OMG, enough with the charts. Can't they just have some pictures. This is way too much work.
Remote Work Sticks for All Kinds of Jobs
Lower-income, less-educated and service workers are all clocking more work-from-home hours than before the pandemic hit
Work done at home can include one minute checking a company email or a 12-hour shift.
By Sarah Chaney Cambon and Andrew Mollica, WSJ
Updated July 4, 2023 12:00 am ET
Workers in unexpected jobs are clocking more time from home than before the pandemic hit.
It isn’t just white-collar workers logging in from bedrooms instead of boardrooms. Lower-income, less-educated and service-industry workers spent more time working from home, on average, last year than before the pandemic struck.
The broad-based gains suggest that while much of American life has reverted to prepandemic norms, remote work persists and is subtly reshaping many professions.
Workers overall spent an average of 5 hours and 25 minutes a day working from home in 2022. That is about two hours more than in 2019, the year before Covid-19 sent millions of workers scrambling to set up home offices, and down just 12 minutes from 2021, according to the Labor Department’s American Time Use Survey.
Those figures reflect the average amount of time all employed Americans—including remote, hybrid and in-person workers—spent working from home. Work done at home can include one minute checking a company email or a 12-hour shift. It strictly includes work done at home and excludes assignments done at a place such as a coffee shop.
One reason remote work remains more prevalent than before Covid-19 first upended job routines is workers still have a lot of leverage in a labor market that remains historically tight. Employers cling to staff they fought to hire during the pandemic rebound.
About 8.4% of job postings on Indeed.com advertised remote or hybrid work at the end of May, up threefold from the same period in 2019. Still, the share of remote job postings on Indeed fell from a peak of over 10% in February 2022, reflective of a steep decline in tech and other white-collar job openings with high concentrations of remote work.
Remote work grows for lower-paying jobs
The lowest-earning Americans spent about three more hours working at home a day last year than in 2019. Their daily work-from-home time increased 1 hour and 19 minutes from 2021, while the highest paid spent about 30 fewer minutes on the clock from home last year compared with 2021.
The highest earners still work from home roughly 45 minutes more a day than the lowest earners.
Many lower-wage office and call-center jobs went remote at the onset of the pandemic. Business executives viewed the shift as a temporary emergency measure, said Julia Pollak, chief economist at jobs site ZipRecruiter. They planned for employees to return to job sites because they wanted workers to be close to peers to learn, and under the direct monitoring of their managers to show up on time, she said.
“Many employers were surprised to discover that remote customer support agents and freight dispatchers, for example, were often just as effective and productive working from home, if not more so,” Pollak said.
Thanks to those productivity gains, as well as improved recruitment and retention, reduced absenteeism and lower real-estate costs, companies decided to keep offering remote options for some lower-wage staff long after offices reopened, she said.
About 22% of customer-service job postings on ZipRecruiter offered remote work in June of this year, averaged over 12 months, up from 4% in June 2019. Still, that declined from about 33% in February 2022.
College degree not required for stay-at-home job
The rise in remote employment for lower-wage jobs in customer service, data entry and tech support is boosting work-from-home time among Americans with less education.
Employees with only a high-school diploma worked from home nearly three hours more a day in 2022 than they did in 2019. Their daily work-from-home time was about the same last year as those who hold at least a bachelor’s degree.
In 2022, 17.5% of workers with only a high-school diploma spent some time working from home, up from 15.5% in 2019. That share was still far below the 53.7% of workers with at least a bachelor’s degree who logged work-from-home time last year.
Companies often outsource remote jobs that don’t require college degrees to states with lower costs of living, said Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University. A remote call-center job in Mississippi can pay less than an in-person fast-food job in New York, he said.
Employees in those occupations face the risk of losing their jobs to overseas workers and artificial intelligence, he said, pointing to the fast development of AI chatbots handling some work tasks.
“I don’t think that fully remote, low-paid occupation is a great place to be,” Bloom said.
Some service-industry workers log more time from home
Service-industry workers clocked about two more hours of work-from-home time in 2022 than in 2019. Their at-home hours rose last year, in contrast with declines for professional, management and office workers.
Workers in service occupations, such as exercise trainers, group-fitness instructors and medical transcriptionists, might have spent a few minutes checking emails at home before the pandemic. Now, they frequently teach classes, schedule appointments or type up notes remotely.
Remote opportunities in healthcare have grown with the pandemic-driven embrace of telehealth. In 2022, 4.9% of healthcare job ads offered remote or hybrid workdays, up from 1.8% in 2019, according to an analysis of online job postings from Bloom and co-researchers.
Most service employees work in person, as they need to be at the workplace to wait tables, cut hair and clean buildings. Last year, 11.2% of service workers spent at least some time working from home, matching the five-year prepandemic average. That share was also well below the 56.1% of workers in management, business and financial roles logging work-from-home time last year, according to the Labor Department.
Write to Sarah Chaney Cambon at sarah.chaney@wsj.com and Andrew Mollica at andrew.mollica@wsj.com
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