What Did We Learn From the Pandemic?

 Greetings. I started this blog back in the good old days, 2018 to be precise. A lot has happened since then. I'll jump ahead and say that we are now at the tail end (kind of) of a global pandemic that really showed how much of the work we do is "essential" and the rest of it. We learned that essential workers are often those who have jobs that will put their health at risk and allow the rest of us to stay mostly out of harm's way. We learned that there are high-skill people like doctors who were at-risk but had many precautions put into place, but also food industry workers and nursing home aides who were at higher risk who did not. We learned that doctors and nurses and allied workers were called heroes and meat processing workers and delivery drivers were expendable. 

It also dramatically showed us how many can and can't work from home. It gave a company called Zoom a huge boost in users and also revealed the weaknesses of the internet globally. We learned that working from home did not make us that much less productive, but wreaked havoc on a lot of folk's mental health and relationships with family and friends. We also learned that when vaccines were made available, there were many early adopters and a large number of never adopters making going back to work on-location a sort of a crapshoot. 

We learned that education for many people changed in a dizzying way at all levels and pretty much everybody was homeschooling, for better or worse. College and high school students missed out on important rites of passage as many graduation ceremonies were virtual and not particularly ceremonious. Young people earned degrees and then struggled to search for jobs or even have the desire to start a career.

More recently, people have dropped out of the workforce while employers struggle to find workers to fulfill their job openings. The why of it seems, on the surface, apparent. People are stressed out because of the uncertainty of a future where this could easily happen again and, also a recognition that we can do things differently where work is concerned that might actually make work better (or different) for more people. Out of necessity, the future of work will also have to value workers differently and lead to substantially better working conditions for more people including better pay, benefits, and recognition.