Anywhere jobs and the future of work

The Covid pandemic has helped to loosen the binds that previously tied a job to a specific geography and created a new class of work in the UK. ‘Anywhere jobs’ are non-routine service sector jobs that can be done from anywhere in the world, potentially for cheaper. This column shows that one in five workers in the UK are in an anywhere job and, in contrast to the past when the pressure was on semi-skilled workers, it is relatively highly skilled workers in non-routine roles that are now vulnerable to the pressures of technology and globalisation.

 
The shock of the pandemic spurred a large-scale experiment in remote working (Baldwin 2020). In doing so, it has loosened the binds that previously tied a job to a specific geography and created a new class of work in the UK in the form of ‘anywhere jobs’ – non-routine service-sector jobs that can be done fully remotely from anywhere in the world, most likely for cheaper (Kakkad et al. 2021).

In recent decades, it was typically semi-skilled manufacturing and clerical jobs that were vulnerable to automation and offshoring, while professional white-collar jobs thrived and were largely sheltered from the pressures of technological change.

But the pandemic changed this. It forced businesses of all sizes to accelerate their digital adoption (Riom and Valero 2020), allowing them to unbundle service-sector value chains; automate, outsource or offshore non-core activities (Weil 2017); and manage and monitor that work more closely (Gilbert and Thomas 2021).

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Πηγή: voxeu.org