How Coronavirus Has Upended Work in America
By Gregory Lyon
As coronavirus has torn through the United States, it has struck the labor market like few crises in American history. The weekly job reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics have come to punctuate in dramatic fashion with huge numbers each week of massive waves of unemployment claims filed throughout the country.
Across the nation, few jobs have been completely untouched and unaffected. In the survey conducted between March 27, 2020, and March 29, 2020, we asked workers (people who were not in the workforce were excluded from this analysis) whether there had been any changes in their work in the two weeks before the survey. An astonishingly small number reported no changes to their work. Only 27 percent of respondents said that there had been no change in their work, while nearly three out of four respondents said that their work had changed in some form—indicating they had begun to work from home, their hours had been reduced, or they had lost their jobs entirely.
Strikingly, 44 percent of workers indicated that they had either lost their job (18 percent) or had their hours reduced (26 percent). These figures probably underestimate the current numbers (which are changing by the hour) as our survey was conducted before many states had ordered non-essential businesses to shut down. This suggests that unemployment and economic insecurity are likely to continue to climb in the coming weeks. In this memo, we look at how coronavirus has upended work for large swaths of the country.
In a signal of the broad impact, both women and men have been hit hard by the economic disruptions brought about by coronavirus. Among the 18% of respondents who reported losing their jobs, women made up 46 percent of them while men made up 54 percent. Similarly, among the 26 percent of respondents in the survey who had their hours reduced, 42 percent were women while 58 percent were men.
While the thunderous disruption to work and economic well-being in America over the past few weeks has spared few workers, our survey found that high income workers were both less likely to report a job loss and more likely to have shifted to working from home. Low and middle income workers were hit particularly hard with 21 percent of low income workers and 19 percent of middle income workers indicating they had lost their job compared with 9 percent of high income workers.
In contrast, the trend is flipped when we look at those workers who are now working from home. Among high income respondents, 56 percent reported that they are now working from home while only 25 percent of low income workers are working from home.
About a quarter of workers in each income category report that their hours had been reduced while roughly one in five workers from each income category report that nothing about their work has changed.
Another way to look at socioeconomic differences in work disruption is by educational attainment. The ability to work remotely is a luxury more likely available to high income and highly educated workers who often do not need to travel to a physical worksite. The results from our survey indeed indicate large differences between workers with a college degree or more and those who without a degree. Among workers with a college degree or more, 50 percent are now working from home while 27 percent of workers with less than a college degree have shifted to remote work.
Workers with and without college degrees have had their hours reduced at similar rates--25 percent and 26 percent, respectively. However, workers who lack a college degree have been hit harder by job losses. Of those without a college degree, 22 percent indicate they lost their job. Among college educated workers, 13% indicate they lost their job. The differences are in line with the findings above and affirm the notion that work has been disrupted for workers from a range of backgrounds, but workers with low socioeconomic status--whether measured by income or education--have been hit hardest.
As the impact of coronavirus progresses, more job losses may follow. This appears to be a fear shared across the income distribution. On a scale from 1 (not at all concerned) to 5 (extremely concerned), the mean level of concern for low, middle, and high income workers hovers around a “little” to “moderate” concern with mean scores around 2.5 for each income group and no significant differences between them. This suggests that although the job losses have been concentrated in largely lower paid, service sector jobs, workers throughout the American workforce are somewhat concerned about their job security as the economic disruption from coronavirus remains a looming threat.
These figures speak to the widespread disruption that coronavirus has had on American workers and how those effects are most significant for low income workers who can least afford to be out of work for long periods of time. Moreover, the results indicate that unemployment rates are likely to continue to climb to rates not seen since the Great Depression, and possibly higher. Moreover, the extent to which workers’ economic dislocation is cushioned by unemployment insurance is highly dependent on which state they happen to live in as unemployment policies vary significantly by state across the country.
The impact of such widespread job loss and the associated effects of economic insecurity portend deep and long-lasting problems for American workers, their livelihoods, and their well-being. Tenuous job security and unemployment have been linked to rising “deaths of despair” by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. Their findings, however, came before any sign of coronavirus. This suggests that, absent substantial and perhaps unprecedented governmental intervention in the economy, the profound shock to American workers over the last few months may only be the beginning, with much of the devastation still yet to come.
Gregory Lyon is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tufts University and studies work and politics.
As part of this survey, the following question was asked: "In the last two weeks, has your work changed?" There were five response options: “yes, I now work from home,” “yes, my hours have been reduced,” yes, I lost my job,” “No, nothing about my work has changed,” “I do not work.” This question wording is different then what was asked in a recently published memo about the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.