Work Futures Update | What Everybody Has Seen
What nobody thought
2021–01–04 Beacon NY
Going back to shorter and more regular (dailyish) updates.
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Quote of the Day
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.
| Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
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We Built Google. This Is Not the Company We Want to Work For. | Parul Koul and Chewy Shaw announce the formation of the Alphabet Workers Union, and make the case for unions as a means to channel workers’ voices to influence company policies as opposed to Hirschman’s other two options: exit or blind loyalty.
Note that the union is open to all classifications of workers, not just full-time employees:
Our union will be open to all Alphabet workers, regardless of classification. About half of the workers at Google are temps, vendors or contractors. They are paid lower salaries, receive fewer benefits, and have little job stability compared with full-time employees, even though they often do the exact same work. They are also more likely to be Black or brown — a segregated employment system that keeps half of the company’s work force in second-class roles. Our union will seek to undo this grave inequity.
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The Future of Offices When Workers Have a Choice | Dror Poleg offers up some interesting ideas about the future of cities, once offices are more like a consumer good:
At the end of the 19th century, most American urbanites walked to work; as late as 1930, Manhattan’s residential population was larger than it is today, meaning the city was more mixed in terms of land use, not dominated by office towers. It’s not hard to imagine that many will once again prefer to work within walking or biking distance of home.
As a result, buildings in many traditional employment districts will have to compete more fiercely, and a small but significant percentage of office space will most likely have to be repurposed into housing, e-commerce fulfillment centers, delivery-only kitchens, health care centers, meeting spaces, event spaces and other uses.
This lines up with what Farhad Manjoo was writing about a few weeks ago in Cities Will Survive Covid-19:
Already, the pandemic has prompted cities around the world to embrace once radical-seeming ideas. In car-free streets and permanent alfresco dining, a picture of a more livable city is emerging. But we can do a lot more than pedestrianize roads. In 2021 and beyond, we should make rebuilding our urban landscape a top priority.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, urban population density does not seem to have been the primary factor in the virus’s spread — note how Asian megacities like Hong Kong and Seoul combated the virus successfully, while many American rural areas suffered major outbreaks.
But in New York and other American cities, overcrowding within residences, caused by a lack of affordable housing, did exacerbate the contagion. So let’s fix that: In addition to loosening our antiquated zoning rules, perhaps vacant office buildings and retail space can be turned into apartments, lowering the cost of housing.
This is also our chance to remake crumbling urban infrastructure — to create more engaging outdoor public spaces and to radically improve public transportation.
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The coronavirus does not have to kill cities — just our old idea of what cities were, how they worked, and who they were for.
Like everything else, this will follow the pattern of ‘slow, slow, very fast’.
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Elsewhere
Work Futures Update | 2020 Retrospective
Some stats and the best stories of the year from hell.
