Comment by addicted
1 day ago
Unfortunately American white collar workers responded to the brief period of relative power increase by pushing for remote work rather than consolidating that power or asking for better pay.
We are seeing the results now with white collar work being outsourced to countries in LATAM. If people aren’t gonna be physically collocated why pay more for someone to work from the U.S. when you can pay a fraction for someone to work in the same time zone in central and South America.
I strongly suspect we will Look back at this period similarly to how we look back at the 80s when blue collar workers voted to have their jobs outsource to China, except this time it’s white collar workers pushing to essentially make their jobs easier to outsource to the rest of the world.
Employers could always have outsourced white collar work. I remember in 2002 when "all the programmer jobs were going to India". Coming together to push for better working conditions you care about is exactly what building power looks like for any group of workers. The problem is not pushing for remote work, it's that most people do it individually so they aren't creating any kind of social structure that helps them keep some of that power when the pendulum swings back.
I think contextually what one has to remember when analysing behaviours during this time of power shift to the employee due to a global pandemic, is that while that was happening there was also a global pandemic taking place...