkets are continuing with their automation – the cashiers we gratefully chatted to during our longed for half hour out of the house are becoming extinct.

We discuss all this and more in this week’s podcast, and we ask whether working from home is putting an end to the traditional workplace hierarchy, in which there’s always a boss somewhere, keeping an eye on what we do.

What do you think? Take a listen to Inside Geneva, and don’t forget you can email us with your comments at [e-mail].

For now, I’ll leave you with the thoughts of analyst Daniel Warner, who, like many of us, has adapted to the changes, but still yearns for how things used to be.

“If people are given the options, it will be interesting to see who wants to go back to the office and who would prefer to stay home. But I hope we can go back to some form of humanity and talking to each other face to face.”