Future of Work / The Economy

Deloitte's report explores returning to normal; it’s more than herd immunity

A March 2021 article by Deloittte explores what returning to a “functioning normal” means. The report says that “for today’s senior executive, herd immunity is not the endgame: the broader goal is the re-emergence of markets and economies post-pandemic.” The article says that “The public’s trust in institutions, in businesses, and even in each other is a critical pre-requisite to achieving a functioning normal. It says four factors collectively have a profound impact on building public trust:

• Immunity/infection rates: Rebuilding public trust to reach a functioning normal requires the pandemic to be controlled and suppressed. Reduction in severe illness and deaths may result in returning to functional normal even without suppression in transmission.
• Therapeutics: While vaccines and natural immunity will help reduce infection rates, therapeutics can help minimize COVID-19 morbidity and mortality rates, easing public concerns and establishing trust in institutional responses.
• Public Policy: Decisive, coordinated policy decisions are shown to significantly impact COVID-19 outbreaks and infectivity.
• Social practices and attitudes: As vaccines and therapeutics become accessible, social practices and attitudes—such as adherence to masking, social distancing, and public belief in their own risk/immunity—will continue to play a pivotal role.

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Companies want less office space at lower rates

The Wall Street Journal on April 6, 2021, reported that even though big companies will maintain their city-center office buildings they want less space and lower rates. Leasing offers in the biggest markets are down 13%, and companies want 10% less space. Many companies are embracing a hybrid model, “maintaining a shrunken office presence while allowing employees to work remotely at least part-time.”

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Fortune’s "Best Big Companies to Work For" – modeling for others

Fortune annually conducts a “Best Big Companies to Work For” list. The magazine’s CEO Daily on April 12, 2021, reported on the top three. What they did in the past year was exceptional.

1. Cisco. When the pandemic hit, the company delayed already announced layoffs and extended pay and benefits for affected workers. Hourly employees continued to get paychecks, even when the shut-down kept them from work. The company also stepped up its donated services to telemedicine providers. 
2. Salesforce. Among other things, the company gave six weeks of extra PTO to parents, and $500 per month child-care and education reimbursements. 
3. Hilton. In spite of furloughs and layoffs at corporate headquarters, the company’s people say they were treated with dignity and compassion, with extended benefits and help in securing short-term jobs.

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Microsoft's index shows disparities in satisfaction from remote work

According to an April 9, 2021, story in ZDNet, Microsoft has released a Work Trend Index, which tried to "paint a more complete picture of the work-life Covid has wrought.” Some findings:

• Hybrid work will be the new, new thing.
• Workers are currently exhausted and GenZ is especially trailing in the wake of the changes .
• 61% of leaders described themselves as thriving.
• Those who don’t make decisions are thriving 23% less than their bosses.

According to Microsoft’s chief vice president of Microsoft 365, “those impromptu encounters at the office help keep leaders honest. With remote work, there are fewer chances to ask employees, 'Hey, how are you?' and then pick up on important cues as they respond. But the data is clear: Our people are struggling. And we need to find new ways to help them."

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Immigrants create jobs in the economy

An opinion piece in The Hill on March 30, 2021, provided a thoughtful overview of the data showing how immigrants of all types contribute to the economy and even lower unemployment. Written by an economist at Freedom Works and a senior fellow for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, they say that “skilled immigrants ‘are often complementary to native born workers’ The work of skilled immigrants makes the work of native born Americans in different jobs more productive and thus higher paid. There also are ‘spillovers of wage enhancing knowledge and skills' which 'occur as a result of interactions among workers.' So skilled immigrants share knowledge with their native born coworkers, making all of us more productive and higher paid.” The writers acknowledge that “immigrants tend to start businesses across the country, from corner delis to landscaping companies to sometimes huge corporations with thousands of employees … We want Americans to be the highest paid in the world. To raise wages for the people at the bottom, we will need better schools, better job training, better work ethic, and more businesses. Restricting immigration will not solve those issues.”

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Firms exiting California and heading to the border

On March 30, 2021, La Prensa Latina Media reported that technology companies are leaving California for Texas, a trend that has been underway for several years, and are locating along the U.S. Mexico border. “Besides less tax and regulatory pressure, the border region is competing with Silicon Valley in another area that’s ever more important to employers: the cost of living is much lower, and thus they can pay their workers lower salaries than in California.”

Political Divisiveness

Thoughts on the Republican Party

In my lifetime, I can remember when voting was about choosing the best person with the best ideas, regardless of party affiliation. Now the choice seems to be for the party, whether there is an “R” or a “D” after the candidate's name. This makes the person less important than their affiliation. This week we came across a number of stories that illuminate how the G.O.P. has been changing in recent years. It has become a party that once was just seen as having a different perspective than the Democratic Party, but now it is different in another way. Here are some citations about what some people think.

• Former House Speaker and Republican John Boehner in his new book “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” as reported in the Washington Post on April 9, 2021. He draws a direct line from anti-establishment lawmakers he dealt with last decade to Republicans in Congress who supported Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election: “The legislative terrorism that I’d witnessed as speaker had now encouraged actual terrorism … I don’t even think I could get elected in today’s Republican Party anyway. I don’t think Ronald Reagan could either.”
• Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter on April 6, 2021, Letters from an American. Cox Richardson provides an extensive overview of how Republicans have historically been leaders in creating opportunities for improving the country (think Eisenhower's support of the Federal-Aid Highway Act, the Pacific Railway Act following the Civil War, etc.) and then reports this: “At this moment, Republican lawmakers seem weirdly out of step with their party’s history as well as with the country. They are responding to the American Jobs Plan by defining infrastructure as roads and bridges alone, cutting from the definition even the broadband that they included when Trump was president.”
• Reuters/Ipsos poll. Reuters has joined with Ipsos, the global market research firm, to survey public opinion three months after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Here are some highlight as reported by Reuters on April 5, 2021.
  • About half of Republicans believe the siege on January 6, 2021, was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad.”
  • Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud.
  • While 59% of all Americans say Trump bears some responsibility for the attack on January 6, only three in 10 Republicans agree. Eight in 10 Democrats and six in 10 independents reject the false claims that the Capitol siege was “mostly peaceful” or it was staged by left-wing protestors.
  • Eight in 10 Republicans continue to hold a favorable impression of Donald Trump.

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The Holocaust started with words, not concentration camps

An opinion in the April 8, 2021, issue of Time by the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany reminds readers of the history leading up to the Holocaust. They write that “the Holocaust did not begin with concentration camps, ghettos or deportations. People didn’t wake up one day and decide to participate in mass murder … In fact, the Nazis had been in power in Germany for eight long years before the systematic murder of the Jews began ... In order to win mass support, Nazi propaganda—both its positive, aspirational messages and its demonization of Jews and others—was skillfully targeted to particular audiences depending on their attitudes, which were measured in an early version of opinion polling ... One of the common messages was designed to make Germans feel that if they were hurting economically, it was the fault of the Jews ... Without understanding the causes of the Holocaust and without thinking about how it might have been prevented, we are not honoring the victims. Nor are we serving the past—or the future.”

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Domestic extremism has reached new highs in the U.S.

On April 12, 2021, an article in the Washington Post reported that “domestic terrorism incidents have soared to new highs in the United States, driven chiefly by white-supremacist, anti-Muslim and anti-government extremists on the far right, according to a Washington Post analysis of data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies … Both far-left and far-right attacks hit groundbreaking levels in 2020, the database shows, with far-right incidents still the much larger group.” There were 73 far-right incidents and 25 left-wing attacks in 2020.

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Jamie Dimon sounds the alarm on the future of American prosperity

Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, recently wrote a 66-page annual shareholder letter expressing his concern for the future of American prosperity. As reported on the CNN Business Before/The Bell newsletter, Dimon writes that “the Covid-19 pandemic, the 'horrific murder' of George Floyd and the painfully slow economic growth of the past two decades are all symptoms of a broader problem: ‘inept’ public policy and broad government dysfunction.” He thinks “the fault line is inequality. And its cause is staring us in the face: our own failure to move beyond our differences and self-interest and act for the greater good."

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U.S. intelligence report sees a grim global future

If Jamie Dimon is pessimistic about America’s future prosperity, a Global Trends report by the National Intelligence Council is even more pessimistic about the world’s future. According to a story by PBS on April 9, 2021, “the coronavirus pandemic has deepened economic inequality, strained government resources and fanned nationalist sentiments.” The story goes on to report that “COVID-19 has shaken long-held assumptions about resilience and adaptation and created new uncertainties about the economy, governance, geopolitics, and technology.” Among other findings, the report also warns of “eroding trust in government and institutions and of a ‘trust gap’ between the general public and the better informed and educated parts of the population.”

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CEO’s stand up for voting access and rights

On April 15, 2021, CEO Daily reported that a group of Black CEO’s and ex-CEOs took full-page advertisements to address voting practices with the headline ”We Stand for Democracy.” The “long list of signatories simply said they oppose any discriminatory legislation or measures that restrict or prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity to cast a ballot.”

In the same issue, CEO Daily wrote that the Pew Research Center asked Americans a pair of questions to find out how they felt about access to the polls. Here are the questions.

Which statements come closer to your own views—even if neither is exactly right?

The first set of questions:

1. Everything possible should be done to make it easy for every citizen to vote, or 
2. Citizens should have to prove they really want to vote by registering ahead of time.

The second set of questions:

1. It would not make elections any less secure if election rules were changed to make it easier to register and vote, or
2. If election rules were changed to make it easier to register and vote, that would also make elections less secure.

The majority of Americans chose answer 1) in both cases, including more than 80% of Democrats. 71% of Republicans chose answer 2) to the first question, and 61% chose answer 2) to the second question.