Trump’s impact on the future of work and mobility
By Joshua Brustein
The country has been transfixed for the past two weeks by the Trump administration’s executive orders on immigration. It seems likely that the same will be true two weeks from now, given that the legal fight over the policy shows no signs of letting up.
Prominent tech companies have been criticizing Trump in public (Google and Amazon), tripping up on their associations with him (Uber) or somehow avoiding popular blowback altogether (Tesla). I had a conversation recently with someone from a non-prominent company that has stuck with me.
It’s a Danish company called SimCorp that makes software used by asset managers. SimCorp employs about 1,400 people worldwide, and about 130 of them are based in the U.S. permanently or semi-permanently. But the company works on a project basis, and often deploys specialists to work directly at the offices of one client or another for a few days, weeks, or months. The assumption that national borders don’t matter much is baked into the way SimCorp does business.
President Trump’s executive order directly impacted about a dozen SimCorp employees, including a Danish citizen who was born in Iran and found himself stuck in New York, concerned that he wouldn’t be able to get back into the U.S. if he left. The company doesn’t want to take a stance on Trump’s order, for fear of antagonizing the government or its U.S.-based clients. But Jens Olivarius, the company’s COO, says the policy has forced it to consider taking some uncomfortable actions.
A new level of instability has permeated the global conversation about work and mobility.
Traveling is a major way for employees to get ahead at SimCorp, says Olivarius. But now the company doesn’t want to put any of its employees at risk, so it is reconsidering whether it should send certain employees to the U.S. Given the unsettled state of U.S. immigration policy, SimCorp’s management doesn’t just see a threat to its workers from the seven countries named in the initial order. The company also wonders whether it should consider keeping employees from other Muslim countries out of the U.S. Doing so would essentially punish people based on their nationality. “We have employed people here with the mindset of whatever religion, country of origin, hair color, it doesn’t matter,” said Olivarius. “That’s what works in Denmark, but all of a sudden it might not be good enough to give them the opportunity to send them to the U.S.”
Regardless of the immediate outcome of the court dispute over Trump’s executive order, a new level of instability has permeated the global conversation about work and mobility. Technology has allowed workplaces to ignore national borders with increasing impunity. But starting with Brexit and Trump’s election, the modern ideal of a global, mobile workforce seems under threat in a novel way. Envoy, a company that works with about 1,000 companies to help navigate the U.S. immigration system, surveyed 400 human resource professionals several months ago. Those who thought their employees’ global travel would increase outnumbered those who thought it would decrease by nearly eight to one. “This is being called into jeopardy by these executive orders,” said Dick Burke, Envoy’s CEO.
If companies like SimCorp send only European employees on U.S. assignments, it’s unfair but probably won’t even be a blip in terms of the economy as a whole. But the other side of a globally mobile workforce is that companies will opt to keep projects outside of the United States, instead of individual workers. Writ large, that could undermine another one of Trump’s stated priorities: keeping jobs from fleeing overseas.
“Companies have a plethora of means for moving work around,” said Ravin Jesuthasan, a managing director at Willis Towers Watson, the HR consulting firm. “It’s so easy to take a job, pull it apart into its tasks, and disperse those tasks around the world.”
This originally appeared in Bloomberg Technology’s newsletter Fully Charged. Sign up here.
