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1. COVID-19 and the shift to remote work

Author:
Scott Marcus
Publication Date:
06-2022
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Bruegel
Abstract:
COVID-19 has accelerated the shift to remote work. Enabling knowledge workers to do their jobs from home or elsewhere brings benefits by increasing labour participation, avoiding unproductive commuting time (thus reducing the carbon footprint), and reducing the gender gap by enabling single parents or partners with domestic-care responsibilities to work. Not all jobs are suitable for remote work, but far more remote work is feasible than was typical prior to the pandemic. The post-pandemic new normal is sure to differ both from the pre-pandemic normal and from current arrangements. Hybrid arrangements in which part of the week is spent at the office, and part at home, are likely to become the norm. Employers, workers, educators, trade unions and governments will need to adapt to the new normal. For employers and managers, the change emphasises the need to manage based on results rather than hours worked, and likely implies many changes in how they manage their employees. Workers will need to be flexible in order to capitalise on the new opportunities in the evolving world of work, and to ensure they have suitable skills for remote work. Educators will need to further emphasise digital skills, and to accelerate the shift from traditional education to lifelong learning. Trade unions will need to re-think how they recruit workers who do not see each other every day, and how they can respond to evolving social protection needs. Policymakers will need to deal with distributional effects driven by the shift to remote work, to protect the work-life balance that remote work potentially erodes, and to seek to ensure that the shift to remote work does not erode social protection.
Topic:
Employment, Work Culture, COVID-19, and Remote Work
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. Work from Home – How Good is it for the Environment?

Author:
Anna Agarwal
Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a large-scale global experiment on work from home (WFH). WFH is expected to continue, albeit at a smaller scale, in the post-pandemic world. WFH is commonly considered to be an energy saving measure that can help reduce office travel related energy demand and energy use in offices. This article presents a framework to analyze the various direct and indirect energy use changes that WFH can potentially induce. We discuss the different long-term structural and behavioral changes from WFH, which will ultimately define energy consumption patterns. We conclude the energy savings and the related environmental impacts are ambiguous. An illustrative analysis has been performed to quantify the direct air quality impacts of work from home adoption in the Delhi region. The results show modest reductions in the levels of PM2.5 emissions, and point to the underlying uncertainties that have the potential to highly amplify or diminish the environmental benefits. The article highlights the need for in-depth multi-sectoral study of the various WFH related energy use changes over both the short- and the long-term. Such an assessment will be key to designing effective policy measures to support work from home as an environmentally beneficial practice.
Topic:
Environment, Work Culture, COVID-19, and Energy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3. Sexual Harassment at Workplaces: Problems and Solutions in a case study of Lahore

Author:
Rana Tahir Rehman Khan and Saqib Khan Warraich
Publication Date:
01-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
South Asian Studies
Institution:
Department of Political Science, University of the Punjab
Abstract:
This research aims to investigate harassment faced by women at workplaces. The research methodology used for this study is qualitative, and semi-structured interviews have been conducted to collect primary data. A population size of onehundred working women at public and private institutions of Lahore has been taken. Twenty working women were interviewed and themes and sub-themes were derived from the collected data. The results revealed that harassment commonly occurs in workplaces. It includes abuse, non-consensual physical contact, threats, homophobic comments, ogling, and attempts at seduction, gender-based harassment, sexual coercion, and sexual imposition. It not only impacts the psychological condition of working women but also impacts their productivity. Those women who are the only breadwinners of their families are unwilling to take any action against the culprits so as not to lose their jobs; as a result, perpetrators exploit them. Most respondents contacted were aware of women's rights, but not familiar with the Protection against Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2010. The study identified several issues related to harassment and recommended significant initiatives to train women against harassment.
Topic:
Women, Sexual Violence, Work Culture, and Harassment
Political Geography:
Pakistan and South Asia

4. Does my Computer Protect me from Burnout? Cross-country Evidence on the Impact of ICT use within the Job Demands-Resources Model

Author:
Sandra Leitner and Roman Stöllinger
Publication Date:
06-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (WIIW)
Abstract:
This paper uses a large sample of employees from 35 European countries to study the direct and indirect effects of ICT use on burnout and work engagement as two opposite poles of employee psychological health, where the former comprises the three dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism and professional efficacy. It applies the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and analyses the mediating role of three job demands (work extensity, work intensity, social demands) and four job resources (social support from management or colleagues, job control, rewards) on workers’ psychological health. It accounts for the importance of the place of work for the effect of ICT use on workers’ psychological health by differentiating between four types of workers: home-based workers, highly mobile workers, occasionally mobile workers, and workers who always work at the employer’s premises. The results show that ICT use is associated with lower levels of exhaustion but is unrelated to work engagement. Furthermore, work intensity, work extensity, social demands and rewards mediate the effect of ICT use on exhaustion, while job control and rewards mediate the effect of ICT use on work engagement. Our multi-group analysis attributes the negative effect of ICT use on exhaustion mainly to occasionally mobile workers and to workers who always work at the employer’s premises and highlights that the factors that mediate the effect of ICT use on workers’ psychological health differ across the four types of workers. Home-based workers stand out in two important respects: first, ICT use per se is unrelated to burnout; second, only one factor – work intensity – mediates the effect of ICT use on burnout, but its effect is especially strong.
Topic:
Labor Issues, Work Culture, Engagement, Computers, and Burnout
Political Geography:
Europe

5. The Relationship Between Public Service Motivation, Work Enjoyment, and Task Performance: A Preliminary Study of Healthcare Workers in Vietnam

Author:
Thanh Nguyen Nghi, Hang Tran Thu, and Thao Tran Dinh
Publication Date:
06-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Liberty and International Affairs
Institution:
Institute for Research and European Studies (IRES)
Abstract:
This study aimed to examine the impact of health workers' public service motivation during their participation in response to the Covid-19 pandemic at a time of the highest number of infections and deaths in Vietnam. This study was conducted through a cross-sectional survey using an intentional sampling technique (n=200). In addition, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was applied to illustrate the proposed hypotheses. We found that compassion in the workplace, self-sacrifice, and attraction to policy-making impacted work enjoyment positively and significantly. In particular, there was a positive and significant relationship between work enjoyment and task performance but no evidence of the relationship between Commitment to the public interest and work enjoyment. This study further demonstrates the importance of public service motivation of health workers in pandemic response, as previous studies have found. This finding suggests that the government and policymakers in Vietnam should develop policies to promote health workers' public service motivation during their engagement in response to the health crisis.
Topic:
Labor Issues, Health Care Policy, Work Culture, and Public Service
Political Geography:
Asia and Vietnam

6. How Did Left-Wing Print Culture Experiment with Capitalism?

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
While many avant-garde periodicals enthusiastically embraced various aspects of the booming post-WWI economy and technology of the core countries, their imagined readership remained the proletariat or “the masses.” Although the predominantly left-wing avant-garde outlets were overflowing with articles exploring the perspectives opened up by Fordism, Taylorism, standardization, and rationalization, not only did their intended working-class readership experience the everyday regime of “scientific management,” but many of them, especially Hungarian organized workers in the industrial centers of the East Coast, actively fought it. Adopting the approaches of periodical studies, book history, and the cultural history of social life, this presentation has a twofold ambition. First, to understand what kind of political economy was envisioned by the avant-garde journals of the 1920s, especially concerning their interpretation of the distinguishing characteristics of the capitalist economic order. Second, to explore how working-class readers—either trade unionist social democrats or revolutionary communists—understood, re-created, or performed some of the techniques promoted by avant-garde journals: using tactics like speaking choirs, “living journals,” political collages, and workers’ photography to critique that same economic reality of post-WWI capitalism. Through the study of hitherto largely unexplored primary sources, including avant-garde periodicals and leaflets, editorial material, secret police accounts, Comintern documents, and annotated pages of avant-garde and labor movement publications, this lecture investigates how the avant-garde radical imagination about capitalism resonated in the larger ecosystem of workers’ culture. It also explores the significant role of centers like New York City—a global hub of avant-garde periodicals, the heart of surging Fordist capitalism, and a battlefield for multi-ethnic organized workers, including a large number of Hungarian immigrants—played in the formation of a Hungarian-language counter-hegemonic public sphere.
Topic:
Media, Work Culture, Leftist Politics, and Identity
Political Geography:
Europe, Hungary, North America, and United States of America

7. Research in the Covid-19 Context: Adaptive Methods and Ethical Considerations

Author:
Mukta Naik
Publication Date:
01-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
Resilience and adaptation have become buzzwords as governments, corporations and society find ways to survive the Covid-19 pandemic and, where possible, seek to develop processes and outcomes that improve on the pre-crisis status quo. Members of the Women, Work, and the Gig Economy research consortium have also thought deeply about strategies to continue research under these challenging conditions, while considering the ethics that must underpin research at a time of great distress for people across the world. This brief summarizes the conceptual and practical approaches that consortium members have taken to address ethical concerns as well as strategic and tactical shifts in research methods within the broader, geographically diverse and evertransforming context of Covid-19. These insights draw on the deliberations of an internal workshop held in September 2020 where consortium members presented and debated their respective approaches and perspectives. In particular, the team at LIRNEasia provided substantive takeaways from their colloquium on “Research methods in a pandemic.”
Topic:
Women, Ethics, Work Culture, COVID-19, and Gig Economy
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

8. Blending the physical and virtual: a hybrid model for the future of work

Author:
Monika Grzegorczyk, Mario Mariniello, Laura Nurski, and Tom Schraepen
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Bruegel
Abstract:
The pandemic has shown that many workers can efficiently work remotely, with benefits for wellbeing and even productivity. The European Union should develop a framework to facilitate hybrid work.
Topic:
European Union, Work Culture, Innovation, Strategic Competition, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Europe and Global Focus

9. Towards an EU Toolbox for Migrant Workers

Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Open Society Foundations
Abstract:
As part of its proposal for an EU Migration and Asylum Pact, the European Commission has pledged to present proposals on legal migration in 2021 to better match labour demand and supply, enable better, faster access to visas and work permits, and increase the intra-EU mobility of foreign workers. This report analyses the actions taken by three EU member states: Germany, Italy, and Spain. These countries have created or expanded labour migration pathways, regularised part of the undocumented population, and increased protections for some categories of migrants. The report examines how effective these different approaches have been and if there are lessons to be learned at the EU level.
Topic:
Migration, Labor Issues, Work Culture, and Migrant Workers
Political Geography:
Germany, Spain, and Italy

10. The Future of Work: Between Technology and Inequality

Author:
Dania El Akkawi
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Cairo Review of Global Affairs
Institution:
School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, American University in Cairo
Abstract:
While the future is foggy in light of the pandemic, the importance of technology is real and certain, and the creation of new jobs will pave the way for new global work arrangements.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Labor Issues, Inequality, Work Culture, and Workforce
Political Geography:
Global Focus